‘Trump aides were in touch with Russia’
Contacts noticed during hacking attempts on Democrats
WASHINGTON: As the Trump administration struggled to put at rest the row over sacked national security adviser Michael Flynn’s controversial dealings with Russia, it was hit by fresh allegations that the president’s campaign aides had been in constant contact with Russian intelligence for months ahead of the presidential election in 2016.
Though the allegations, first reported by The New York Times, did not point to cooperation or coordination between Trump aides and Russians, they did add to the administration’s growing Russia problem.
The revelations, based on phone records and intercepts by US intelligence and law enforcement, were alarming enough for some to comparable it to Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
The president responded to the reports in a string of tweets on Wednesday, denouncing them as an instance of “fake news media going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred”.
“This Russian connection nonsense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign,” he wrote, and slammed the leaks as “un-American”. He wrote President Barack Obama had been soft on Russia — for letting it take Crimea from Ukraine — and not him.
Trump seemed clearly troubled by the reports when his administration is appearing to be in complete turmoil, hit by the Flynn controversy.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer sought to draw a picture of an administration in control, telling reporters on Tuesday the president knew that Flynn had not told the truth about his calls to the Russian ambassador to the US, but fired him after a thorough review that found he had violated no laws but only because he had lost Trump’s trust.
Trump presidency is in full crisis mode. And now allegations of Trump aides in touch with Russians, which has been widely reported before, but that those Russians were intelligence operatives adds a new edge to it.
Paul Manafort, Trump campaign chairman for a few months, has been the only one named in these new reports. In denying contacts with Russian intelligence officers, he told The New York Times: “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer’.”
The contacts with Russian intelligence were first noticed, according to reports, around the time US intelligence and law enforcement agencies were discovering Russian attempts to hack into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. What was particularly alarming was “the amount of contact that was occurring while …Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president Vladimir V Putin,” the New York Times said.
But none of the media reports provided any evidence of Trump aides cooperating or coordinating with Russians on the hacking.
The new developments were alarming enough for some, such as veteran journalist Dan Rather. “Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now,” he wrote.