Tag: Russian roulette

Whenever I finish a book like Russian Roulette, I ask myself the same question: why is anyone still debating whether there was collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump? Trump was a big advocate of Brexit, which was a body blow to the EU, and in the 2016 campaign he called Nato “obsolete”. Although the Russians failed at that moment to produce promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, the authors point out that “Trump’s senior advisers now had new reason to believe that Putin’s regime wanted Trump to win and was willing to act clandestinely to boost his chances. The Russians had offered to help, and Trump’s campaign had demonstrated a willingness to take what Moscow had to offer.” Almost any of these details would have been enough to torpedo any other presidential campaign, but Trump somehow managed to weather every single crisis. There were also more than 60,000 sentences published about Clinton and her emails – and less than 10,000 about Trump’s connections to Russia. An Obama official told Corn and Isikoff it wasn’t until two months after the election that “all the pieces came together for us”. As Corn and Isikoff explain, the editors decided to make the FBI’s failure to prove a connection the article’s theme, instead of the much more important fact of the investigation itself. What is new in Russian Roulette about the Times piece is how the ex-British spy Christopher Steele reacted to it. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House review – tell-all burns all Read more Before the Times piece appeared, Steele had been considering a trip to Washington to discuss his findings with members of Congress – and perhaps hold a press conference on the steps of the Capitol. If Steele had gone public, could that have been enough to change the election?