The Russia Scandal Takes A Mind-Blowing Turn That Could Destroy The Republican Party

It wasn't Donald Trump alone who had ties to the Russians during the 2016 campaign. It turns out that the Republican National Committee used a firm with ties to Russian intelligence to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton.

By Sarah Jones

This is truly mind-blowing.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering how establishment Republicans were so happy ignoring the looming treason scandal of their President. It very well could be because they, too, have something Russian to hide.

So it wasn’t Donald Trump alone who had ties to the Russians during the 2016 campaign. It turns out that the Republican National Committee used a firm with ties to Russian intelligence to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The RNC used former CIA officers’ firm the Hamilton Trading Group, which has “particular expertise” in Russia, to dig up dirt on Clinton according to a Politico report.

“RNC officials and the president and co-founder of Hamilton Trading Group, an ex-CIA officer named Ben Wickham, insisted the payments, which eventually totaled $41,500, had nothing to do with Russia,” Kenneth P. Vogel and Eli Stokols reported.

The RNC claimed the payments were for “security.”

“But RNC officials now acknowledge that most of the cash — $34,100 — went towards intelligence-style reports that sought to prove conflicts of interest between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State and her family’s foundation.”

Oh.

So the RNC was perfectly comfortable working with a firm that raised eyebrows for its Russian connections, at a time when the intelligence community was telling them that Russia was interfering in the U.S. election.

To say this again, as Putin has bragged about information warfare as the new war, a major U.S. political party sided with a country that declared information warfare, or war if you will, on the U.S.A.

Yes, it is an act of war, it is meant to destroy western democracy in the end.

Russia uses “rigged polls and fake news to sway foreign elections,” the Wall Street Journal reported, on a dossier showing an example of how Russia operated in Bulgaria.

The entire Republican Party had strange ties to a government at war with this country, the country to which Republicans are supposed to be loyal.

Strange things are afloat. No wonder Congressional Republicans are doing everything they can to ignore the screaming treason of the White House. They are quite possibly in on it themselves.

If this scandal comes to a head, that is to say if the intelligence community turns on the Republican Party in an effort to force them to deal with the possible collusion with a hostile foreign power in the White House, the Russia scandal could bring down the Republican Party for a generation.

Republicans should be smart here; this will come out. They should get on the right side of history before it’s too late. Sadly, this party’s elected officials have shown little allegiance to their country.

What is going on here is a scandal that will go down in history. One of two major parties in the U.S. system working with a foreign power that has declared war on the U.S.A. That is not to say they colluded with Russia to bring the U.S. down, but they did work with them as Russia was attacking the election, an act of war. That much is in evidence.

The collusion evidence, the circumstantial collusion evidence, in this case could be as simple as Republicans knew Russians were attacking the U.S. elections when they worked with this firm with ties to Russian intelligence. To be clear, there is not public evidence of direct collusion in terms of quid pro quo right now. There is evidence that the RNC was deceptive about their connections with Russian intelligence in this regard, and that they had it during the campaign.

The fact that the head of the RNC at the time is now in the Trump White House is even more troubling, as Trump has hired people at all points whose contacts with the Russians during the election have already caused one of them to be fired and another to step down from overseeing an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.

This should now be amended to the Republican Party’s ties to Russia. Lucky for them, they are in power of both branches of government and trying to get their Supreme Court nominee in as the last gatekeeper in a checks and balances system. The only way this scandal is going to come out is through the intelligence community leaking to the press.

And that’s why Republicans are so outraged about leaks.

But this is not Republicans trying to protect our national security secrets. This is Republicans trying to make sure they cover up the fact that Russia has eyes and ears in the situation room, and has access to our national secrets because of Trump and the GOP.

It was true that going to the extremist corner they did, Republicans could not win a national election without cheating. They knew this, everyone knew this. So it was a shock when Donald Trump, the most extreme of the extreme, won.

But now, it’s not such a shock because it wasn’t won without cheating. It was won with the help of a hostile, aggressive government whose goal is to bring the U.S. down in order to kill the hope of democracy.