Trump was meeting with O’Keefe to sabotage Clinton in 2015by digby
Why wouldn’t he work with Russians to do the same thing?
Days after Donald J. Trump launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, James O’Keefe, the conservative disrupter famous for trying to use secret recordings to embarrass liberals and journalists, visited Trump Tower and gave Mr. Trump a preview of his latest hidden camera video intended to undermine Hillary Clinton.
The footage, widely dismissed after it was released some weeks later, showed officials from Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign appearing to accept a payment for campaign swag from a Canadian woman at a Clinton campaign rally — in violation, Mr. O’Keefe contended, of election laws barring campaign contributions from foreigners.
Mr. Trump had been promoting Mr. O’Keefe’s work for years and a few weeks earlier had donated $10,000 from his foundation to Mr. O’Keefe’s group. At the meeting in his office, Mr. Trump praised the new video and pledged more money. As the campaign progressed, he pointed to other videos as evidence of his false accusations that Mrs. Clinton paid people to cause violence at Trump campaign rallies, and since his inauguration he and his team have continued to highlight Mr. O’Keefe’s work as evidence of the president’s repeated claims that the news media is peddling “fake news.”
If he’s meet with that professional dirty trickster I find it completely believable that he’d agree to lift the sanctions on the Russian government in exchange for their help in doing exactly the same thing. Why not? He’s too stupid to understand the difference. And frankly, there isn’t much. Both O’Keefe and the Russians dishonestly and covertly manipulate American democratic institutions for their own gain. O’Keefe is actually worse.
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