Russia! Russia? Russia. w/ Yours Truly, Ep. 24
To understand why Trump is attacking James Comey with a historic prosecution, we have to go back to a landmark story I covered years ago: The Trump Russia investigations.
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The Trump Russia Story, Pt. 1
President Donald Trump did not just wake up and decide recently he hated former FBI Director James Comey, he’s been seething about him for almost a decade now.
Why? Because Comey opened the FBI investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign amid questions of whether they worked at all with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his online troll army to swing the election through sophisticated hacks and online propaganda.
The first president to order a prosecution of a perceived enemy, despite his own prosecutors saying not enough evidence exists, started with a foundational story in Trump’s White House legacy, The Trump Russia Investigations.
On today’s show, I dig back to my own roots covering these amazing investigations, by the House and Senate and special counsel Robert Mueller, first when I was at CNN and then with The Associated Press.
The partisan furor at the time, with unproven allegations that Trump was co-opted by Putin from the left and Trump’s bogus fabrication of a Deep State attack on him, formed much of what we’re living in now.
But the reality of what happened, a clever and persistent Russian campaign of online propaganda and sophisticated digital targeting, would prove eerily prescient of what we now live through every day in America.
Join me, as we Return to Oz. It’s not fun, but it is important.
This is Part 1 of “Russia! Russia? Russia.”
***
What a week it has been, friends. We’re all old enough to remember when the White House did its best mafia impersonation to attempt to cancel ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, and see that effort fall flat on its face — after an astonishing capitulation.
The coda on this? Even conservative network Sinclair finally buckled to popular pressure and brought Kimmel back on its ABC stations today.
If you think that’s it for the attacks on free speech and the First Amendment, guess again. But, for now, enjoy the weekend. I’ll see you back here Monday, I’ll have DNC Vice Chair
on the show with some key insights ahead of the Virginia and New Jersey elections.It’s a pleasure to be with you every day, but also our right as Americans. Thanks for exercising our most basic of human freedoms with me.
Tom
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I have no sympathy for Comey. Pure Karma. I have a long memory and remember his October Surprise, and probably why Trump was elected 45, not he is getting tied to the execution post by the man he helped but in power. Good on him.