Tag: Donald Trump presidential campaign

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Marking the one-year anniversary of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Russians who played key roles in the Trump campaign gathered for a reunion in Moscow’s Red Square. The reunion gave hundreds of thousands of Russians an opportunity to celebrate and share warm memories of their successful 2016 effort. Alexey Zholtovsky, a computer specialist who set up over ten thousand separate troll accounts on social-media sites to benefit the Republican nominee, called the reunion a chance for Russians who worked on the Trump campaign to finally meet each other face to face. Vasilisa Lokhvitskaya, an intelligence analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, said that she “very much enjoyed getting to know” Donald Trump, Jr., Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and George Papadopoulos over the course of many meetings to discuss the campaign. “They were all such fantastic guys,” she said. “So available, so accessible. It was never hard getting in touch with them. Those were the days!” However, she said that she was baffled by reports coming out of the White House in recent days indicating that Papadopoulos had played a peripheral role in the campaign. “There are, what, maybe three hundred thousand people here at this reunion?” she said. “We all met with George.”

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in a new interview argued the controversial and unverified dossier on President Trump that her campaign helped fund is not equivalent to the Trump campaign possibly colluding with Russia to meddle in the presidential election. “Of course there is,” Clinton told Comedy Central's “The Daily Show” when asked by host Trevor Noah if there is a difference between the two. Clinton noted that a conservative website, the Washington Free Beacon, originally began funding the research endeavor that eventually produced the dossier. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have faced the ire of Republicans since The Washington Post reported that the campaign and committee assisted in funding the dossier. Clinton, echoing her former running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), argued the dossier is opposition research compiled on a political rival. But the former secretary of state also pointed out that the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was not disclosed prior to the election. “So I know that voters should have had that information. That’s something that may have influenced some people and it’s part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate,” she said. “So this thing didn’t come out until after the election and it’s still being evaluated, but the fact of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia should have come out.”

The former Trump campaign staffer who pled guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russian officials was in contact with top Trump campaign officials, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. George Papadopoulos was reportedly seated next to Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a dinner weeks ahead of the Republican National Convention. A spokeswoman for Sessions declined to comment to The Post about the report. Papadopoulos also reportedly bragged to a British official that he was in touch with senior officials in the Russian government, according to The Post. But the officials at the British Foreign Office apparently determined that Papadopoulos was not a major figure in the Trump campaign and did not stay in touch with him, The Post reported. Trump officials have claimed that Papadopoulos was a low-level staffer in the campaign with little influence and a minor role in the operation. “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last month to lying to federal officials about his contacts with Russian officials. The charges were revealed on Monday. Former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates were also charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe on Monday.

Washington (CNN)Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators met this past summer with the former British spy whose dossier on alleged Russian efforts to aid the Trump campaign spawned months of investigations that have hobbled the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the matter. The intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, and the FBI took Steele's research seriously enough that they kept it out of a publicly-released January report on Russian meddling in the election in order to not divulge which parts of the dossier they had corroborated and how. "We're investigating a very expansive Russian network of interference in US elections. The dossier is a collection of memos that were initially intended as political opposition research, sources tell CNN. In the weeks before the US intelligence community published a January report detailing Russian meddling efforts in the 2016 election, top officials at the FBI, CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence discussed including parts of the Steele dossier in the official intelligence document, sources tell CNN. The debate came in part because the FBI was concerned about being alone in shouldering the responsibility of briefing the incoming President about the allegations. But the intelligence community had bigger concerns, sources tell CNN. And if that report included the dossier allegations, the intelligence community would have to say which parts it had corroborated and how. That would compromise sources and methods, including information shared by foreign intelligence services, intelligence officials believed. Trump later told The New York Times in July that he took Comey's briefing on the dossier to be an attempt to hold it as leverage over the new President.

Under Trump The EPA is More About Politics Than Science. A former Trump campaign aide is now vetting hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money the EPA gives out to worthy environmental science and projects each year. John Konkus—a public relations expert who chaired Trump’s 2016 campaign in Florida’s Leon County—has told agency staff he’s scrubbing climate change “the double C-word” from projects the EPA funds, according to The Washington Post. If Konkus “has any concerns, comments, or questions on the solicitation,” it reads, he will intervene in the grant process. Konkus joined the EPA in early February after acting as Pruitt’s “sherpa” during his confirmation hearings. President Donald Trump, Pruitt has questioned the very existence of climate change and whether it is man made. Yet Konkus is not the only political appointee at the agency. The press releases, Lavin said, show an EPA “that has near utterly abdicated its duty to regulate” that industry. In calling the AP’s reporting false and targeting Biesecker, the agency “is engaging in political smearing of the press and critics,” she said. In late August a group of Democratic Senators accused Pruitt in a letter of taking “deliberate steps to thwart transparency” at the agency, including forbidding “staff from taking notes during meetings, so that they do not create records of your questions or directions.” When questions about Konkus’ qualifications to evaluate scientific and other environmental projects applying for grants were put to the EPA by E&E News, a spokesperson said, the “grants are being reviewed to ensure they adhere to the Trump administration's goals and policies and the EPA's back-to-basics agenda."