On MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show on Tuesday, the liberal superstar dropped another Russian reality check on viewers, telling America to “get back to the main point,” which is that it’s slowly looking like the Trump campaign was working with Russia to topple Hillary Clinton last year.
In her opening segment, Maddow focused on a so-far unsubstantiated dossier released in January that details damning links between Trump and high-ranking Russian officials. While Trump and his apologists try to muddy the waters, point fingers, and deny any wrongdoing, more and more of that controversial dossier has become verified as truth.
As Maddow said, pieces from that document continue to fall into place, which is slowly raising the likelihood that Russia and Trump’s campaign worked together.
Maddow connected the dots here:
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Rachel Maddow with another Russian reality check pic.twitter.com/RN7S9ld1dd
— Sean Colarossi (@SeanColarossi) March 8, 2017
Maddow said:
Forget all the salacious personal stuff. Forget all the stuff that made the White House so mad when this was published. The bottom line of this dossier, the bottom line allegation, the point of it is that the Trump campaign didn’t just benefit from Russia interfering in our presidential campaign. The point of this is that they colluded, they helped, they were in on it. The money quote from this dossier is, “The operation had been conducted with the full knowledge of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” That’s basically what this whole dossier alleges – that the Trump folks were in on it.  There were multiple people close to Trump, involved in the Trump campaign, who were in contact with the Russian government about the Russian government’s attacks on Hillary Clinton, while those attacks were happening, while Russia was waging these attacks. Overall, yes, we still have to describe this as a sheaf of uncorroborated allegations, but little pieces supporting that bottom line thesis really do keep falling in line.
Maddow then listed the series of Russian revelations – and secret meetings between Trump associates and the Russian officials – that have come out over the past several weeks, despite initial claims from the president that nobody on his team met with the Russians during the campaign.
It turns out that more than a half-dozen Trump associates are linked to Russia, including Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen.
As Maddow noted in her coverage, it was reported by Politico on Tuesday that one of those associates, Carter Page, was given permission by the Trump campaign last year to make a visit to Russia in the heat of the 2016 election cycle.
The president himself even met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak before giving a campaign speech last year.
All of these bits of information are turning what was previous an unverified dossier into a credible document implicating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in what would be the biggest political scandal in U.S. history.
Even though there is so much going on in our politics right now, much of it disturbing and distracting, we must not lose focus on this scandal.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
