‘What’s Going On?’ US Intelligence Overheard Russians Discussing Trump Associates, WSJ Says

What have we been saying for months?

This:

Feel free to go down with the ship, but don’t delude yourself into thinking this ship isn’t sinking.

Simply put: there is no way that Donald Trump and his associates are going to escape this Russia investigation. It isn’t “going away.” In fact, it’s going to get worse, and worse, and worse for the President, his family, his inner circle, and, by extension, his support base.

“The journalism is not slowing down. The more that comes out, the more people who know things will call reporters, and the more people will find it in their interests to take calls when reporters call them,” Benjamin Wittes, Jane Chong, Quinta Jurecic, wrote, in a piece published on Lawfare today.

These stories have a way of snowballing, and we have definitely reached a tipping point where this one has reached escape velocity,” they added.

And Donald Trump doesn’t make things any easier on himself by labeling the press “the enemy of the people.”

Sure enough, in a testament to just how right Wittes is to contend that we’ve reached a “tipping point” beyond which there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, WSJ is out with a piece this afternoon that claims Russian government officials were picked up on surveillance talking about Donald Trump’s associates back in 2015.

Here’s the Journal:

U.S. intelligence agencies starting in the spring of 2015 detected conversations in which Russian government officials discussed associates of Donald Trump, several months before he declared his candidacy for president, according to current and former U.S. officials.

In some cases, the Russians in the overheard conversations talked about meetings held outside the U.S. involving Russian government officials and Trump business associates or advisers, these people said.

[…]

The reports were gathered by intelligence agencies that routinely monitor Russian espionage against the U.S.

The U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t sure what to make of the vague and inconclusive information, given that Mr. Trump had done business in Russia and was a global celebrity well-known to prominent people there. The names of Americans do sometimes show up in conversations involving Russian officials that are overheard by U.S. intelligence.

Of course this will likely cause Trump and his administration to start shouting about wiretapping again, but do note that this was before he was a candidate.

“The reports on the 2015 conversations weren’t particularly illuminating,” WSJ goes on to write, before noting that “they did have officials asking each other, ‘What’s going on?'”

Yeah. “What’s going on?”

Kinda makes you wonder if maybe this was in the works for a lot longer than anyone previously thought, now doesn’t it?

******

 

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3 thoughts on “‘What’s Going On?’ US Intelligence Overheard Russians Discussing Trump Associates, WSJ Says

  1. It is my understanding that when the Donald hit a hard patch (Corp bankruptcy) Wall Street and in extension to big to fail banks wanted nothing to do with him.
    So what is a business man to do?
    Mabey go to a foreign country find some investors and get back to the business of making money
    And then because you made those investors money you now have some new friends.
    To simple of course

    1. Alternatively, if you’re incompetent enough to lose money running a casino, and don’t have access to the credit you need to run the real estate empire you inherited, you could turn to laundering money for Russian oligarchs through shady real estate transactions to pay off your creditors and maintain your lifestyle. Once the Russian government has enough evidence of financial malfeasance to ruin you and put you in prison for the rest of your life, they may encourage you to do something to benefit them, like run for president to subvert our political system and push a pro-Russia agenda.

      At this point there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Trump, and a number of his associates, have been compromised by the Russians. I, for one, would be shocked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation doesn’t reveal corruption amongst members of Trumps’ inner circle, and perhaps even members of congress, of a scale never before seen in American politics.

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