It’s Donald Trump’s favorite line when he’s asked about the 2016 election and ongoing Russia investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller: No collusion. He tweets it endlessly and uses it almost as a punchline when a reporter asks him a question regarding Russigate.
But based on what former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said during an interview with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes,” it certainly looks like there was plenty of collusion and a much larger conspiracy.
McCabe’s interview came just a day after a federal judge agreed that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort did indeed violate his plea agreement with the special counsel, and those two pressure points must have been on Trump’s mind when he angrily fired off two tweets aimed at McCabe:
Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax – a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2019
….Many of the top FBI brass were fired, forced to leave, or left. McCabe’s wife received BIG DOLLARS from Clinton people for her campaign – he gave Hillary a pass. McCabe is a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2019
All of this fits perfectly with what McCabe told Pelley, Heather Digby Parton of Salon points out:
“McCabe made more news in an excerpt from a CBS interview to air this weekend by saying that he not only opened a counterintelligence investigation at the FBI, as reported earlier, but also opened an obstruction of justice investigation around the same time, based upon Trump’s behavior and his insistence that the Justice Department was to do his bidding. McCabe appears to have been right to do so.”
The much larger point is that the FBI clearly believed there was some connection between Trump and Russia, so they started multiple investigations into the matter. Those wound up merging with the Mueller probe and now with separate investigations being conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York.
So what Judge Amy Berman Jackson said regarding Manafort takes on a new urgency now that we have McCabe confirming the FBI suspected Trump from the get-go:
“We’ve now had a federal judge in the Manafort case affirm what appears to be a central piece of Robert Mueller’s larger theory, which may implicate the president in a criminal conspiracy. We earlier saw another federal judge look at the evidence in the Michael Flynn case and get so agitated he accidentally threw out the word ‘treason.'”
Here’s another quote from McCabe’s “60 Minutes” interview that perfectly encapsulates the overall consensus in the law enforcement community regarding Donald Trump and the Kremlin:
“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and just won the election for the presidency. And who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage. And that was something that troubled me greatly.”
There’s a reason James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Robert Mueller all suspect Donald Trump of treason: Because that’s what the evidence points to.