The 3 Trump-Russia scandals, explained

President Trump’s Russia problem is getting even worse.

Late Wednesday night, the Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had met with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak twice during the 2016 campaign, when he was serving as a Trump advisor. This is despite the fact that Sessions said in his confirmation hearing that “I did not have communications with the Russians” — while under oath.

This is a devastating revelation, as Sessions is nominally in charge of the FBI — which is investigating the links between Trump’s team and Russia. It also comes on the heels of the recent New York Times piece reporting that members of Trump’s campaign team and other “Trump associates” had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” prior to the November vote. The calls were intercepted by US officials monitoring Russian intelligence, who then leaked their existence to the Times.

The Times report cautions that there’s no evidence the Trump staff discussed Russian interference in the election — or that they even discussed Trump at all — and it doesn’t disclose whether any current administration officials were among the staffers who had been in contact with Russia. So for all we know, Sessions was one of many administration officials who had spoken with the Russians.

And neither report explains what Sessions or the unnamed officials actually talked to the Russians about. Both end up raising more questions than they answer as a result.

So what do we know, exactly, about the scandals surrounding Trump and Russia? A fair amount — a disturbing amount, actually.

That’s because there isn’t just one scandal involving Trump and Russia: There are, roughly, three different allegations, which are connected but are each more or less distinct. One centers on Russia’s interference in the election, another centers on just-resigned National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s improper contact with the Russian ambassador after the election, and a third involves potential blackmail material Russian intelligence may or may not have on the president.

The US government is currently investigating each of these scandals, but none are proven. There are varying degrees of public evidence for each of them.

Individually, the mere hint of any one of these scandals would be bad. Put together, though, they point to one inescapable conclusion: Trump’s unprecedented friendliness with Russia’s dictator and willingness to tolerate staff with close Russia ties has already thrown his young administration into chaos. None of this would be happening if Trump hadn’t decided to buddy up with Vladimir Putin.

Trump made his bed. And now his entire administration is lying in it.

This first scandal really got going after we found out about the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in June 2016. Suspicion fell on Russia almost immediately, given Trump’s pro-Russian approach to foreign policy and Russia’s long history of interfering in Western elections. As emails hacked from Clinton allies continued to leak to the press in a way that seemed designed to damage her campaign, these suspicions grew stronger.

At this point, the evidence that Russia is responsible is pretty conclusive. Private cybersecurity firms and researchers have linked some of the code in the hack to known Russian operations; there’s consensus in the US intelligence community that Russia’s operation was designed in part to help Trump.

So here’s the million-dollar question: Did Trump, or anyone on his team, know about the hack targeting Clinton while it was going on? And did they plan their campaign strategy, which centered on “Crooked Hillary” and her emails, around Russian interference?

There’s long been circumstantial evidence to support this. In August, longtime conservative political operative and close Trump confidant Roger Stone said that he was in touch with WikiLeaks, the source through which Russia released the hacked emails to the public. On October 2, Stone sent a tweet hinting he had inside knowledge that WikiLeaks was about to torpedo Clinton’s campaign:

Five days later, on October 7, WikiLeaks released the first tranche of emails hacked from top Clinton aide John Podesta.

Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager at the time the first emails went public, also has longstanding ties to the Russian state. He resigned in late August — right in the middle of the campaign — after a secret ledger was discovered with his name in it, suggesting he had quietly received $12.7 million between 2007 and 2012 from Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Manafort was the only Trump official identified by name in Tuesday’s New York Times report, though he denied the allegations.

“I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers,” Manafort told the Times reporters. “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

Trump himself seemed to encourage Russian involvement in the election. In a July 2016 press conference, his final presser of the campaign, Trump publicly called on Russia to hack Clinton and publish emails from her private server.

"Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

After the campaign was over, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov publicly admitted that members of Trump’s “entourage” were in touch with Russia. “I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives,” he told the Russian news service Interfax.

The latest Sessions news shows that, without a doubt, Ryabkov was telling the truth.

Put this all together and two things become clear. First, an unknown number of Trump campaign operatives and Trump-adjacent people were in touch with agents of the Russian government. Second, the Trump camp had no problem with Russian interference in the election, and at times seemed to welcome it.

What we don’t know is whether there’s a connection between those two things — that is, whether the Trump camp knew about the Russian hack while it was ongoing. There’s no confirmation, in the Times or Post reports, to support this.

“The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation,” the Times reports.

There is a smidgen of evidence outside of the calls to support cooperation allegations. A dubious dossier put together by a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, claims there was an “extensive conspiracy” between Trump and the Russians to weaken the Clinton campaign. The evidence comes entirely from testimony from anonymous sources, with little identifiable corroboration, and thus is very far from conclusive.

“Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy between them and the Russian leadership,” Steele writes in the dossier. “This was managed of the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT.”

US intelligence and law enforcement agencies are still investigating the dossier, parts of which have apparently been deemed credible, as well as the contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence that were identified by the New York Times. The Sessions news has raised questions even among Republicans on Capitol Hill — three leading Congressional Republicans have already called on Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation — so it’s possible more questions will come from that venue as well.

The question of whether the American president assisted in a Russian effort to interfere with the democratic process is still very much open.

The second Trump scandal begins after the election was over, around Christmas. That’s when Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, made a series of phone calls to Ambassador Kislyak (yes, him again). Flynn’s deception over what was and was not discussed during those calls has gotten Flynn fired — but the outstanding question is who else knew about Flynn’s calls and when they knew it.

On December 29, the Obama administration announced a series of new sanctions on Russia as punishment for its interference in the US presidential election. That same day, Flynn called Kislyak multiple times.

That Flynn would call Kislyak was not, itself, surprising: Like Manafort, he had longstanding ties to Russia. Flynn has spoken very positively about the prospect of partnering with Putin’s regime to fight terrorism, and repeatedly appeared on Russia’s English-language propaganda outlet, RT. Flynn was so in with RT that he had been paid to give a speech at its 10th anniversary dinner in Moscow — where he sat at the head table with Putin himself.

The timing of the call, though, was an issue. If Flynn was calling Kislyak to tell him that the Trump administration would roll back Obama’s new sanctions, then it would look like the Trump administration was attempting to immunize Russia from punishment for its interference in the US election and undermine the Obama administration, which was still in power at the time.

Arguably, doing so would have been illegal — an obscure 18th-century law, the Logan Act, prohibits people outside the executive branch from making foreign policy on behalf of the United States (though no one has ever been prosecuted under this act).

When news of the call first went public, on January 12, the Trump administration admitted that the two men spoke but denied that they spoke about sanctions. Trump press secretary Sean Spicer and Vice President Mike Pence both separately told reporters that the calls were a friendly exchange that grew out of Christmas greetings — a questionable story given that Russian Orthodox Christmas was actually on January 9, 2017.

On February 9, this narrative fell apart. The Washington Post published a story confirming that Flynn had spoken to Kislyak about sanctions on December 29, and that FBI counterintelligence agents were investigating Flynn’s contact with Russia. Two sources told the Post that Flynn had strongly implied that the Trump administration would be taking care of the sanctions.

The report also suggested that Flynn had lied to Pence personally, telling Pence he hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak, thus leading Pence to give false statements to reporters.

The Post’s piece was the backbreaker for Flynn, who tendered his resignation on February 13. But it wasn’t the end of the trouble for the Trump administration.

For starters, we still don’t know whether Flynn was acting alone. It’s theoretically possible that Flynn reached out to Kislyak on his own, without consulting any other Trump administration officials, and told him not to stress about sanctions. It’s also possible that Flynn was acting with Trump’s blessing — that the Trump team knew about the call’s contents the whole time and then lied to the American people (and maybe even Mike Pence) about it.

This would be a much, much bigger scandal than the call itself — it would mean that the president or key members of his team deliberately hid the truth about the actions and policies toward Russia. Right now, there’s no public evidence either in favor or against that — but some members of Congress have called for an investigation into the issue.

It’s also possible that Flynn was acting alone but the Trump administration found out about his sanctions conversation before it went public — and then covered up the truth about it to save face.

In late January, acting Attorney General Sally Yates informed White House counsel Don McGahn that she believed Flynn was deceiving the Trump administration about the contents of his call to Kislyak. At this point, we don’t know who else in the administration McGahn told about Yates’s warning, or what they chose to do with that information. Trump officials are insisting that McGahn passed on the information to them quickly, but their story is confusing.

Finally, we don’t really know why Flynn ultimately resigned from his post, as the line out of the White House varies from official to official.

Spicer insisted, in a Tuesday press conference, that McGahn informed senior members of the administration back in January, and that their trust in Flynn had been deteriorating for weeks, culminating in a dismissal from Trump.

But in a TV appearance the same day, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the president had been “loyal” to Flynn for the whole controversy, and that Flynn himself chose to resign on Monday night to put an end to the controversy.

The most logical explanation, as my colleague Matt Yglesias explains, is that Trump did indeed fire Flynn, but did so only after the Post story exposed his lie about the sanctions call publicly. This would suggest that Trump was basically fine with Flynn reaching out to Russia and discussing sanctions — that is, McGahn’s warning didn’t really matter to him — and that it was only the negative press that forced him to get rid of Flynn.

Trump’s own comments during a Wednesday press conference suggest this is the case. He called Flynn a “wonderful man” and said that "it's really a sad thing" that Flynn was treated “very, very unfairly” in press accounts of his actions.

If that’s right, it means that Trump didn’t see Flynn’s call itself as a fireable offense, which in turn suggests that Trump at least tacitly approved of him reaching out to the Russians back in December. Which, if true, would suggest that the administration has been lying to the public for weeks.

All roads here lead back to the same thing: allegations of a cover-up. FBI counterintelligence is still investigating Flynn, to see if Russia had any improper influence over him during his time in the administration. It’s likely that this investigation, together with whatever Congress decides to do, will give us more clarity on the real nature of Flynn’s call.

This third scandal is, by far, the least supported of the three. It stems almost entirely from anonymous allegations in the Steele dossier, and involves some deeply bizarre and hard-to-believe stuff.

We know that Trump has had business dealings in Russia for years, going back to efforts to open a Trump hotel in Moscow during the Soviet era. Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets."

In 2013, Trump traveled to Russia to host the Miss Universe pageant. Before he went, he tweeted this:

The point is that Trump, as a result of his business interests, has spent time in the country. This where the Steele dossier starts.

According to Steele’s sources, Trump did some very naughty things during his visits to Russia — like hiring prostitutes to pee on a hotel bed that President Obama once slept in. Russian agents filmed these acts, according to Steele’s sources, and are wielding them to blackmail Trump into taking pro-Russian policy positions.

"Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance,” Steele writes. “TRUMP’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.”

Most of this stuff is completely uncorroborated. When my colleague Sean Illing asked an ex-CIA analyst, Aki Peritz, about the memo, Peritz was deeply skeptical.

“We've no idea if any of this is true,” Peritz said. “We don't know who these sources are. It's entirely likely that they're feeding the author of this report garbage, as often happens.”

For this reason, mainstream media outlets had generally shied away from reporting on the Steele dossier — until January, when CNN reported that US intelligence services had determined that Steele and his sources were “credible.” Top intelligence officials presented a summary of the dossier to Trump in an intelligence briefing.

Sine then, investigations into the dossier’s allegations have remained ongoing.

So far, they have only been able to corroborate insignificant parts of it, like whether one Russian official talked to another on the date listed in the memo. And there’s very little hard evidence to support the allegations — especially the more salacious ones — in the Steele dossier.

So what we’ve got are three distinct, but connected, scandals — each unproven but credible enough that investigations from both the press and elements of the US government are ongoing. Even if no damning information is uncovered, continued press coverage will distract from Trump’s substantive agenda — and continued intelligence investigations will fuel his counterproductive, damaging feud with the intelligence community.

Basically, the Russian connection will be a problem for Trump for the foreseeable future. And it’s all his own fault.

Trump didn’t have to hire staff, like Manafort and Flynn, who had extensive and well-documented ties to the Russian state. He didn’t have to propose policies, like weakening America’s commitment to NATO, that help Russia. He didn’t have to repeatedly praise Putin in public over the course of the past several years, or call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

If Trump hadn’t done these things, most of these scandals wouldn’t exist. Sessions’ meeting with Kislyak wouldn’t have been nearly as controversial (to the point where he may have lied about it under oath) had it not been for questions about Trump’s choices about Russia. The scandals aren’t “fake news” or an intelligence community conspiracy; they stem directly from behavior by Trump or his staff.

This is detrimental to Trump’s ability to pursue his agenda. Presidents only have so many resources and people at their disposal. Getting bills through Congress, or crafting executive orders that can survive court scrutiny, is hard work. When huge elements of the administration are busy fighting fires, dealing with damning press leaks and congressional investigations, then they don’t have time to make major policy pushes.

And these Russia allegations are, make no mistake, huge. Veteran journalist Dan Rather wrote in a Facebook post two weeks ago that the various controversies have the potential to become bigger than Watergate:

On a 10 scale of armageddon for our form of government, I would put Watergate at a 9. This Russia scandal is currently somewhere around a 5 or 6, in my opinion, but it is cascading in intensity seemingly by the hour. And we may look back and see, in the end, that it is at least as big as Watergate. It may become the measure by which all future scandals are judged. It has all the necessary ingredients, and that is chilling.

Handling one scandal with that kind of potential is tiring enough for an administration. Handling three separate ones at the same time — that’s exhausting, especially for a White House as famously disorganized as Trump’s.

Even if Trump survives these scandals, it’s possible his policy agenda won’t.