Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



If you’ve ever filled out a form SF-86 for a U.S. government security clearance, you’ll know the hassle of dealing with the sheer volume of information it entails. Listing contacts, personal, financial, and travel information in enormous, painstaking detail isn’t trivial, and even small errors will get the form kicked back to you or your clearance rejected. Applicants are required to spell out in great detail the specifics of foreign travel and overseas contacts. Investigators need to know where you’ve made your money and to whom you have debts.

I did it in my early twenties when my life was relatively uncomplicated, and it was still a pain in the ass. It’s not easy, and it’s not supposed to be.

It’s even harder when you’re a corrupt, entitled snake who repeatedly lies about your finances to federal investigators and serves as a living, breathing poster child for privileged venality. It’s even harder when you’ve rather clumsily attempted to use both your familial relationship and proximity to the president of the United States to save your family’s failing real-estate empire.
 


NBC News reports that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is asking those he’s interviewing a question that, upon reflection, seems obvious: When did President Trump know that Russia was in possession of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, if not others?

“Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team is asking witnesses pointed questions about whether Donald Trump was aware that Democratic emails had been stolen before that was publicly known,” NBC’s Katy Tur and Carol Lee write, “and whether he was involved in their strategic release, according to multiple people familiar with the probe.”

Over the weekend, Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/26/what-did-trump-know-and-when-did-he-know-it/?utm_term=.ab98def863d9 (said) to Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro that he had not colluded with the Russians because “I had no phone calls, no meetings, no nothing.” It’s worth noting that this is not a refutation of the idea that anyone on his campaign worked with Russian actors and that it is not a denial that Trump might have aided the Russian effort through inaction — by not interfering with something he knew was happening.

That prompted us to want to outline the various points during 2016 when we know or have reason to believe that members of Trump’s campaign team had contact with Russian actors about stolen information or contact with WikiLeaks, which released the information believed to have been stolen by the Russians. Earlier this week, we https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/26/what-did-trump-know-and-when-did-he-know-it/?utm_term=.ab98def863d9 (presented) that information in an article, but it seems worth a visual timeline as well.

Points are explained in more detail below.

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In essence, Trump would have Americans believe that he knew that Russia had possession of emails stolen from the DNC and Podesta prior to their being released publicly. Mueller, it seems, is trying to determine if that’s true.
 




Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has been investigating a period of time last summer when President Trump seemed determined to drive Attorney General Jeff Sessions from his job, according to people familiar with the matter who said that a key area of interest for the inquiry is whether those efforts were part of a months-long pattern of attempted obstruction of justice.

In recent months, Mueller’s team has questioned witnesses in detail about Trump’s private comments and state of mind in late July and early August of last year, around the time he issued a series of tweets belittling his “beleaguered” attorney general, these people said. The thrust of the questions was to determine whether the president’s goal was to oust Sessions in order to pick a replacement who would exercise control over the investigation into possible coordination between Russia and Trump associates during the 2016 election, these people said.
 
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