VOX: What we know about evidence of coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign

[babylonsister]

http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/22/15031052/trump-russia-campaign-coordination-cnn
What we know about evidence of coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] Mar 22, 2017, 10:27pm EDT



Wednesday night, CNN dropped what seemed like a bombshell of a story: “The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign,” reported CNN’s Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, and Shimon Prokupecz.

The FBI’s evidence reportedly includes “human intelligence, travel, business and phone records, and accounts of in-person meetings.”

snip//

If it all checks out, the implications literally couldn’t be bigger

It’s important not to jump to conclusions here.

The information that we’re getting is thirdhand at best: CNN’s summary of unnamed US intelligence officials’ summary of evidence they had acquired from unnamed sources. We don’t know nearly enough to evaluate the quality of CNN’s sources or the quality of the intelligence they’re basing their conclusions on.

But CNN’s report does seem to dovetail with comments made earlier in the day by Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, that the evidence of Trump-Russia collusion had become more direct than was publicly known.

"I can't go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” Schiff said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball.

If this all turns out to be true, and someone associated with the Trump campaign was in league with the Russians, this would turn the already serious scandal swirling around Trump’s Russia ties into a national crisis.

“If {there’s} coordination, then this scandal becomes Watergate-like,” Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, tweeted.

In Watergate, individuals connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign attempted to steal sensitive information from the Democratic National Committee headquarters, presumably to find compromising information that could be used to help Nixon’s campaign. This would be basically the same thing, only done digitally and with the help of a hostile foreign power.

The debate would then turn, as it did in Watergate, to two basic questions: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

The CNN report gives us no indication whatsoever about Trump’s personal involvement. It carefully refers to the “Trump campaign” without naming specific individuals who are suspected of coordinating with the Russians. But even if Trump wasn’t involved in the coordination itself, it would still be in an issue if he found out about it later and covered it up, as Nixon did in the Watergate scandal.

Right now, we honestly don’t know which of the three possible scenarios is most likely: no collusion with Russia, collusion without Trump’s knowledge, or collusion with Trump’s knowledge. And that, in and of itself, is worrying.

The notion that a US president could be involved in something like this should seem preposterous. The fact that the FBI may have evidence that it could be true speaks volumes about where America is as a country right now.