The Reince Priebus panic move suggests Trump-Russia scandal runs even deeper than imagined
With each passing day, the Donald Trump Russia scandal begins to read more like the kind of bad international spy novel you’d find at an airport gift shop. When it comes to the increasingly strange ways in which Trump and his associates were involved, no new evidence or accusation would surprise me. But until two days ago, I believed that Trump-Russia was contained entirely to Trump’s own people. This new Reince Priebus panic move, however, suggests something else.
Despite his current status as Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus is not a Trump loyalist. He never has been. During the campaign, while he was RNC Chair, he acted completely neutral as to whether Trump became the nominee or not. He’s not someone who’s willing to take a fall for Trump now. In addition, Priebus is one of the few power players in the Trump White House who seems to understand how anything in government works.
So when Priebus asked the FBI to help him scuttle the Russia scandal, he wasn’t acting on a naive whim. In fact he started off as RNC general counsel before he was RNC Chair, so he knows political law better than most. He knew he was committing Watergate-level obstruction of justice. He knew the risk he was taking. Yet he was willing to break the law in a last ditch effort to try to make the Russia scandal go away. This suggests that Priebus himself, or someone else he’s deeply loyal to, was involved in the Russia scandal to begin with.
If Priebus was indeed involved in the conspiracy to work with Russia to rig the election, he had to have been doing so back while he was RNC Chair. When you look at how early on Vladimir Putin began trying to set the stage for Hillary Clinton to lose the 2016 election, including bringing Republican operatives like Michael Flynn and Sheriff David Clarke and even Green Party candidate Jill Stein to Moscow in December of 2015, long before Putin could have known that Trump would be the nominee, it raises the question of just whom Putin may have been conspiring with in those early days.
Was the effort to rig the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton originally a conspiracy between Russia and Republican Party leaders? Is that why Reince Priebus, who was Chair of the Republican National Committee at the time, is now going to such desperate lengths to keep the remaining details from coming out? If so, which other Republican Party leaders may have been involved at the start, even if they didn’t continue to pursue it after Trump hijacked the party? Is there enough dirt to take down the entire GOP leadership?
Until two days ago, I wouldn’t have believed that anyone in the Republican Party leadership, outside of Donald Trump and his associates, was a part of the Russian election rigging conspiracy. But now that Reince Priebus has panicked in the manner he has, it dictates that we must also investigate Republican leaders outside of Trump’s own circle to determine if they were a part of it. Contribute to Palmer Report
