Not only Jeff Sessions, Russia taint on other President's aides too

President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, on Thursday recused himself from a looming investigation into Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 US election, as more disclosures of sustained pre-election engagements with Russia by Trump surrogates continued to haunt the new administration.Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr and his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner were also drawn into the Russian maelstrom that has already claimed the president’s national security adviser Michael Flynn. The spotlight also fell on several other associates for their close links and engagement with Russia during the election campaign, which US intelligence officials suggest was manipulated by Moscow.Among them are Paul Manafort, J D Gordon, Carter Page, and Walid Phares, all of whom assisted the Trump campaign.Trump administration officials have acknowledged that Kushner and Flynn met the Russian ambassador to US Sergey Kislyak in December at Trump Towers, but characterised the meetings as “introductory” and “kind of an inconsequential hello” that lasted only 10 minutes, according to CNN. Gordon and Page too acknowledged their meetings in TV interviews while suggesting it was not unusual for presidential candidate advisers and transition teams to engage with foreign envoys.Trump stepped in to back Sessions, one of the first senators to back his presidential bid, calling him an “honest man” and describing the hoopla over his meeting with Russians as a “witchhunt”.“Jeff Sessions… did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional,” the President said about the attorney general’s ambiguous testimony at his confirmation hearing. “This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win. The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election and now, they have lost their grip on reality.” “The real story is of all the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It is a total witch hunt!” he added.However, Sessions had to announce his recusal – withdrawal from a probe due to conflict of interest – hours after support from the White House (whose spokesman Sean Spicer said “there’s nothing to recuse himself from”) because his version of his meeting with Kislyak fell apart under scrutiny.Primarily, Sessions maintained that as a senator and a member of the armed services committee, it was well within the ambit of his work to meet the Russian envoy.But it turned out that a meeting with Kislyak in Cleveland on the margins of the Republican National Convention was bankrolled by campaign money, not by Congress, effectively making it a political meeting. Compounding the trouble over Trump’s own alleged Russian sympathies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr, was paid $50,000 to deliver a speech last year at a think tank in Paris that is closely associated with Russia.The fact that sections of the media have characterised Kislyak as a Russian spymaster — amid strong protests from Moscow at the slandering of its envoy — has also put the Trump administration on the defensive.Trump supporters have hit back on social media by posting stories and photos showing leading Democrats such as New York Senator Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi also consorting with Russian leaders (Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev), although those meetings predated the election campaign. On Friday, the Trump White House was battling a new fire.A local paper in Indiana, Vice-President Mike Pence’s home state, reported that as governor, Pence used a personal AOL email address for official business and had been hacked. A similar charge had dogged Hillary Clinton throughout her campaign.The non-stop drip of leaks in the media that is torturing the Trump administration has led to calls in the conservative alt-right media for a purge in Washington DC of government officials perceived as being sympathetic to former President Obama or those appointed by him. One radio host has asked for an investigation into Obama’s “silent coup” against Trump, even as conspiratorial Trump supporters are alleging that the operation to undermine Trump is being run out of Obama’s house in Washington DC.Trump supporters are also rattled by the oblique criticism coming from former President George Bush. “I don’t like the racism and I don’t like the name-calling and I don’t like people feeling alienated,” Bush said in a recent interview. He has subsequently rejected the notion that he is criticising Trump.