monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump says he’s never doubted Russian meddling. Here are the multiple times he has.

It’s on tape, in tweets, and in transcripts.

Fact-checking website PolitiFact declared Trump’s continued proclamations that Russian interference is a “made-up story” as its 2017 Lie of the Year.

Evan McMullin
‏Verified account
@Evan_McMullin
There are reasons why President Trump refuses to make obvious criticisms of Vladimir Putin, why he won't implement sanctions needed to deter Russian espionage, why he attacks the FBI when its investigation yields overwhelming evidence of Moscow's aggression. There are reasons.

'If you wanna keep the gun laws as they are now, you will not get re-elected'

From that position of power, Trump has systematically attempted to shut down investigations of the foreign-espionage operation that operated on his behalf. He fired the director of the FBI to shut it down. His White House coordinated with the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to misdirect the investigation. He mobilized the speaker of the House to thwart bipartisan investigations under broadly respected leadership. He has inspired, supported, and joined a national propaganda campaign against the Mueller investigation.

And all the while, Trump has done nothing—literally nothing—to harden the nation’s voting systems against follow-on Russian operations. On Sunday, he publicly repudiated his own national-security adviser for acknowledging at the Munich Security Conference the most incontrovertible basics of what happened in 2016.

The Republicans probably think they have a true friend and ally in Putin.

A former top aide to Donald Trump's presidential campaign will plead guilty to fraud-related charges within days — and has made clear to prosecutors that he would testify against Paul Manafort, the lawyer-lobbyist who once managed the campaign.

The change of heart by Trump's former deputy campaign manager Richard Gates, who had pleaded not guilty after being indicted in October on charges similar to Manafort's, was described in interviews by people familiar with the case.

At the end of my campaign, when it appeared that Clinton was going to win, and certainly after she won the nomination, what the Russians were doing is flocking to Bernie Sanders Facebook sites, and they were saying to Bernie Sanders supporters, [...] if you voted for Sanders, you have to understand Hillary Clinton is crazy, she's a murderer, she is terrible, all kinds of horrible, horrible things about Hillary Clinton.

And it turns out that one of our social media guys in San Diego actually went to the Clinton campaign in September and said something weird is going on, [...] hundreds of these people are now coming onto his Facebook sites. So I think we already knew that, it was an effort to undermine American democracy

This was not just the 2016 campaign. They intend to do this in 2018. [...] Everybody knows this, except the President of the United States. [...] What we have got to do, [...] front dead - what we have got to say to the Russians: you are doing something to undermine American democracy; you are not going to get away with it; this is a major assault; if you do that there will be severe, severe consequences; we have got to protect states and communities to make sure that their voting is not compromised.