Since we've gotten a vote of some confidence for this thread....
A new story from The New York Times' Michael Schmidt reports that that during the first months of the new Trump administration, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein shuttered FBI investigations into Trump’s longstanding financial connections with Russia —then ordered special counsel Robert Mueller to steer clear of it himself.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/30/1973600/-Rosenstein-blocked-FBI-from-probing-Trump-s-Russian-ties-then-ordered-Mueller-to-ignore-them-as-well.
The accusation being leveled by acting Federal Bureau of Investigation director Andrew McCabe against Rosenstein goes further, suggesting that Rosenstein intentionally misled him. Schmidt reports that McCabe launched a counterintelligence probe into Trump's Russian ties immediately after Trump's firing of former FBI director James Comey, a move that was widely publicly speculated to be a Trump move to quash investigations into Russian election actions and into numerous of Trump's top advisers and allies.
The fear within the intelligence community was that Trump's behaviors could be impacted by unknown Russian pressures, representing an immediate national security threat.
Rosenstein, however, ordered the probe shut down. Rosenstein did not tell McCabe that directly, says Schmidt, but instead left McCabe "with the impression that the special counsel would take on [that] investigation" as part of Mueller's overall Russian interference inquiry.
But separately, Rosenstein told Mueller that he wasn't to pursue the counterintelligence concerns either.
That means no federal investigation into Trump's Russian cash have been undertaken during his presidency, despite numerous papers and journalists themselves identifying significant ties between Donald Trump's finances and individuals close to the Russian government. Not by intelligence officials, not by the special counsel's team, and not the Senate's own Russia probes. Through the entirety of Trump's term, all probes of financial ties to Russian interests—which he has retained, even in the presidency—have each been blocked.
Schmidt's claims here seem impossible to fully believe. It would require that federal law enforcement officials turn a blind eye to a potentially massive national security threat—the very real chance that Trump was and is being intimidated into, or merely bribed into, pursuing Putin-preferred policies damaging to the United States. Trump's moves to weaken NATO, his pressure on allies to weaken Russian sanctions and re-elevate Russia as economic leader, and his mostly-successful sabotage of the Ukrainian government's ability to push back Russian forces during a key Russian military push have each been contrary to longstanding U.S. interests. None have been competently explained, not even by Trump's own national security officials.
Per Marcy Wheeler....
https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/08/30/both-rod-rosenstein-and-richard-burr-chose-not-to-investigate-trumps-biggest-counterintelligence-vulnerability/
