The Smoking Gun Unveiled: Trump’s Russian Connections

This raises two issues. First, at the time these meetings took place, Sessions was a United States Senator and served on the Armed Services Committee. There is a standing rule in the United States Senate that Senators are required to report any contacts made between them and members of foreign governments. Secondly, in addition to lying to Congress during his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Sessions would be in the position of having to investigate himself. This would also put him in the position of being able to block any investigations.

On the face of it, however, Sessions has lied to Congress on at least two occasions. If his confirmation were to be held again today, it is doubtful that he would be confirmed again.

At almost exactly the same time, the New York Times is reporting a breaking story that outgoing members of the Obama administration, with the assistance of senior members of American intelligence organizations, disseminated a large volume of incriminating evidence documenting contacts between Donald Trump’s close associates and representatives of the Russian government.

The evidence includes sighting reported by several friendly governments, government wiretaps on Russian officials that picked up conversations about contacts with Trump’s campaign staff, that challenge the Trump Administration’s repeated denials that any such conversations ever took place.

The New York Times story describes how members of the Obama administration disseminated much of this information as widely as possible by giving the material very low security levels, sending large volumes of information to friendly senators, causing questions to be asked in committee hearings that put some information on the public record, and disseminating some of the information to friendly governments. Some of the information was even published on a secret government website.

At the same time, the Obama administration also attempted to sequester information about intelligence sources around the world by putting the highest security classification levels so that only a very few top ranked officials could see them. This made them relatively safe, since it would be possibly to identify anyone who violated those tight security protocols.

Sources:  Washington Post  New York Times 

This article originally appeared on the author’s Facebook account. Published with permission of the author.