The contents of these communications have not been disclosed, but what Brennan learned obviously unsettled him profoundly. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. In April 2016, one of the Baltic states shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies began picking up evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. The first intimations that Trump might harbor a dark secret originated among America’s European allies, which, being situated closer to Russia, have had more experience fending off its nefarious encroachments. One of the oddities of the Russia scandal is that many of the most exotic and sinister theories have come from people within government and especially within the intelligence field. Conspiracy theories tend to attract people far from the corridors of power, and they often hypothesize vast connections within or between governments and especially intelligence agencies. ![]() What would it look like if it were reassembled into a single narrative, one that distinguished between fact and speculation but didn’t myopically focus on the most certain conclusions?Ī case like this presents an easy temptation for conspiracy theorists, but we can responsibly speculate as to what lies at the end of this scandal without falling prey to their fallacies. And while the body of publicly available information about the Russia scandal is already extensive, the way it has been delivered - scoop after scoop of discrete nuggets of information - has been disorienting and difficult to follow. ![]() After all, treating a small probability as if it were nonexistent is the very error much of the news media made in covering the presidential horse race. What is missing from our imagination is the unlikely but possible outcome on the other end: that this is all much worse than we suspect. And it is possible, though unlikely, that every trail between Trump Tower and the Kremlin extends no farther than its point of current visibility. A minority of analysts, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have promoted aggressively exculpatory interpretations of the known facts, in which every suspicious piece of evidence turns out to have a surprisingly innocent explanation. The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory. The Other Russia Collusion Scandal Is Breaking Wide Open Say, that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort told their candidate about the meeting they held at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer after they were promised dirt on Hillary Clinton and that Trump and Kushner have some shady Russian investments and that some of Trump’s advisers made some promises about lifting sanctions.īut what if that’s wrong? What if we’re still standing closer to the mouth of the cave than the end? And since trying to discern the size and shape of the scandal is an exercise in uncertainty, we focus our attention on the most likely outcome, which is that the story goes a little deeper than what we have already discovered. The cavern might go just a little farther, we presume, but probably not much farther. Every step reveals that the cave runs deeper than we thought, and after each one, as we wonder how far it goes, our imaginations are circumscribed by the steps we have already taken. The unfolding of the Russia scandal has been like walking into a dark cavern. ![]() Yet when news of the hacking broke, nobody raised the faintest suspicions that Russia wished to alter the outcome of the election, let alone that Trump or anybody connected with him might have been in cahoots with a foreign power. By that point, Russia was already broadcasting its strong preference for Trump through the media. News reports quoted experts who suggested the Russians merely wanted more information about Trump to inform their foreign-policy dealings. A political world already numbed by Trump’s astonishing rise barely took notice. On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s files and gained access to its research on Donald Trump.
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