Donald Trump’s Russia scandal just exploded – and it’s even uglier than we imagined

| 9:41 pm EDT September 27, 2019
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Earlier this evening, the news broke that the Trump White House had also tried to bury the evidence of Donald Trump’s conversations with Russia and Saudi Arabia. Palmer Report pointed out that the details of these conversations would end up becoming public sooner or later. But even we weren’t expecting those details to start surfacing immediately.

We already know that back in 2017, Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, then met with Kremlin officials in the Oval Office the next day, and told them that he’d done it to make the Trump-Russia investigation go away. But this evening the Washington Post broke the news that during that same meeting, Trump also told the Russians that he didn’t mind that they interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, because the U.S. does that same thing to other countries.

This means Trump was sending a clear signal to the Russian government that he hoped the Kremlin would also try to rig the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. Combined with Trump’s recent attempt at extorting the president of Ukraine into helping him with rigging the 2020 election in Trump’s favor, this establishes a clear and prolonged pattern. Trump has been urging foreign countries to rig his reelection for years now.

What stands out here is that the WaPo says its sources are three former officials with knowledge of the Russia meeting. This means that people who have known about this conversation since 2017, and have remained quiet all this time, now feel compelled to come forward. We’re going to see a lot more of this, as people who disapproved of Trump’s antics begin piling on. Also, it’s notable that we’ve learned this tonight without anyone even gaining access to the actual documents on the secret server. That’ll come next.