Blessedly, we had a break from Trump’s tweets while he was overseas, but that did not stop further news from breaking over the Trump administration.
As we remember, the New York Times reported about 10 days ago that in February Trump asked FBI director James Comey to drop the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn regarding his ties to Russia.
On Monday (May 22) the Washington Post reported that in March Trump separately asked the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and Admiral Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to publicly deny that any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia existed. Both declined. That seemed to also constitute an attempt to interfere with the ongoing investigation.
On Thursday the Wall Street Journal reported that a Republican political operative in Florida asked for and received important Democratic voter-turnout analyses from the alleged Russian hacker who broke into Democratic Party organizations’ servers during the 2016 campaign. (The WSJ article is behind a paywall, so I’m citing to Talking Points Memo here.) Per Talking Points Memo, “the hacker went on to flag that same data to Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of Donald Trump’s who briefly advised his presidential campaign, and who is currently under federal investigation for potential collusion with Russia.” It is strongly suspected that this hacker was working on behalf of the Russian government.
On Friday the Washington Post reported that in the month before Trump took office, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner contacted the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, about using Russian embassy facilities to set up “back channel” communications line between Trump’s transition team and the Russian government. This would have meant a communications channel safe from the U.S. intelligence community, U.S. diplomats and the U.S. military. The question, of course, is why Kushner would need this.
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As you probably know by now, Gregg Allman of the Southern rock group the Allman Brothers Band just passed away. In memoriam, here’s Blue Sky and One Way Out from their February 1972 “Eat a Peach” album. The founder of the group, Duane Allman, died in a motorcycle accident at age 24. Legend had it that he collided with a peach truck, hence the title of the album issued after his death. Legend is wrong, though. The title came from a quote by Gregg: “Every time I'm in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace.” Recall that this was the height of the Vietnam War and the slogan “Make Love Not War”. Richard Nixon was President; he was not to resign due to Watergate until August 1974. Rest in peace, Gregg.