Your Guide to Understanding the Trump-Russia Saga: QuickTake Q&A

by Dramelin 12:30 AM 0 comments

By now, few American elected leaders dispute that elements of the Russian state meddled in the 2016 U.
presidential election -- though President Donald Trump has continued to say it "could have been a lot of different groups.
" What remains unknown, or at least unproven, is whether anybody from Trump’s winning campaign assisted in that meddling.
As Trump dismisses talk of collusion as "a total hoax," a wide-ranging criminal investigation continues.
It’s producedone guilty plea and two indictments so far, but no proof yet of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
What exactly did Russia do? U.
intelligence agencies concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered a campaign to undermine "public faith in the U.
democratic process" and the candidacy of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and that along the way, Putin and his government "developed a clear preference" for Trump.
Russia’s efforts included hacking and leaking emails that undermined Clinton’s campaign, and using phony accounts and advertising on Facebook and Twitter to sway American public opinion.
Read more: The Trump-Putin Bond That May or May Not Be Real 2.
What’s still not known? What if anything Trump or his team did to solicit, encourage or participate in Russia’s effort.
Did anybody from the campaign’s digital team, for instance, help Russia target voters with fake news? (Absolutely not, says the director of that effort.
) A former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, did admit pursuing "dirt" on Clinton through people he understood to be connected to the Russian government.
(Papadopoulos pleaded guiltyto telling investigators, falsely, that he wasn’t yet on Trump’s campaign when he took those steps.
) Then there’s the 35-page “dossier” alleging Russia has been "cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for at least five years and fed his campaign “valuable intelligence” on Clinton.
 Its major allegations -- compiled by a former British spy at the behest of the Clinton campaign -- remain unsubstantiated, and Trump has dismissed them as "a complete fraud.
Who is investigating? Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, was called back into service as special counsel to oversee the probe.
He was appointed on May 17 by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who cited the "unique circumstances" of the case.
(It was Rosenstein’s call because Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his boss, recused himself, a move that bothered Trump.
) Eight days before the appointment, Trump had fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, who’d been a key player in the investigation.
Read more: What Is and Isn’t Special About a Special Counsel 4.
Why did Trump fire Comey? Trump’s dismissal of Comey in the midst of the Russia probe is at the heart of allegations that Trump might have obstructed justice.
Trump said he considered "this Russia thing," which he called a "made-up story.
" The New York Times reported that months before being fired, Comey wrote a memo describing how Trump had personally asked him to shut down the investigation of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
The White House called that "not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation.
" Read more: Why ‘Obstruction of Justice’ Is Echoing in D.
How did this all begin? In April 2016, Democratic Party leaders called in a cybersecurity firm to look at suspicious software on their computers.
The firm said it found digital footprints of hackers tied to the Russian government.
The Democratic National Committee went public with the news and the suspicion of Russian involvement in June, just after Clinton clinched the party’s nomination for president, and just after WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said his group had "upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton.
What were those leaks? WikiLeaks released almost 20,000 emails from inside the Democratic National Committee that showed, among other things, how DNC staffers had favored Clinton during her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders -- prompting Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC head.
Later in the campaign, WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of emails from the Gmail accountof John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.
And WikiLeaks got those emails from Russia? That’s the allegation.
The report by U.
intelligence agencies says Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, gave the material to WikiLeaks through an intermediary.
Some of the emails also were released through the "persona" of a purported Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.
0, and a website, DCLeaks.
com, both of which promoted the hacked information to certain journalists.
Assange has said the source of the hacked emails "is not the Russian government and it is not a state party," though that doesn’t mean that an intermediary couldn’t have done so.
Which Trump aides are under scrutiny? Potentially any who had contact with Russian representatives or intermediaries during the presidential campaign.
That list includes: 9.
Is Trump himself being investigated? He keeps saying no, though most indicationspoint to yes.
Comey, whom Trump fired on May 9, said he assured Trump three times that he wasn’t personally the target of a counterintelligence case.
But in firing Comey, Trump appears to have opened himself up to allegations of obstruction of justice, now being investigated by Mueller, the special counsel.
Plus, as the indictment of Manafort shows, Mueller isn’t limiting his investigation to the 2016 campaign.
Bloomberg News reported on July 20 that the broad probe includes Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008.
Is Mueller allowed to look beyond the Russia question? The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller instructs him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign,” as well as -- and this is key -- “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.
" Trump and his lawyer, John Dowd, say that digging into matters beyond Russia and the 2016 election is out of bounds.
Does Trump acknowledge Russian meddling in the election? He’s given mixed signals.
He dismissed such reports during the campaign, theorizing that Democrats could just as easily have been hacked by "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.
" His first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said in January that Trump was “not denying that entities in Russia were behind" the hackings.
But since then Trump has called the concern about Russian involvement "fake news put out by the media," a "ruse" and a "scam.
" Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that investigators should focus on Democrats paying for the "fake dossier," rather than on the "phony Trump/Russia ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist.
" The Reference Shelf.