Harry Reid must be feeling slightly smug

When he isn't busy being glad he won't have to live to see how much damage has been done to the US.


None.

Then-Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid released a letter in the heat of the 2016 election alleging Trump-Russia collusion even though the CIA director at the time urged him not to, according to a person familiar with their conversation.

Mr. Reid’s Aug. 27 letter to the FBI appears to mark the first time a Democrat officially accused President’ Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government to hack his party’s computers.

[...]

“The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” Mr. Reid wrote to FBI Director James B. Comey.

Mr. Reid wrote and leaked his letter after receiving a secret telephone briefing from then-CIA Director John Brennan.

[...]

That August, Mr. Brennan was briefing the so called “gang of eight” congressional leaders on Russian computer hacking and on suspicious that Trump people were involved.

  WaPo May 2018

The Reid and Brennan camps argued about whether Brennan gave Reid a green light to send the letter (Brennan's people say no), but it remains that Harry Reid tried to get this information out to the public before the election.

Observers of the Russia investigation have generally understood Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work as focusing on at least two separate tracks: collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, on the one hand, and potential obstruction of justice by the president, on the other. But what if the obstruction was the collusion—or at least a part of it?

[...]

Today, the New York Times is reporting that in the days following the firing of James Comey, the FBI opened an investigation of President Trump. It wasn’t simply the obstruction investigation that many of us have assumed. It was also a counterintelligence investigation predicated on the notion that the president’s own actions might constitute a national security threat.

[...]

Here’s the bottom line: I believe that between today’s New York Times story and some other earlier material I have been sifting through and thinking about, we might be in a position to revisit the relationship between the “collusion” and obstruction components of the Mueller investigation. Specifically, I now believe they are far more integrated with one another than I previously understood.

[...]

I think, and the Times’s story certainly suggests, that the story may be more complicated [...] , the lines fuzzier, and the internal understanding of the investigation very different along all three of these axes from the ones the public has imbibed.

  Ben Wittes

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.