by David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog:

I’m a fair player, so even though I’ve said Trump is damaging his ability to improve the economy by making himself look guilty in the Russiagate story, I’ll also point out news that indicates he is not guilty of collaborating with Russians. Here’s an odd twist in the Russiagate story as Anderson Cooper sleepwalks past the truth of his own news break:

CNN/Anderson Cooper confirms Trump’s Russiagate innocence

CNN, whose barrage of stories about Trump have run 93% negative according to a Harvard study, just confirmed that President Trump is telling the truth when he says he had no connections with Russia during the campaign. Watch the story — at least the first few minutes — then consider the following:

Trump’s position has been that he doesn’t believe his campaign had any connections with Russia and that he knows he did not. IF this latest leak to CNN from “multiple sources” is true, it confirms Trump’s position. Why would Russia try to develop its connections with Flynn in hopes of “gaining influence” over Trump if Russia already had a direct connection with Trump and was working in collaboration with him? True collaborators do not need to try to court INDIRECT influence via THIRD PARTIES.

Furthermore, IF Russia was trying to gain influence over Trump through Flynn, that approach means Russia certainly would not have let Trump become aware of that. Therefore, Trump would also be right in saying he doesn’t believe his campaign was influenced by Russia. With this news only now being leaked, it’s likely he still wouldn’t know about it.

The story also indicates that the Obama administration would not have let Trump know this. According to CNN, the Obama administrationg knew all about this, regarding it “as a five-alarm fire from early on,” and, therefore, limited how much of this information they shared with Flynn (and hence with Trump, lest the info get back to Flynn via Trump). The story says Russians regarded Flynn as their ally and says Russian officials were “bragging” about the relationship they had managed to establish with Flynn. That, however, would strongly indicate they didn’t have any other connections with the Trump campaign; for, if they did, the ability to collaborate with Flynn wouldn’t have been much to brag about. Their bragging about managing to create an opportunity to influence Trump through Flynn indicates the Russians did not have much sway with the rest of Trump’s team.

After the intitial story about the new leaks, CNN’s commentary goes on to try to spin the story as showing it is “bizarre” that Trump continues to support Flynn. This, again, misses the point: If the Obama administration did all it could to keep this information from being shared, as the story claims, this information about Flynn may not have been included in the information that Sally Yates shared with Trump. The administration, not wanting Flynn to know in those early days of the controversy that he was being investigated, would not have shared the information with someone close to Flynn. That would be particularly likely if the Obama administration, having been surprised and badly upset by Trump’s victory, hoped to use the Russiagate story to bring Trump down. They would naturally want to make it appear that Trump was complicit in all the information that was coming out and not make it look like Flynn was a sole operator.

If the Obama administration was decent in trying to “warn off” Trump from putting Flyyn directly in charge of US intelligence, it would have shared this information with him. However, they might have leaked info to others and not Trump if they had an ulterior motive of trying to wrap Trump in a conterversy that would bring him down after they knew they had failed to keep him out of office. The question there becomes how secret did the Obama administration keep its knowledge about Flynn and for how long? A secondary question would be how complicit was the intelligence community in withholding the information from the current president?

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