‘Russia Russia Russia’ Was No Hoax

At a time when Ukraine was driving Russia out of occupied territory, and taking the war to Russia in a way that had the superpower wobbling, Trump intervened to save Russia and put Ukraine in dire straits – by cutting off Starshield, intelligence sharing, and even delivery of missile interceptors Ukraine has already paid for, while blaming Zelensky for Russian war crimes. I am reminded of a conversation I had last year with a doctor friend of mine. When I brought up the issue of Trump being compromised and colluding with Russia, my physician friend quickly retorted: “I thought all of that was debunked in the Russia investigation.”JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. How did America’s ability to assess Trump’s repeated embraces of Putin become paralyzed? Misunderstanding the Mueller investigation The most obvious place to start an investigation of trump’s mysterious featly to Putin would be to follow the money. Yet what most people, including the media, do not understand is that the Trump DOJ barred Independent Counsel Robert Mueller from investigating Trump’s financial connections to Russia. In addition, Mueller’s small team could not delve into every suspicious circumstance everywhere in the country. There was no investigation of bizarre events that happened right here in Georgia: with the Georgia Election Center servers at Kennesaw State wiped clean after a request to inspect them for evidence of Russian tampering – though I urged Fulton DA Fani Willis to include it in her investigation of Trump election meddling. Other Topics of Interest Avenger Air Defense Missiles Deployed Near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Resort The US Secret Service has deployed barge-mounted Avenger air defense missiles near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort amid elevated threat levels and Iran tensions. It took the subsequent Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, chaired by Marco Rubio, to confirm that 1) Russian intelligence hacked or attempted to hack into all 50 state election systems in 2016, and 2) the Russian government representatives the Trump campaign was meeting with were actually Russian intelligence agents who were part of the attack Putin ordered on American elections after Obama placed sanctions on Russia for invading Crimea in 2014. Tell a Lie Often Enough Trump AG Bill Barr withheld the Mueller Report while lying that it cleared Trump of any wrongdoing. In fact, without drawing conclusions, Mueller laid out facts supporting numerous crimes committed by Trump and said he could not reach firm conclusions on others because Trump and his associates lied to investigators and hid and destroyed evidence. Trump infamously pardoned campaign manager Paul Manafort for refusing to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Still, even legitimate news organizations falsely repeat Barr’s misrepresentations today. They also repeat the Trumpish mantra that the whole Russia investigation hinged on the supposedly discredited Steele Dossier – forgetting that the central, then-revelatory premise of the former head of the Russia desk at British intelligence was that Putin had ordered a comprehensive attack on the 2016 US election. Regardless of whether a pee-pee tape exists, that central premise proved to be all too true. Attempts to Re-write History The MAGA-Fox News disinformation machine has worked overtime to change the Trump-Russia narrative, and even blame those who called attention to Trump’s obvious alignment with Russia. In each of his terms, Trump has mandated an investigation with the advance purpose of absolving Trump from any malign Russia connection and actually blame Hillary Clinton, Obama – and even Ukraine! The first, the Durham investigation, strained to conclude that there never should have been a Russia investigation because the FBI did not have sufficient predication to open one (when Trump went on national TV and asked the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton) – even though Durham concedes the investigation confirmed Steele’s premise and Mueller’s conclusion that Russia launched a massive influence operation to get Trump elected. In other words, US law enforcement and intelligence should have left our country undefended against this attack by a foreign adversary. Trump’s second-term whack at re-writing history with a grand jury investigation in Florida has fallen apart as Trump’s appointed allies have abandoned the effort for lack of any evidence supporting the theory that Trump is blameless and Obama and Hillary Clinton concocted the whole “Russia Russia Russia hoax.” Places to look It is not as though we don’t have any leads to follow. What if Mueller had been allowed to trace Eric Trump’s boast that Trump, when he was hundreds of millions of dollars in default to US banks, was able to get all the money he needed to buy golf courses in Scotland from Russia? Another avenue of investigation could be to examine how and why Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had a falling out. Some suggest it was over competition for Russian oligarch money that also financed Epstein’s worldwide child sex-trafficking network. No wonder Trump is blocking release of the Epstein files. After all the investigations have been detoured, derailed, and misrepresented, it is high time for a real Russia investigation, unobstructed by Trump, to get to the bottom of Trump’s efforts to hand Putin a victory in Ukraine. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.