An inventory of Trump-Russia “smoke” consists of the following: A peripheral Trump associate purportedly communicated with the hacker (or hacking group) identified as Guccifer 2.0. (How he did so I could not know). Maxine Waters (D-CA) hypothesized that Russian propagandists trained Trump. Others cite the 18 contacts (declared innocuous by the intelligence community) between the Trump campaign and Russia in the last seven months of the campaign. High on the smoke list is the paid speech ($43,000) by Trump advisor Michael Flynn (who failed to disclose an otherwise-legal conversation with the Russian ambassador). A final puff of smoke is former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort’s, consulting work for unsavory Ukrainian/Russian politicians and oligarchs.
Three contacts per month do not add up to an “unusually extensive network.” Note that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had “lots of meetings” with Russian officials including Ambassador Kislyak during the campaign, Bill Clinton delivered a $500,000 speech to a Russian oligarch in 2010. The insider Democratic lobbying behemoth, Podesta Group, charged a Kremlin-associated bank $170,000 for lobbying in 2016 for removal of sanctions and $60,000 to Uranium One in 2015 to lobby for a huge uranium deal in favor of Russia. Manafort directed his wealthy Ukrainian/Russia clients to the Podesta Group, which cashed in more than a million dollars in lobbying fees. Democrat heavyweight Lanny Davis represented a fugitive oligarch, who also happened to be a Manafort client. Yes, indeed, Washington’s K-Street swamp is deep and incestuously blurs party affiliation.
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