CNN Contributor: White House Staffers ‘Terrified’ By Russia Investigation

Imagine, for just a moment, that you happen to work at the White House as a staffer to one Donald Trump’s main advisers, i.e. Jared Kushner or Steve Bannon. Each and every day you hear reports of FBI investigations into the 2016 election, and you also hear that you and others could soon be subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury on the matter. How afraid would you be that both your job and your very freedom could be in jeopardy?

On CNN’s New Day Friday morning, editor David Frum and award-winning journalist Carl Bernstein speculated on the deeper meaning of Thursday’s announcement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo that Wikileaks has been acting as an agent of the Russian government. Bernstein commented:

“We are in the midst of the huge series investigations of the whole question of what Russia did in our election campaign to interfere with the democratic system. Part of the story are the Wikileaks disclosures that were aimed to destabilize us. Wikileaks was used, knowingly or unknowingly, by the Russians.

“Trump is part of right now trying to impede what we need to know about Russian did and collusion among people around him in the effort to destabilize our election campaign.”

Later in the discussion, Bernstein added:

“Trump knows a good deal that he’s not revealing. We are going to find out a lot in the coming weeks and months about the cover-up. There is really disturbing information that the president of the United States is trying to impede knowledge of what happened here of an attempt of a foreign hostile power to destabilize the electoral process.”

That’s when Frum speculated that White House staffers must be afraid, if only because they have no way of knowing how deep or high the conspiracy goes:

“[Trump] knows there is a bad smell around Paul Manafort and he knows the Ukrainian ledger showed millions of dollars in payments to Paul Manafort from the pro-Russian dictator to Ukraine. It’s now confirmed that that is real. We know the large sums did flow to Manafort.

“But exactly what the context was, it is very possible that other people in Trump world are terrified of what the information might possibly be. They don’t know the magnitude of the problem. It may be terrible, it may not be terrible, but they are trying to seal and control the story whose magnitude they themselves don’t know.”

If you work in the White House, here’s some free advice: Have a good attorney on retainer.

This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org

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