MANY WIND UP TANGLED IN TENTACLES OF RUSSIA INQUIRY
Controversies build on allegations until presidency ensnared
It started with Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Those emails were hacked — through Democratic National Committee servers and the private account of her campaign chairman — and released on the website Wikileaks.
The intelligence community pointed the finger at Russia, and officials said they believed the operation was part of a deliberate effort to sway the 2016 presidential election.
There is no direct public evidence that President Trump knew anything about the hacking — though he did say last July that he hoped Russia would be able to find official emails missing from Clinton’s home server.
But as tends to happen in Washington (see Watergate, 1972-74, and Whitewater, 199398), one controversy can beget another until the central question becomes not what the president did but whether he obstructed the investigation.
“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story,” Trump tweeted Thursday.
It is five months into the Trump administration as the original firestorm over hacked emails set into motion a series of offspring controversies that have consumed the presidency.
Here’s a guide to the Russian hacking investigation and its many offshoots:
RUSSIAN HACKING In October, as the Clinton campaign weathered near-daily disclosures of internal emails, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded the Russian government was behind the hacking. The agencies said only that Russia was trying to interfere in the election. In January, they released a stronger assessment: Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking — to get Trump elected.
Trump, then president-elect, complained that the report was leaked to NBC News before he had a chance to read it.
“Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results. Voting machines not touched!” he tweeted.
The Russian interference campaign included “fake news” stories and propaganda from Russia-owned media, intelligence reports said.
FLYNN’S CONTACTS In December, incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn talked to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about relaxing sanctions — a call reported in
The Washington Post two weeks later. White House officials — including the vice president — insisted that it was a courtesy call and that sanctions were not discussed.
When that turned out not to be true, Trump fired Flynn.
That wasn’t the end of Flynn’s legal troubles. He failed to disclose his lobbying for the Turk- ish government and didn’t get approval to work for a Russian state-owned media outlet.
KUSHNER’S COMMUNICATION During the transition, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Russian officials about opening channels of communication.
The White House said such communications are “an appropriate part of diplomacy.” But if such communication involved the use of Russian methods, it could come under federal laws governing contacts with foreign powers: the Logan Act, a rarely used law forbidding private citizens from conducting foreign policy; the Espionage Act, which prohibits divulging state secrets; and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires those acting on behalf of a foreign power to disclose their contacts with the government.
Kushner, who took on a formal role as an adviser to Trump, allegedly failed to disclose meetings with Russians on security clearance forms.
SESSIONS’ TESTIMONY During Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing to become attorney general, Sen. Al Franken, D - Minn., asked him about reports of communication between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Sessions said he was unaware of any such contacts, then volunteered, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I ... did not have communications with the Russians.”
That turned out not to be true. He met with the Russian ambassador at least twice as a U.S. senator. Whether Sessions committed perjury turns on whether he intended to deceive the Senate panel.
“My answer was honest and correct as I understood it at the time,” Sessions said.
He recused himself from investigations into the Russian matter.
TRUMP FIRES FBI DIRECTOR Trump fired FBI Director James Comey — the man responsible for the various Russia investigations — on May 9. The purported reason: a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein excoriating Comey for how he conducted an investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
Trump later told NBC’s Lester Holt he was thinking about “the Russian thing ” when he made the decision. Comey testified that Trump had repeatedly pressed him to publicly deny the president was personally under investigation.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether the president obstructed justice.
DISCLOSURE TO RUSSIANS The day after firing Comey, the president met in the Oval Office with Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The Washington Post reported that Trump divulged classified information to the Russian diplomats, giving them details of an intercepted plot by the Islamic State to bomb planes using disguised laptops. Though the president can legally share classified information with anyone, the intelligence belonged to Israeli agencies.
‘I HOPE THERE ARE TAPES’ After firing Comey, Trump set off weeks of speculation with a single tweet: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
Secretly recording conversations in the White House isn’t illegal because the District of Columbia requires only one party of the conversation to consent to the recording. Those tapes, if they exist, could be evidence in the obstruction of justice investigation, and Congress requested that the White House turn over any tapes.
Comey said the tapes would back him up. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
OBSTRUCTION INQUIRY Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Mueller as special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Mueller would interview Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Mike Rogers with an eye toward investigating whether Trump obstructed justice.
In a tweet Friday, Trump declared the investigation a “witch hunt.”
“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story.” President Trump in a tweet Thursday