Voters who saw the Russians' Facebook, Instagram and Twitter posts were led to believe they were being lobbied by their fellow citizens — not by an adversarial foreign power.
"Instead, they ask Congress to simply pass permanent normal trade relations and remove Russia from long-standing human rights law, while ignoring Russia's rampant corruption, theft of U.S. intellectual property, poor human rights record and adversarial foreign policies".
Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes wrote on the influential Lawfare blog: "Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators.
The president has broad authority to declassify information that he feels the need to share, but sharing this information willy nilly with adversarial foreign powers — including one with very different goals in Syria — would seem to raise obvious red flags.
It is much worse to think that anyone connected with the Trump campaign might have known about this interference by an adversarial foreign power and failed to sound the alarm — or, perhaps, even collaborated in the dark operation.
Much like the online ads discovered by Facebook, messages spread by Soviet-era operatives were meant to look as though they were written by bona fide political activists in the United States, disguising the involvement of an adversarial foreign power.
It's one thing to talk with an adversarial foreign leader; it's another to lend them the legitimacy of saying you, the president of the United States, would be honored to meet them.
We have a president who is under investigation by several bodies of government for what ultimately could prove to be collusion between his campaign and an adversarial foreign power that sought to alter the very fundaments of our democracy.
If he cannot take his place at a podium next to an adversarial foreign leader and stand up for America's interests and principles, he should not be president.
The most recent example of this behavior occurred when Sen. Tom Cotton, and his 60 days of experience, penned a letter that was signed by 47 senators and sent to our adversarial foreign leader.
