From Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice on the collusion of Senate Republicans to acquit Trump.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released the fifth and final volume of their multipart report on Russia’s Active Measures Campaign and Interference in the 2016 presidential election yesterday. You can find the first four volumes at this link.

This fifth volume is entitled Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities and despite that title it really ties together all the pieces from the previous four reports.

[…]

To tie everything together neatly, despite knowing everything that the President, his family members working on the campaign, his other campaign officials, his campaign surrogates, his transition, and his transition officials had done to coordinate with, conspire with, facilitate, aid, and assist the Russians directly or indirectly in conducting their active measures campaign during the 2016 presidential election, which is a hostile attack on the United States, as well as everything the President, his family members working on the campaign, his other campaign officials, his campaign surrogates, his transition, his transition officials, his administration officials, and his personal attorneys had done to obstruct their investigation and Robert Mueller’s investigation, they still voted to not hold a proper trial in the Senate. They did so knowing his defense was rooted in and making wide use of a Russian intelligence created conspiracy theory to shift the blame off of both Russia and the President, which was why the President had tried to squeeze Ukraine’s president for dirt on the Bidens in order to both validate the conspiracy theory and use it to damage VP Biden’s campaign, and they allowed that defense to be presented without so much as a peep of objection. And then, knowing all of this, they voted to acquit him. In doing so Senators Burr, Rubio, Risch, Collins, Blunt, Cotton, Cornyn, and Sasse betrayed their oaths of office and actively aided and abetted the President and Vladimir Putin’s attempts to cover up Putin’s war against the United States. A war that is ongoing. A war that the President, his family members working on the campaign, his other campaign officials, his campaign surrogates, his transition, and his transition officials were all actively involved in; involvement they, as well as a number of administration officials and the President’s private attorneys, have all actively tried to cover up.

Via the New York Times:

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 election.

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.

The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was stocked with businessmen with no government experience, advisers working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment and other friends and associates Mr. Trump had accumulated over the years. Campaign figures, the report said, “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

Like the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But 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 identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report was the first time the government has identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer — Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence. Most of the details about his intelligence background were blacked out in the Senate report.

Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the report said.

It also included a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations, conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

With any other president at any other time, this would be huge headline material in the same way that a memo from the FBI created havoc for Hillary Clinton four years ago. But now the news that the Russians actively interfered with the election in collusion with a Trump campaign manager barely makes it above the fold at the New York Times and doesn’t rate the front page of the Washington Post.

This changes nothing.  Republicans will continue to spout the Trump line that it’s all a hoax and the 1,000 pages doesn’t say what it says.  Trump lied to the FBI and the committee, which is a felony.  I can predict with confidence that this won’t even be remembered by October, and even if it is, it will be shrugged off; “So what else you got?”

I wish I was wrong.

The New York Times:

As a top official in President Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort shared political polling data with a business associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday. The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers made the disclosure by accident, through a formatting error in a document filed to respond to charges that he had lied to prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after agreeing to cooperate with their investigation into Russian interference in the election.

The document also revealed that during the campaign, Mr. Manafort and his Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, discussed a plan for peace in Ukraine. Throughout the campaign and the early days of the Trump administration, Russia and its allies were pushing various plans for Ukraine in the hope of gaining relief from American-led sanctions imposed after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Prosecutors and the news media have already documented a string of encounters between Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates dating from the early months of Mr. Trump’s bid for the presidency, including the now-famous meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton. The accidental disclosure appeared to some experts to be perhaps most damning of all.

“This is the closest thing we have seen to collusion,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said of the data-sharing. “The question now is, did the president know about it?”

The document gave no indication of whether Mr. Trump was aware of the data transfer or how Mr. Kilimnik might have used the information. But from March to August 2016, when Mr. Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.

Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.

Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt.

The big news last night was that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, is now telling us that Trump knew beforehand about the June 2016 meeting with his top campaign staff and his son and folks from Russia promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.  This is just one of the nuggets being looked at by the Mueller team as part of a broad investigation into the case of Trump obstructing justice.

I think we already had that figured out, but making the case in court versus in the court of public opinion and “Well, duh,” the bar is a bit higher.  You have to actually have evidence.

But Mr. Cohen’s testimony isn’t the only evidence.  We know that Trump bragged to the Russians in the Oval Office about firing James Comey in order to stop the investigation, and that he’s stated on numerous occasions that he would never have appointed Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as attorney general if he knew that he was actually going to enforce the law and allow the investigation to go forward.

So what Michael Cohen says is fine, but the case has already been made.

There’s a great article (subscription req’d) in The New Yorker by Adam Davidson on the Trump-Russia connection.  What it boils down to is that Trump isn’t an agent of the Russian government; he’s not slick enough unless you think his whole persona is an act.  It’s more likely that the Russians have something on him — in Russian it’s called kompromat — and that’s why he’s basically doing everything to keep them happy.

What is it?  Well, knowing Trump — or at least what we’ve seen of him — it’s probably financial as opposed to sexual.  He’s not afraid — he’s probably secretly proud — that stories have leaked, so to speak, about his sexual conquests, such as they are.  But he’s done everything he can to keep his finances secret to the point that he’s never revealed his tax returns or allowed anyone, including his legal team, to give up any information on where his money comes from.  (We already know where it goes; usually down the drain.)

What I and a lot of other people can’t figure out is who is really running this caper.  Certainly not Trump himself.  He’s not smart or deft enough to pull this off on his own; he can’t even lie well enough to get past the records of his own tweets.

So the question comes down to this: who’s really calling the shots?  Certainly not Putin himself; he spent too much time in the KGB to put himself out there.  There has to be someone high up enough to be able to know exactly what it is that they have on Trump, but invisible enough that they’re not seen or heard.  We may never know who it is.  But they’re there and they’ve got him.