Wednesday, July 27, 2016

The Russian Connection

The story that Russia was responsible for the DNC e-mail hack is beginning — just barely — to enter the consciousness of some of the news organizations.  The New York Times notes below the fold that the consensus among the U.S. intelligence agencies is that Russia is behind it, and the message is getting out there that the Kremlin has more than just a little interest in seeing who wins the presidential election.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s ties to Russia are getting new scrutiny.  It also puts the focus on the question of where are his tax returns.

James Fallows in The Atlantic:

So Donald Trump should release his tax returns because in modern times that is the basic price-of-entry in national politics. (Along with a plausible — rather than Pyongyang Daily News-style — medical report.) He should do it whether or not Vladimir Putin ever existed or there was any Russian hack. That would be true in any candidate’s case, but especially this one. George Will has come out and said that Trump should release his returns because of questions about his ties to “Russian oligarchs.”

With 100-plus days until the election, a nominee about whom there are graver-than-usual financial questions is saying that, unlike previous candidates, he won’t make his finances public.

In June 1972, a few months before Richard Nixon was renominated for president, a bunch of GOP-hired operatives broke into the Democratic headquarters in Washington, D.C., located in a building in the Watergate complex.  It caused a brief flurry of news that summer, but Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.  It wasn’t until a month after he was inaugurated — February 1973 — that the first real connections with the Watergate burglars and the White House began to leak out.

Do we really want to wait until after Donald Trump takes over the White House to find out who bought and paid for him in Moscow?

2 barks and woofs on “The Russian Connection

  1. What scared me more than anything else is Putin may be blackmailing Trump to get the launch codes for the nuclear arsenal. I read some scary stuff yesterday about Trump’s son(s) and their so-called business connections. Something here is not right!

  2. Manafort, Trump’s advisor, has real and many business interest in Russia and the former Soviet Union states. Additionally, banks aren’t loaning to Trump for obvious reasons so the place for him to go is to Russian banks and/or oligarchs. WikiLeaks is owned by Julian Assange who’s admitted wanting to defeat Hillary Clinton. It’s personal with him. She went after him when he leaked secret emails from the State Department. There’s so much there there and it’s so awkward for future relations with Russia for a Clinton administration for this one to publicly go after Putin it’s hard to know how all this will end up. But isn’t it fascinating? Putin loves Trump’s position on NATO and Trump loves Putin’s “leadership”. I wish with all my heart we could nail them both before November.

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