Cause
2018
Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle
It isn’t just the story of a few corrupt officials, or even a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt Republican Party.
It isn’t just the story of a few corrupt officials, or even a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt Republican Party.
www.thenation.com
The point here isn’t necessarily that Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, solicited illegally obtained documents from Russian officials. There are other plausible candidates who might have done that. The point is that Russiagate, which is widely understood to be a scandal surrounding Donald Trump’s close associates like Paul Manafort, may go wider and deeper, and could implicate at least one member of Congress.
Moreover, it seems that the Republican leadership was at the very least aware of this possibility, amused by it, and did nothing whatsoever to alert the public or any relevant authorities. They were happy to enjoy the benefits of Russian interference and said so openly among themselves.
Similarly, as the Post reported, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was informed of Russian interference in September 2016 in a meeting with President Obama and other senior officials, he threatened to cast any public announcement of the threat as partisan politics. It’s not a stretch to say McConnell deliberately undermined national security for partisan advantage, a decision that has paid off with the signing of a massive tax cut for the wealthy and the looming establishment of a durable right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.
In other words, Russiagate isn’t just the narrow story of a few corrupt officials. It isn’t even the story of a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt political party, the one currently holding all the levers of power in Washington. After Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans in Washington proclaimed their solemn concern, just as they did when the president expressed his sympathy for the white supremacists in Charlottesville last year. But all of them are fully aware that they are abetting a criminal conspiracy, and probably more than one.
Cause
2023
GOP operative sentenced in scheme to funnel Russian money to Trump campaign
A Republican strategist was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in helping funnel illegal foreign campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump's 2016 campaign, per the Department of Justice.
Cause
2019
Trump’s businesses are full of dirty Russian money. The scandal is that it’s legal.
Shell companies put figures from Putin’s Mafia into Trump Tower. Should that be worrying?
Effect
The Republican Party has grown much more supportive of Russia in recent years
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic, about Russia's continued appeal to the American right.
www.kosu.org
KELLY: I want to begin by noting that this piece you wrote - it's coming up on five years old. It's from 2019. Have you, as a longtime Russia watcher, tracked any diminishment in the intervening years in American conservative admiration for Russia?
APPLEBAUM: No. On the contrary, I think the conservative party's romance with Russia has grown quite a bit deeper. This is now a party that is profoundly critical of the United States. It doesn't like the diverse society that we've become. It doesn't like immigration. It doesn't like the kind of national conversation we have. And ironically, like the left of a previous generation, they've imagined that a better, ideal version of our society exists in Russia - a kind of white, Christian nation, you know, unified beneath a single leader without all this messy, ugly democracy and all these different kinds of people. And that's, I think, one of the roots of their admiration.
Effect
Feb 15, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is stepping up efforts to stop dirty money from flowing through the U.S. financial system with a slew of new rules aimed at increasing corporate transpare…
fox59.com
Treasury promoting new rules to stop money laundering ahead of Europe meetings
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, not exactly physics and not exactly equal and opposite, but,
The Biden administration is cracking down on Russian money laundering in the US. Also, witness the
Article that Budman posted today about Johnson's funds tied to Russians. This came out after Johnson halted a bill that would have continued funding for Ukraine's war against Russian aggression that he is keeping from a vote for no good reason. Coincidence?
www.politico.com
