Priebus: US intelligence community ‘finds no links’ between Trump campaign and Russia

Days after The New York Times published a sensational report claiming multiple contacts between Trump’s associates and members of his campaign team and Russian officials – including Russian intelligence officials – Reince Priebus, President Trump’s Chief of Staff, has been touring the television studios to say that the US intelligence community has assured him – and given him the green light to say publicly – that this report was “totally wrong”.

This comes a few days after FBI Director James Comey briefed members of the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors on this very question on Friday 17th February 2017.  Since there have been no sensational links since that meeting, it is a virtual certainty that Comey told the Senators the same thing, and that the FBI’s investigations into the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia have so far at least drawn a complete blank.

That of course is exactly what I said would happen

The multiple investigations launched into the President’s connections to Russia will come to nothing.  Were there anything to find it would surely have been found by now.  The fact that after a year of bitter electoral campaigning and of multiple investigations by the FBI, CIA, NSA, British intelligence, the US tax authorities, legions of private investigators, and the news media, nothing has been found – other than one obviously fake dossier – is a sure sign that nothing exists to be found.

However, I also predicted that the fact that the investigations into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia would lead nowhere would not kill the claims but that it would simply result in demands for more investigations.

That will not of course satisfy the President’s neoliberal/neocon critics.  As the investigations repeatedly draw a blank, they will demand more and more investigations to find what doesn’t exist but what they are convinced is there.  The risk they run is that over time the public will become bored with a never ending saga which is going nowhere, and they will lose its attention, but in the meantime their increasingly shrill demands for more and more investigations will add to the hysterical atmosphere.

That is exactly what appears to be happening.  Note that despite what Prieebubus says he has been told by the US intelligence community there has been no let up in the campaign against the Trump administration by its critics and no retraction of its story by The New York Times.