Republicans swiftly condemned Donald Trump’s performance at today’s joint press conference with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, in which the US president refused to back repeated findings by US intelligence agencies that Russia attacked the US 2016 election.
When he shook hands with Donald Trump in Helsinki today, Russian president Vladimir Putin ticked off the number one item on his wishlist for US-Russia relations: his first planned summit with a US president since he returned to the presidency in 2012.
Michael McFaul has been optimistic about US-Russia relations before. In the heady days of the fall of the Soviet Union, he was a technocratic activist, advising many in the halls of power on what they hoped would become Russia’s transition into a democracy. It ended with disappointment; president Boris Yeltsin’s government spluttered through eight years of chaos, until Putin took over. He quickly began curtailing freedoms, ushering the country into the autocracy it is now.
Russian intelligence officers helped out a 2016 candidate for US Congress, by giving that candidate stolen information about their Democratic opponent, according to a Department of Justice indictment released today.
Russian intelligence agents used bitcoin to pay for crucial elements of a campaign to sway the 2016 election, according to a federal indictment released today. They allegedly laundered more than $95,000 in total through bitcoin.
Peter Strzok, the FBI agent best known for sending his lover a text saying “we’ll stop” Donald Trump winning the 2016 election, faces the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today.
Michael Cohen is very unhappy.
In late October 2017, US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross was asked for comment about a damning story (paywall) on his business ties to the Kremlin. Bad press was inevitable, and the company that tied him to Russia was sure to suffer a hit in its market value.
A scene in the film Playing the Victim (2007) epitomizes Russians’ pained relationship with their national sport.
Paul Manafort is not used to being deprived of life’s comforts. The perfectly manicured former Trump campaign chair has advised leaders like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Ukrainian autocrat Viktor Yanukovych. He owns lavish houses across the US, drives a fleet of fancy cars, and has spent nearly $1 million in just one carpet store and $1.3 million in a handful of clothing shops.
James Comey famously lambasted Hillary Clinton’s “extremely careless” use of her personal email account for government business as a security risk. A few months later, he used his own personal email for FBI business, a report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz says (p.425).
Former FBI director James Comey has been fond of the following metaphor for describing his fateful decision to tell Congress just 11 days before the 2016 election that they had found more Hillary Clinton emails:
FBI agent Peter Strzok texted his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, that they would “stop” Donald Trump winning the 2016 election, according to multiple stories about an upcoming report into the FBI’s handling of its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Donald Trump turns 72 today, becoming only the second US president to hit that age while in office. Serving two terms would see him overtake former president Ronald Reagan, who was two weeks shy of 78 when he left office.
House Republicans this week axed a key passage in a bill that is deemed crucial in the fight to stop kleptocrats, drug traffickers and terrorists from laundering money through the US.
Donald Trump left this week’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un having granted a huge last-minute concession: promising to stop what he called “war games” with South Korea.
The US government’s latest move in its crackdown on immigration is to target US citizens.
The US Supreme Court sided with the Ohio in a case over whether or not the state has the right to cull voters from registers if they go too long without casting a ballot. The court’s narrow ruling is likely to have dramatic knock-on affects across the country. At least twelve other conservative states said they would follow Ohio’s lead if it prevailed, NBC reports.
It’s no secret that tax havens help launder money, hide what powerful people own, and let giant corporations pay negligible taxes. One thing that’s not often mentioned is how they skew a lot of economic data.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted a man with direct ties to both Russian intelligence and the Trump orbit: ex-spy Konstantin Kilimnik.
One is the leader of one of the world’s worst dictatorships. The other is pro-torture (paywall), calls the media “the enemy of the American people,” and once dismissed the United Nations—which wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—as “just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.”
Donald Trump has developed an appetite for one of the unchecked powers of the US presidency: the pardon.
At last, we know what Jared Kushner has been doing in the three months since his security clearance was downgraded. US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law has been spending “months of back-channel talks” in an effort to bring reality TV star Kim Kardashian to the West Wing, according to Vanity Fair.
President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani admitted this week that attacking special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Trump’s campaign ties with Russia is a deliberate strategy with a specific endpoint in mind: making impeachment impossible.
