Romney: Trump Has Blind Spot on Russia

“I was disappointed with the president’s comment. But I think we’ve come to recognize that the president has a blind spot when it comes to Russia. And the reality here is that the experts, the people who really understand how our systems work and how computers work and software and so forth, the thousands upon thousands at the CIA and the NSA and the Department of Defense, have determined that this came from Russia.”

— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) blasted Russia in a NBC News interview for a cyberattack he said amounted to an “invasion,” adding that the president’s unwillingness to blame Russia shows he has a “blind spot” when it comes to the country.

Trump’s Sordid History of Accepting, Requesting, and Encouraging Foreign Interference in US Elections

Susan Walsh/AP

Here’s a good one from David Corn at Mother Jones

One of the key lines in the House Democrats’ impeachment report distills the Trump-Ukraine scandal to a simple idea: “[T]he impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection.”

And in the report’s preface, the Democrats place Trump’s Ukrainian caper within the larger context of foreign intervention in US elections, namely Russia’s covert attack on the 2016 contest, which was mounted in part to help Trump win the White House: “we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president. Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the President welcomed and utilized.”

The point was clear. Trump muscling Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to produce political dirt that could influence the 2020 election for Trump’s personal advantage was a continuation of Trump’s behavior in 2016. This contextualization brings back into the spotlight Vladimir Putin’s clandestine assault on American democracy—and how Trump encouraged and exploited that attack. So now, as Trump is under scrutiny for pressing Ukraine to influence the 2020 race, it’s a good time to review all the ways that Trump aided and abetted a foreign adversary’s scheme to subvert a US election the last time the nation was choosing a president.

Read the whole sordid history here.

Bernstein Calls for More Reporting On Trump’s Russia Connection

“Remarkable information related to Russia and Putin and Trump’s deference to Putin — whether witting, unwitting or half-witting — continues to be revealed. Turkey’s Syrian adventure-invasion with Trump’s permission; his disdain for Ukraine through his whole presidency; and serving Russia’s interest there (as opposed to established US policy) suggest more reporting again is called for.”

— Carl Bernstein in an email to CNN

Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1977

1977

MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance claimed that President Trump is a Russian asset who was compromised “as early as 1977” via his first marriage to Czech-born Ivana Trump, the Daily Beast reports. Nance, a retired naval intelligence operator, went on to boast that he saw early in Trump’s presidential campaign that the U.S. was under attack by a “wide-ranging information warfare attack” by Russia that was designed to make Trump president, adding that he saw it “about a year before anyone would really understand that.”