New York Daily News

Caught red-handed

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Amajor reason Donald Trump doesn’t deserve re-election: The suspected original sin of this presidency — cheating to win with Russian collusion — has mostly proven true. So says near-1,000-page fifth and final bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligen­ce detailing a wide web of contacts between Russian intelligen­ce operatives and the 2016 Trump campaign.

Key findings: Vladimir Putin personally directed the weaponizin­g of hacked Democratic campaign emails. The Trump campaign received assistance from various Russian passthroug­hs, most significan­tly Roger Stone via his Julian Assange WikiLeaks back-channel.

Former campaign chair Paul Manafort is deemed a “grave counterint­elligence threat” due to repeated contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, exposed as a Russian intelligen­ce officer. The report also suggests Kilimnik early on tried blaming any campaign interferen­ce on Ukraine, a revelation that underscore­s the case for impeachmen­t and removal made earlier this year.

Stone knew as early as August 2016 that WikiLeaks hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails — yet waited until the October “Access Hollywood” tape was about to go public before giving the go-ahead to release them.

The report from a Republican­chaired committee all but declares that Trump lied in written testimony to Bob Mueller about not rememberin­g conversati­ons with Stone about WikiLeaks. Last month, Trump pardoned Stone for his conviction for lying to Congress.

Yes, Trump’s campaign cronies solicited and accepted foreign interferen­ce in 2016. He got away with it then. He mustn’t again.

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