There were contacts
Russian government officials had contacts with members of Donald Trump’s campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday, in a disclosure that could reopen scrutiny over the Kremlin’s role in the president-elect’s bitter race against Hillary Clinton.
Facing questions about his ties to Moscow because of statements interpreted as lauding Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump repeatedly denied having any contact with the Russian government.
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Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, in an interview with the state-run Interfax news agency, said that “there were contacts” with the Trump team.
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Speaking to Bloomberg News, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russian embassy staff met with members of Trump’s campaign, which she described as “normal practice.” Democratic Party contender Hillary Clinton’s campaign refused similar requests for meetings, she told the agency.
Probably a sign that it’s not so normal, yes? Or is it just that Clinton’s people are too shy to talk to strangers?
This could be an even cagier move on Putin’s part. First, meddle in the election to back his horse. Then let enough details of the shenanigans leak out that the new President, already woefully over his head, gets to deal with the scandal out of the gate. End result: Russia is free to act because America is too busy trying to hold itself together to prevent it.
If the media had been doing their job, instead of playing the “moral equivalency” game and obsessing over Clinton’s e-mails, this information might have gotten out BEFORE the election, when it might have (probably not) done some good.
Sorry about the all caps. I have no clue how to do italics here.
iknklast: italics (and other markup) is completed with simple HTML tags (or HOPEFULLY pseudo-tags, because a comment system interpreting raw HTML is not secure). So you get italics by going something (without any spaces). Similar for bold. (Be careful to close up tags, or else you’ll get runoff.)
…apparently the comment system’s parser takes out whitespace. Rather than try to ineptly explain it myself, I’ll link you to an authoritative source.
I doubt that a bean-spilling over the Putin connection would have changed things. We are dealing with an electorate immunized against the concepts of Truth and Falsehood.
Trump’s voters are a pit of Birthers, ‘Truthers,’ Holocaust deniers, creactionists, new-Confederates etc. etc. These are categorically unteachable men.
I almost typed ‘people.’