There are longstanding questions concerning the president’s affinity for Russia, which intervened within the 2016 marketing campaign to assist Mr.
There are longstanding questions concerning the president’s affinity for Russia, which intervened within the 2016 marketing campaign to assist Mr. Trump, in accordance with American intelligence businesses, a particular counsel investigation and the present Senate Intelligence Committee report. Mr. Trump has known as all of it a hoax, publicly accepted President Vladimir V. Putin’s phrase that Russia didn’t intrude and pushed insurance policies useful to Mr. Putin and his authorities.
This month, Mr. Trump rejected warnings from the American intelligence businesses that Russia is attempting to assist him win re-election in 2020.
“Collectively, the allegations raised a possible counterintelligence concern, that Russia would possibly use compromising data to affect the then-presidential candidate’s positions on relations with Russia,” the report stated. “The committee sought, in a restricted method, to grasp the Russian authorities’s alleged assortment of such data, not solely due to the specter of a possible international affect operation, but in addition to discover the opportunity of a misinformation operation focusing on the integrity of the U.S. political course of.”
The report launched Tuesday offered probably the most detailed official accounts of Mr. Trump’s time in Russia. Over dozens of pages within the practically 1,000-page doc, the report stated {that a} Marriott govt advised committee investigators that after Mr. Trump traveled to Russia in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant the manager overheard two colleagues who labored on the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow discussing video footage that they stated confirmed Mr. Trump with girls in an elevator on the lodge.
Related accusations have arisen earlier than. A file of largely unverified data compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia claimed that in Mr. Trump’s 2013 journey to Moscow there was video of him with prostitutes in his Ritz-Carlton lodge room. An individual Mr. Steele relied on for that data later advised the F.B.I. that the allegation was only a rumor he was passing alongside.
The Ritz-Carlton, the Senate report stated, is a “excessive counterintelligence threat surroundings” that has “no less than one everlasting Russian intelligence officer on employees, authorities surveillance of company’ rooms and the common presence of a lot of prostitutes, probably with no less than the tacit approval of Russian authorities.”
The Marriott govt advised the committee that one of many colleagues he overheard discussing the footage from the Ritz-Carlton stated the video confirmed Mr. Trump “with a number of girls” within the elevator, whom the colleague “implied to be ‘hostesses.’”