Despite cable news talking heads largely fawning over Donald Trump’s ineffective and politically motivated airstrike in Syria, Rachel Maddow refused to back down from her dogged commitment to shedding light on the ongoing Trump-Russia scandal.
On Monday, she dug back in and connected more dots, this time setting her sights on two new developments in the story:
1. The CIA knew about pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
2. The recent arrest of an infamous Russian hacker who, according to reporting, developed a virus that helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
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More from Maddow:
Maddow said:
This new reporting indicates that the CIA last summer somehow came into possession of information that it found sufficiently alarming that the director did one-on-one briefings with the leadership in Congress, not to tell them about Russia interfering with the election, but to tell them about Russia interfering with the election and the distinct possibility that the Trump campaign was helping Russia do that.  So the Trump campaign side of that is something that the FBI would have to handle, not the CIA. And because of that, because that’s FBI territory, at that point the investigation becomes a black box to us in terms of what we know about it, or at least in terms of what the FBI will say about it. But whether or not they are talking about these things, we can see what they’re doing. And one of the things they have just done is request the arrest of this Russian intelligence-linked, criminal mega hacker who’s now sitting in a jail cell in Barcelona presumably about to be extradited to the United States. And the FBI won’t say beep about it … As this administration continues to enjoy its first real bout of shallow, good press about their bombing 2,000 percent of all the planes in Syria, the one potentially existential scandal of this administration really is still moving. Tonight it’s moving in Barcelona. Tomorrow, who knows?
Once again, we don’t really know exactly what is happening behind the scenes in the ongoing probe into Trump’s ties to Russia, but it’s clear that the scandal isn’t going away for this White House and the wheels on this investigation are still rapidly moving.
As Maddow noted on Monday, the intelligence community continues to show that it’s hard at work in what many in the media seem to forget is a bleeping investigation into whether the current President of the United States worked with a foreign power to get elected.
Once the media stops drooling over Trump’s decision to fire some missiles at an empty airfield in Syria, perhaps they’ll remember, as Maddow has, that this is still an important story that needs to be told.
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.
