U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted on numerous occasions that his 2016 presidential campaign had nothing to do with Russia.

“Time for the Witch Hunt to END!” Trump said in a message on Twitter last Saturday. “After two years and millions of pages of documents (and a cost of over $30 million) no collusion!” Trump tweeted earlier. 

But the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton has unearthed plenty of evidence connecting Trump associates with Russia. In the year and a half since Robert Mueller took over the investigation into possible collusion, charging documents have alleged that more than a dozen Trump associates – from former campaign manager Paul Manafort to son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner – communicated with Russians, in one form or another, during and after the election. 

While the Mueller investigation operates under grand jury secrecy, the evidence the special prosecutor has referenced in court documents points to deeper and broader than previously thought contacts between people in Trump’s orbit and Russian operatives who sought to gain influence with the Republican president.

The latest revelation on the nexus between Trump and Russia appeared in a sentencing memo for former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen who pleaded guilty last week to lying to Congress about Trump’s efforts, during the campaign, to build a Trump tower in Moscow.

Last year, Cohen told lawmakers that his efforts on behalf of Trump to win Russian approval and build a new high rise in Moscow ended in January 2016, just as the campaign was heating up, whereas in fact they continued through June 2016, shortly before Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. In the memo, Mueller’s prosecutors wrote that Cohen, who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump but subsequently turned on his former boss, has provided “information about his own contacts with Russian interests during the campaign and discussions with others in the course of making those contacts.”

Cohen, who broached the possibility of a meeting in New York between Putin and Trump during the U.N. General Assembly in September 2016, has told prosecutors that he had “conferred” with Trump about the idea before “reaching out to gauge Russia’s interest in such a meeting,” according to the memo. 

The meeting did not take place for reasons that prosecutors did not reveal. 

Russian attempts to set up such a meeting persisted, however. In November 2016, Cohen spoke with a Russian who offered “political synergy” with the campaign and “repeatedly proposed a meeting between Putin and Trump. 

“The person told Cohen that such a meeting could have a ‘phenomenal’ impact ‘not only in political but in a business dimension’… because there is ‘no bigger warranty in any project than consent of [the President of Russia,]’” according to the memo. 

Cohen did not follow up on the invitation, according to the court filing, explaining to prosecutors that “he was working on the Moscow Project with a different individual who Cohen understood to have his own connections to the Russian government.” 

The unidentified individual is believed to be Felix Sater, a Russian-born real estate developer who worked as an adviser for the Trump Organization.

Trump’s interest in doing business with Russia goes back decades. In 2013, he brought the Miss Universe beauty pageant to Moscow. Throughout the 2016 campaign Trump repeatedly praised Putin and reveled in the Russian president’s compliments before the relationship soured after the election. 

The latest filings came at the end of a whirlwind week in the Russia investigation that saw similar documents filed in criminal cases involving Manafort and former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in denying he had conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. shortly after the election and before Trump took office, at a time Russia was trying to get out from under U.S. sanctions. 

The Cohen sentencing memo represents the first time the special counsel has alleged a discussion between Trump and his lawyer about a meeting with Putin during the 2016 election.It suggests that Trump remained focused on his business interests even as he was running for the White House. 

“If the project was completed, the Company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues,” the Cohen sentencing memo says. 

Other Trump associates accused of interacting with Russia during and after the 2016 campaign include former attorney general Jeff Sessions who met with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign and former campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos who tried to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin during the campaign.
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A group of former U.S. Senate members from both the Democratic and Republican parties is urging current members to be “guardians of our democracy” and not let party affiliation get in the way of the interests of the country as it faces a “critical juncture.”

The 44 former lawmakers wrote in an op-ed published Monday by the Washington Post that the United States is “entering a dangerous period” and they felt they needed to “speak up about serious challenges to the rule of law, the Constitution, our governing institutions and our national security.”

They cited the eventual conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with President Donald Trump’s campaign, as well as the planned investigations of the Trump administration by the Democrat-led House of Representatives that will be in place next month as challenges that are coming amid regional and global conflicts.

“We are at an inflection point in which the foundational principles of our democracy and our national security interests are at stake, and the rule of law and the ability of our institutions to function freely and independently must be upheld,” they wrote.

The group includes Democrats John Kerry, Tom Daschle and Chris Dodd, as well as Republicans John Warner, Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel.
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U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with Democratic leaders Tuesday in a final effort to secure border wall funding as part of a larger government spending package that must be passed by Dec. 21. The funding marks the final legislative action of the Republican-controlled Congress and a must-pass bill to avert a partial government shutdown ahead of the holidays.

Both parties face a delicate balancing act tackling the latest fight over immigration with just weeks until control of the House of Representatives shifts to Democrats.

Trump will meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to see if there is room for compromise on his request for up to $5 billion in funding for the wall in fiscal year 2019. The meeting will be the first test of Trump’s ability to negotiate bipartisan deals following significant Democratic gains in November’s congressional midterm elections.

Trump and Pelosi initially expressed interest in working with each other on bills addressing infrastructure and prescription drug prices. But Pelosi — who is expected to become Speaker of the House when the new Congress is sworn in next month — rejected the possibility of compromise on border wall funding.

Democrats consider a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border “immoral, ineffective and expensive,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. She also made clear Democrats would not link a compromise on the border wall with a legislative solution addressing the legal status of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, the more than 800,000 undocumented young people brought to the United States as children.

Compromise on a solution for DACA recipients stalled in Congress throughout 2018. The House failed to pass a bill after a group of Republicans organized an effort to defy House Speaker Paul Ryan and force the issue.

Pelosi proposed lawmakers pass the six funding bills that have already cleared key committee votes while funding the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that would oversee the border wall funding, on another temporary spending measure.

“I can’t imagine the president is willing to accept that,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn told reporters Thursday.

Trump says the border wall with Mexico will stop an invasion of migrants from Central America into the United States.

“Could somebody please explain to the Democrats (we need their votes) that our Country loses 250 Billion Dollars a year on illegal immigration, not including the terrible drug flow. Top Border Security, including a Wall, is $25 Billion. Pays for itself in two months. Get it done!” Trump tweeted on Dec. 4.

The administration received $1.375 billion in funding for border security in the fiscal year budget that ended on Sept. 30. It did not include money for building a wall.

“The idea that they haven’t spent last year’s money and they’re demanding such a huge amount this year makes no sense at all,” Schumer said.

Trump and Republicans in a lame-duck Congress face a tough choice. Forcing the issue of the border wall will trigger a partial government shutdown just four days before Christmas.

Lawmakers will not relish the prospect of being trapped in Washington figuring out a solution. But some Republicans see the shutdown as an opportunity to slow Democratic momentum coming into the new year with a new legislative agenda. Democrats will not want to be blamed for a shutdown before they have even taken control of the House.

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, Pelosi and Schumer issued a joint statement saying Trump’s border wall proposal does not have sufficient support and he should not make it “an obstacle to bipartisan government.”

“Republicans still control the House, the Senate, and the White House, and they have the power to keep the government open,” the statement said.
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Editorial cartoons — also known as political cartoons — have been around as long as there’s been political discourse and dissent. In the U.S. they’re a vibrant part of American culture and history, and no matter how controversial, are protected as free speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist about the current state of cartooning in the U.S. — and overseas.
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Editorial cartoons — also known as political cartoons — have been around as long as there’s been political discourse and dissent. 

In the U.S., they’re a vibrant part of American culture and history, and no matter how controversial, are protected as free speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the late Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist Doug Marlette described them as “the acid test of the First Amendment.” 

An unusual calling

Matt Wuerker is a staff cartoonist for Politico, an American political journalism company based just outside the nation’s capital. 

He says it’s an unusual job.

“We’re a strange mix of things in that we are making serious commentary on serious topics, but we’re doing it not so seriously,” he says. “We like to see ourselves as opinion columnists that you’d see in a newspaper or somebody on TV who’s offering their opinion… and we get to draw our opinions with silly pictures!”

The Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist says the main advantage of a political cartoon is being able to communicate an opinion very quickly. 

“I can draw a picture and put in a little word bubble and you can read it in about four seconds and you get it,” he says. “So it’s a very interesting vehicle for expressing an opinion if you do it right.”

“It has to hit you in the face kind of hard and fast and you know it when you’ve been hit.”

A good example of that is his popular Thanksgiving cartoon where he shows a family gathered around the dinner table about to partake in the much-revered Thanksgiving meal. While Mother brings the turkey to the table, family members are shown immersed in their mobile phones instead of paying attention to this time-honored ritual.

He was inspired by a popular painting by American artist Norman Rockwell who painted idyllic scenes reflecting American culture. 

While Wuerker created the cartoon for an American audience, its message is universal; a striking example of how technology is disrupting such simple rituals as meal time.

A variety of styles

Wuerker’s cartoons are very ornate and detailed and painted in a variety of colors. But he’s a bit envious of other cartoonists he says, who can express themselves with a simple line drawing. They can “make the statement with very little drawing and it can be just as effective, if not maybe more effective,” he says.

The format of cartoons has evolved, he says.

“When I started 40 years ago doing cartoons, an editorial cartoon was a black-and-white single-panel cartoon in a newspaper. And now cartoons can be color, they can be animated, they can be graphic novels that are political.”

Like the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning work by journalist Jake Halpern and illustrator Michael Sloan currently on display at the Newseum in Washington. 

“They did something quite extraordinary,” says Patty Rhule, Vice President of Exhibits at the Newseum. “They did a 20-part series in the New York Times following the story of two Syrian immigrants who fled the war in Syria to come to this country and start a new life with their families.”

It marked the newspaper’s first Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

Rhule says editorial cartoons “bring faces and art to current events and tell stories in a way that journalists who are reporting strict facts can’t always do,” adding that the graphic novel format the two journalists used “takes cartooning to a whole new level; they add a note of commentary on what is happening in the world.”

Editorial cartoons have always been an important part of American culture, she adds.

“Since the beginning of this country, editorial cartoons have been framing issues and framing debate — from Ben Franklin’s Live Free or Die [Join, or Die], the segmented snake that rallied the 13 colonies together. So it’s always been a part of this country and the world’s way of freely expressing ideas and debate, and so I hope they never go away.”

Cartoon backlash 

But free expression sometimes comes at a heavy price. 

In 2015, Islamic terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine, after it published unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Twelve people were killed in the attack, including several prominent cartoonists.

“And within their [Islamic] culture they are certainly entitled to be offended, but they’re not entitled to decide that they’re going to go to Paris and kill the people who created that cartoon that was really intended for a French audience,” Wuerker says.

He has great respect, he says, for cartoonists who keep working despite the dangers.

“In the course of my career I’ve gotten to know a lot of cartoonists from different parts of the world, and the ones that really impress me are the ones that keep drawing despite having to live with constant threats all the time.” 

“Many cartoonists have had to flee their country because they were brave enough to take on regimes or political figures that don’t understand that a free press is a salutary thing,” he adds.

He hopes that in these troubled times, people will appreciate cartoons for what they are.

“The times have become so vitriolic and people are so quick to anger. I think the good kind of political cartooning is something that slips in a really good political point with a certain amount of good humor and wit that people will process and hopefully won’t make them angry but will make them think.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump sought Monday to diminish allegations he directed his lawyer to criminally violate campaign finance laws by making $280,000 in payments to two women to remain silent before the 2016 election about alleged affairs with him.

Trump said on Twitter the payments made by his former attorney, Michael Cohen, were “a simple private transaction,” and that opposition Democrats and federal prosecutors “wrongly call it a campaign contribution, which it was not.”

The U.S. leader said that “…even if it was, it is only a CIVIL CASE,” comparing it to campaign finance violations committed in 2008 by his predecessor, Democrat Barack Obama. But Trump said the payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal were “done correctly by a lawyer and there would not even be a fine. Lawyer’s liability if he made a mistake, not me.”

He said, “Cohen just trying to get his sentence reduced. WITCH HUNT!”   

Trump’s comments on Cohen came after federal prosecutors said Friday the Trump attorney, “in coordination with and at the direction” of then-candidate Trump, made the hush money payments shortly before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen is being sentenced Wednesday for making the payments, along with several other criminal offenses, and faces several years in prison.

Trump, as he often does, derided special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing 19-month investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to help him win the election and whether, as president, Trump obstructed justice by trying to thwart the probe.

Quoting a Fox News report, Trump said, “Democrats can’t find a Smocking (sic) Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia… No Smocking Gun…No Collusion. That’s because there was NO COLLUSION.”

‘Impeachable offenses’

A key U.S. lawmaker said Sunday Democrats in the House of Representatives could pursue impeachment hearings against Trump, saying that he had “surrounded himself with crooks” and was part of a broad “conspiracy against the American people” to win the 2016 election.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat set to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when Democrats take control of the chamber next month, told CNN that lawmakers have to decide “how important” allegations are against Trump, but should pursue impeachment charges “only for serious offenses.”

Nadler said that if proven, the payments to the two women were “certainly impeachable offenses.” That could lead to his removal from office, if the Senate were to convict him by at least a two-thirds vote, a doubtful proposition with Republican control of the Senate continuing in the Congress that takes office in January.

Nadler said lawmakers will have “to look at all this,” along with weighing what Mueller eventually concludes about Trump campaign links with Russia and whether Trump obstructed justice.

The U.S. Justice Department has a standing guideline against indicting sitting presidents, although they can be charged after leaving office. Nadler said, however, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the president from being indicted. Nobody should be above the law.”

Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, set to assume control of the House Intelligence Committee next month, told CBS News on Sunday, “My takeaway is there’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time.”

Trump has called for the end to the Mueller probe, but a Republican lawmaker, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, told ABC News, “I’ve always supported the Mueller investigation and continue to do so because I think it’s in the best interest of everyone involved, including, by the way, the president.”

Aside from Cohen, Mueller so far has secured guilty pleas or won convictions of Trump’s first national security adviser, his former campaign manager, his former deputy campaign manager, a foreign policy adviser and other lesser figures.

Blaming Comey

On Sunday, Trump assailed former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey, whom Trump fired while he was heading the Russia investigation before Mueller was named to lead the probe. Comey testified to a House panel on Friday about his role in 2016 election-related investigations of Trump’s campaign and that of his challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state.

“On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked,” Trump said on Twitter.

“Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful!  This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!”

Late Sunday, Comey said Americans “should use every breath we have to make sure” Trump is defeated in 2020 when he is running for re-election to a second term.

 
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Washington is absorbing new revelations concerning the Russia probe revealed in court documents regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager as well as his former personal attorney, both of whom have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal crimes and provided information to prosecutors. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, Trump himself continues to deny wrongdoing.
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A key U.S. lawmaker said Sunday that Democrats in the House of Representatives could pursue impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump, saying that the U.S. leader had “surrounded himself with crooks” and was part of a broad “conspiracy against the American people” to win the 2016 election.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat set to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when Democrats take control of the chamber next month, told CNN that lawmakers have to decide “how important” allegations are against Trump, but should pursue impeachment charges “only for serious offenses.”

Nadler offered his thoughts two days after federal prosecutors accused former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, “in coordination with and at the direction” of Trump, of orchestrating $280,000 in hush money payments shortly before the 2016 election to two women who alleged they had affairs with Trump so they would stay silent before Election Day.

Nadler said that if proven, the allegations against Trump were “certainly impeachable offenses.” That could lead to his removal from office, if the Senate were to convict him by at least a two-thirds vote, a doubtful proposition with Republican control of the Senate continuing in the Congress that takes office in January.

Nadler said lawmakers will have “to look at all this,” along with weighing what special counsel Robert Mueller concludes about allegations that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to help him win and that, as president, Trump obstructed justice by trying to thwart the ongoing 19-month probe.

The U.S. Justice Department has a standing guideline against indicting sitting presidents, although they can be charged after leaving office. Nadler said, however, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the president from being indicted. Nobody should be above the law.”

Trump has dismissed the latest allegations against him in connection with the payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal and allegations of Trump campaign contacts with Russia to help him win the election.

“We’re very happy with what we’re reading,” Trump said Saturday, following a Twitter comment Friday night, “Totally clears the President. Thank you!”

Trump has called for the end to the Mueller probe, but a Republican lawmaker, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, told ABC News, “I’ve always supported the Mueller investigation and continue to do so because I think it’s in the best interest of everyone involved, including, by the way, the president.”

Aside from Cohen, who is set to be sentenced Wednesday and faces several years of imprisonment, Mueller so far has secured guilty pleas or won convictions of Trump’s first national security adviser, his former campaign manager, his former deputy campaign manager, a foreign policy adviser and other lesser figures.

On Sunday, Trump assailed former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey, whom Trump fired while he was heading the Russia investigation before Mueller was named to lead the probe.

Comey testified to a House panel on Friday about his role in 2016 election-related investigations of Trump’s campaign and that of his challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state.

“On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked,” Trump claimed on Twitter.

“Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!”

 
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The latest impending White House high-profile departure is the top official who traditionally controls access to the Oval Office.

Chief of Staff John Kelly is exiting by the end of this month, President Donald Trump told reporters on Saturday.

“John Kelly will be leaving — I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring.’ But, he’s a great guy,” Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn. 

Kelly’s successor is widely expected to be Nick Ayers, the young, politically savvy chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence.

New staff

Trump, before boarding Marine One, said he would announce his next chief of staff “over the next day or two.”

Kelly’s imminent departure comes as no surprise. There had been speculation for months — which had grown more intense in recent days — that the former Marine general would soon exit amid a further chill between him and the president, a deterioration in a relationship that had never been described as overly warm.

“It would have been a bad fit for anybody. He was essentially tasked with mission impossible,” said professor David Cohen, a presidential historian at the University of Akron in Ohio. “Trump never gave him the tools to succeed in the job,” in which the chief of staff is supposed to be empowered to speak for the president and to have unfettered authority in organizing the White House and instilling stability and order.

“The cause of the chaos is Donald Trump himself, who is never willing to be reined in by anybody,” and considered Kelly and his predecessor, Reince Priebus, to be more “staff than chief,” said Cohen, who is writing a book about White House chiefs of staff.

Although the Trump administration has a reputation for a higher rate of staff turnover than its predecessors, Kelly’s total time of 16 months in the job will not be unusually short in a high-stress position where two years is considered a decent run. Priebus lasted just six months.

“There’s a lot of burnout in the position,” Cohen told VOA. “More often than not the individual that’s serving in that position can’t wait to find a new position, in the president’s Cabinet or maybe simply retiring from the rigors of the White House and a presidential administration.”

The departing chief of staff, during his time inside the White House was “a force for order, clarity and good sense,” said outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican. “He is departing what is often a thankless job, but John Kelly has my eternal gratitude.”

Kelly’s service

Kelly’s tenure has been “the definition of selfless service and he served President Trump well from day one,” Heritage Foundation Vice President James Jay Carafano told VOA, noting the administration’s foreign policy that “has been tough, focused, realistic and successful.”

A former high-ranking official from the administration of Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor, saw it differently.

Kelly “failed to contain or restrain the president, and supported and encouraged the abhorrent family separation policy as a deterrent to asylum seekers,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a former senior director for arms control on the National Security Council.

Kelly previously was Trump’s secretary of homeland security, where his hard-line stance on immigration earned praise from the president.

Trump in recent days has been negotiating with Ayers to succeed Kelly — who lacked experience in partisan politics — but the vice president’s 36-year-old chief of staff is reluctant to make a two-year commitment to the job, according to White House sources.

Ayers has the support of the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, but some key West Wing officials will not be welcoming to the hard-charging operative, according to administration insiders.

Ayers likely would be a chief of staff who “is politically savvy and willing to help with the president’s campaign operation,” but his age is likely to prompt senior staff to question: “Who does this kid think he is?” Cohen said.

Asked to assess Ayers’ chances of success, Wolfsthal replied, “Zero. Trump listens to Trump because he cares about his self-interest, not that of the country.”

The bottom line is that Trump will soon have his third chief of staff in two years, a turnover rate for which he harshly criticized Obama in January 2012.
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The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia initially focused on four Americans and whether they were connected to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, former FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers during hours of closed-door questioning.

Comey did not identify the Americans but said President Donald Trump, then the Republican candidate, was not among them.

The House Judiciary Committee released a transcript of the interview on Saturday, just 24 hours after privately grilling the fired FBI chief about investigative decisions related to Hillary Clinton’s email server and Trump’s campaign and potential ties to Russia. The Russia investigation is now being run by special counsel Robert Mueller, and Comey largely dodged questions connected to that probe — including whether his May 2017 firing by Trump constituted obstruction of justice.

The Republican-led committee interviewed Comey as part of its investigation into FBI actions in 2016, a year when the bureau — in the heat of the presidential campaign — recommended against charges for Clinton and opened an investigation into Russian interference in the election.

The questioning largely centered on well-covered territory from a Justice Department inspector general report, Comey’s own book and interviews and hours of public testimony on Capitol Hill. But Comey also used the occasion to take aim at Trump’s public barbs at the criminal justice system, saying “we have become numb to lying and attacks on the rule of law by the president,” and Trump’s suggestion that it should be a crime for subjects to “flip” and cooperate with investigators.

“It’s a shocking suggestion coming from any senior official, no less the president. It’s a critical and legitimate part of the entire justice system in the United States,” Comey said.

In offering some details of the investigation’s origins, Comey said it had started in July 2016 with a look at “four Americans who had some connection to Mr. Trump during the summer of 2016” and whether they were tied to “the Russian interference effort.”

He reiterated that the investigation was not prompted by a Democratically funded opposition research — often referred to as the “Steele dossier” — but rather contacts former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had with an intermediary during the campaign, a finding confirmed by House Republicans.

The investigation was prompted by “information we’d received about a conversation that a Trump foreign — campaign foreign policy adviser had with an individual in London about stolen emails that the Russians had that would be harmful to Hillary Clinton,” Comey said.

Papadopoulos was released from prison on Friday after serving a brief sentence for lying to the FBI about that conversation.

“It was weeks or months later that the so-called Steele dossier came to our attention,” he added.

He also said that President Barack Obama never ordered him to have the FBI surveil or infiltrate the Trump campaign.

Comey said that by the time of his firing, the FBI had not come to a conclusion about whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia’s efforts to sway the presidential election.

He insisted that the FBI would recover from the president’s steady attacks on the bureau.

“The FBI will be fine. It will snap back, as will the rest of our institutions,” Comey said. “There will be short-term damage, which worries me a great deal, but in the long run, no politician, no president can, in a lasting way, damage those institutions.”
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President Donald Trump says chief of staff John Kelly will leave his job at the end of the year.

Trump isn’t saying immediately who will replace Kelly, a retired Marine general who has served as chief of staff since July 2017. But the president says an announcement about a replacement will be coming in the next day or two.

Trump spoke to reporters at the White House before departing for the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia.

He calls Kelly “a great guy.”

The West Wing shake-up comes as Trump is anticipating the challenge of governing and oversight when Democrats take control of the House in January, and as gears up for his own campaign for re-election in 2020.

 
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