imaginethat
Forum Staff
- Oct 2010
- 70,460
- 30,678
- Colorado
Unproven, and untrue, but it's becoming ever more clear that Trump was covering Putin's ass before he was elected.
Internal Mueller documents
show Trump campaign chief pushed unproven theory
Ukraine hacked Democrats
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, suggested as early as the summer of 2016 that Ukrainians might have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the presidential campaign rather than Russians, a key witness told federal investigators last year.
Newly released documents show that Manafort’s protege, deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, told the FBI of Manafort’s theory during interviews conducted as part of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Gates told the FBI that Manafort had shared his theory of Ukrainian culpability with him and other campaign aides before the election.
The new information shows how early people in Trump’s orbit were pushing the unsubstantiated theory about Ukraine’s role. And it illustrates a link between Mueller’s investigation, which concluded in March, and the current House impeachment investigation of Trump. The president had pushed Ukrainians to open a probe into whether their country interfered in the election — an assertion his allies have made in an effort to discredit Mueller’s findings about Russia’s role.
The documents were released in response to lawsuits filed by BuzzFeed and CNN seeking documents related to Mueller’s investigation. BuzzFeed on Saturday published the first installment of internal Mueller records, released by the Justice Department to the news organization in response to a court order.
They include heavily redacted summaries of interviews the FBI conducted during the investigation with Gates, as well as with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon, along with other documents.
The documents show that Gates told the FBI that Trump adviser Michael Flynn had been “adamant” that the Russians were not responsible for the hacking.
