A New Senate Intelligence Report Dives Deeper Into 2016's Russian Ratf*cking (C. Pierce)

[Nevilledog]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33635419/senate-intelligence-report-russia-donald-trump-election/

Well, good morning, merry sunshine!

El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago began his Tuesday by rage-tweeting about Monday night’s Democratic National TV Show, and by posthumously pardoning suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who was convicted only of state crimes and has been dead since 1906 anyway. (Apparently, Frederick Douglass’ enthusiastic lobbying on Anthony’s behalf paid off. He is, after all, being recognized more and more.) Why this sudden spasm of early-morning presidential vigor, this sunrise volley of presidential squid-ink? Might we find the answer in The New York Times?

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary. The report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s stunning election nearly four years ago.

Oh, right. I remember now. This was the first really bad thing.

...the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The Senate report for the first time identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.
The president’s lacke...er...allies in the Republican majority have seized upon the committee’s fragile conclusion that the relationship between the campaign and the Volga Bagmen was not “coordinated” in order to argue that there was “no collusion” per se. However, the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee put together an appendix to the report and that appendix was no vestigial organ at all.

*snip*