For weeks, Trump and his supporters have been saying, reporting, and tweeting that there is no evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign or transition team and the Russian government. However, that message has taken a sudden change. Not only has Trump issued a number of tweets that accuse Hillary Clinton of colluding with the Democratic Party and Barack Obama for colluding with … someone, the message from Trump surrogates has taken a sudden and sharp turn in a very, very peculiar direction.
Brit Hume
Collusion, while it would be obviously alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign, of which there is no evidence by the way, of colluding with the Russians. It's not a crime.
Sean Hannity
What was the collusion? That maybe somebody in the Trump campaign talked to somebody in Russia … Is that a crime?
Gregg Jarrett
I've said it before and I'll say it again: collusion is not a crime. ... You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election.
Why are Trumpublicans suddenly in a hurry to explain how the thing they’ve been denying for months is, after all, just fine?
Wittes’ “tick tick tick” tweets have preceded big news releases in the past concerning James Comey. But Wittes, a Brookings fellow who runs the Lawfare blog, made it clear that what’s ticking today isn’t more testimony from the former FBI director.
It’s not just that Fox and Donald’s Friends are so anxious to explain that collusion is not a crime, and it’s just not that Trump’s weekend and morning tweets worked to turn collusion into one of those words that Republicans can throw around recklessly—like traitor.
Trump’s tweets also set a new standard for what constitutes acceptable evidence of an issue.
It’s no longer that the FBI, Senate, or Special Counsel has no evidence of collusion between Team Trump and the Russians. It’s “they have zero ‘tapes.’”
With another big shoe about to join the heap of those which have already dropped, some speculation is focusing on a particular event that happened after the election.
When U.S. officials entered shuttered Russian compounds in Maryland and New York last December, they found damaged materials that could have been used in intelligence gathering and that former officials say could have been useful in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. …
The Russians were given 24 hours to get out of the compound and 72 hours to leave the country. Current U.S. officials tell CBS News they vacated the compounds before the 24-hour deadline, striking some as odd and raising the question of whether the diplomats had been tipped off about their expulsion.
Obama administration officials were reluctant to give the Trump transition team a heads-up on the sanctions expressly because they worried that someone on Trump’s team would tip off the Russians about what was coming. But Trump’s people did get some advance notice … just enough to account for the Russians’ early departure.
These are the same compounds that Trump had been planning to return to the Russians.
The Trump administration is moving toward handing back to Russia two diplomatic compounds, near New York City and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that its officials were ejected from in late December as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
That Michael Flynn—or Jared Kushner—would have called up the Russians to warn them about the loss of the compounds seems completely believable.
However, it also doesn’t seem like enough to explain the sudden effort to turn collusion into something that everybody does. All the time. So it’s not an issue.
Donald Trump, Fox News, and Trump surrogates have seriously moved from “there was no collusion” to “You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election.” What do they know that everyone else is about to find out?