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Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024
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I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar after Elon Musk’s robot played dumb over and over again to deny that Trump willingly accepted help in 2016 — “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” 2020 — when the White House ignored warnings that Rudy was being targeted in a Russian influence operation, and 2024, when there were campaigns paying top Trump propagandists, manufacturing dirt on Biden, and attacking Tim Walz; maybe Grok is willfully dumb because of Elon’s role in the whole thing.
All that’s before you consider how quickly Steve Witkoff and Jared resumed the outreach from Kirill Dmitriev, or how quickly Trump moved to get Alexander Smirnov sprung from prison.
Grok showed amazing agility for a robot, always moving the ball from “accepting” Russian help to “sitting in a room and asking for it.”
The robot claims there are no documents akin to the ones John Solomon had just released implicating Eric Swalwell, but not showing that he knew Christine Fang was working for China. Except that among the documents Solomon released, he revealed that Konstantin Kilimnik had renewed his efforts to get Trump elected in 2020.
And that Michael Caputo had participated in an anti-Biden propaganda effort in 2020, before he joined Trump’s government.
NYT doesn’t go into all this detail in its piece describing how Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. But it did note the gravy train Benny Johnson was floating on.
Disclosures during the Biden administration, including federal indictments, accused both Russia and Iran of engaging in aggressive influence operations in 2024. Iranians were charged with hacking Mr. Trump’s campaign and shopping stolen material to various news outlets in an effort to harm his bid to return to the White House. The Justice Department and other agencies accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of again trying to bolster Mr. Trump (and degrade U.S. support for Ukraine) by targeting the United States with disinformation — including by secretly funneling $10 million to a conservative media start-up.
But those revelations were piecemeal, and do not offer a full portrait of what foreign meddling took place.
Congress passed a number of laws after Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election intended to better inoculate the American public from foreign attempts to influence voters. That included requirements for more transparency with lawmakers and the public from the nation’s spy agencies about what intelligence had been collected concerning the ambitions of foreign powers around federal elections.
In a letter in July, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee urged Bill Pulte, then the acting director of national intelligence, to declassify and publicly release a redacted version of the 2024 election report. The law at issue requires the assessment’s public release within 60 days of the conclusion of the federal election cycle “to the greatest extent possible” while protecting sources and methods.
The Trump administration also has yet to deliver to Congress a report required by law, identifying foreign intelligence threats to the coming 2026 midterm election. The deadline was in early May, a Democratic aide to the House Intelligence Committee said.
“The intelligence community is currently in violation of multiple statutes designed to ensure that Congress understands the full scope of foreign adversary plans and intentions this cycle,” as well as the administration’s efforts to combat those threats, the letter said.
Though to be honest, I think Trump may have as much to hide regarding the Iran hack-and-leak that successfully compromised Trump’s rat-fucker Roger Stone, his defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, and his campaign manager (though Trump delayed confirmation that Iran did get at least some files from Susie Wiles), as he does on the Russian front. I say that for reasons beyond the fact that even as he was being hack Trump was promising to be nice to Iran.
I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.
Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?
I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.
Does there need to be a government response?
Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.
Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.
We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.
There was a blackmail component with the Bolton hack, and I would be unsurprised if Iran at least tried that with Trump. Just as importantly, even from the few documents I saw from the hack (the vetting documents for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum), I have real questions whether Trump vetted JD anew or just relied on one that Peter Thiel had done in 2022.
Whatever the reasons, Donald Trump is defying the law that requires him to tell us all the ways Russian intervened to help him get elected in 2024 before they try again in 2026.
The post Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024 appeared first on emptywheel.