FBI now pursuing Donald Trump campaign and Russia for targeting Hillary Clinton during primary season

| 4:54 pm EDT March 31, 2017
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The long running FBI investigation into the Donald Trump campaign and Russia for colluding against Hillary Clinton during the election, which was recently acknowledged publicly by FBI Director James Comey, turns out to go much further back than had been previously believed. CBS News has learned that the FBI is pursuing the Trump campaign and Russia for targeting Hillary as early as the primary season, long before she became the nominee.

Declassified documents now reveal that the FBI is going all the way back to March of 2016 to study the role which Trump campaign advisers played in the earliest known Russian attempts at hacking Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t until a couple months later, when Russia began targeting the Democratic National Committee instead, that the effort bore more fruit. But the March timeframe aligns with another key Trump-Russia event.

As we’ve previously reported in the Palmer Report on Trump-Russia, it was in March 2016 when Jeff Sessions first introduced Carter Page to Donald Trump. Page had previously spent years working in Moscow, and it’s still not clear why he was brought into the campaign. Page then went on to meet with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Republican Convention in the summer of 2016, and then he gave a pro-Russia speech in Moscow in the fall, before departing the campaign due to controversy over his Russia connections. Sessions also went on to meet with the Russian Ambassador and then lie about it under oath.

It’s not yet clear if this new revelation from CBS News (link), that Trump and Russia were targeting Hillary during the primary, is related to the arrival of Carter Page on Donald Trump’s campaign staff. But it does stand out that the FBI now believes the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign began just as the Russia-tainted Page was joining the campaign staff. Palmer Report will dig deeper to try to further connect these March 2016 dots. Contribute to Palmer Report