FBI and CIA catch Donald Trump’s top campaign staff on wiretap with Russian government

| 8:10 pm EST January 19, 2017
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Donald Trump may be hours away from being sworn in, but his Russia scandal continues to deepen and become more of a central focus. It turns out the FBI and CIA have been wiretapping multiple top Trump campaign people to monitor their communications with Russian officials, and that the effort to nail them on it is accelerating.

The three Trump campaign people in question won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the Russia scandal. The first is Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was already previously discovered to have allegedly taken millions of dollars in illegal cash payments from the Kremlin and was ultimately forced out of the campaign. The second is former Trump advisor Carter Page, who was last seen in Moscow under circumstances which suggested he may now be working as some kind of Russian government agent. And the third is Trump advisor Roger Stone, who has already admitted that he had been collaborating with cyberterrorist Julian Assange. But the plot now thickens.

Once Trump takes office, the New York Times points out he can attempt to scale back these investigations before the CIA and FBI can drop the hammer on his associates, who could potentially flip on him. But if he does, he risks setting himself up for the kind of Watergate style implosion which took down Richard Nixon as made himself look more and more guilty by trying to shut down the federal investigations into him.