As the Russia investigation continues to consume Washington, one Senator is asking questions that threaten to upend the Swamp’s campaign against Trump.
They involve Barack Obama’s role in the scandal.
And the answers could change everything you thought you knew about this scandal.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has asked the FBI to provide information as to whether they provided the Trump campaign with a defensive briefing about Russian contacts with Trump campaign officials.
The Daily Caller reports:
A Republican Senator wants to know whether the FBI warned the Trump campaign about Russian attempts to infiltrate the campaign.
Bombshell revelations this week about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort are what prompted the inquiry, made by the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
In a letter to Wray, Grassley asks whether the FBI ever provided a “defensive briefing” or any other warnings about “attempts to infiltrate the campaign by people connected with, or compromised by, Russian intelligence.”
“Such a briefing allows innocent, unwitting organizations and individuals to take defensive action to protect themselves,” Grassley wrote to Wray.
This is an important question for a number of reasons.
If the FBI provided no such briefing, then it provides evidence that the whole Russia “collusion” narrative was fake news cooked up after the election in order to deflect blame from Hillary for her defeat and to delegitimize Trump.
It could also show that the Obama administration was keeping the information to themselves to use against Trump and his campaign.
Grassley noted that in 2008, the FBI gave the McCain campaign a defensive briefing about Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Davis over their work in Ukrainian politics.
The Daily Caller also reports:
The Iowa Republican also noted that Manafort has been at the center of one such defensive briefing.
He pointed to a report out earlier this year that in 2008, U.S. intelligence raised concerns about Manafort’s foreign consulting work to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.
Manafort’s business partner, Rick Davis, was McCain’s campaign manager. At the time, Manafort and Davis were working on behalf of then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. The business partners also arranged two meetings between McCain and Deripaska, the Russian oligarch who Manafort offered to brief last year.
Grassley told Wray that the circumstances that prompted a defensive briefing to McCain’s campaign about Manafort’s work “seem substantially similar” to the situation surrounding the Trump campaign.
Either way, it shows that the Obama administration’s actions were politically motivated.
And they cast serious doubt on the real nature of the allegations of Russian “interference” in the election.
We will keep you updated on any new developments in this story.
