Will we ever know the full truth about Russia/Trump?

It takes time for investigations like this. Anything released early could jeopardize the case. The purpose at this stage is to prove the need for an independent investigation and prosecutor.

It took 18 months for Watergate to break. This is so much bigger and so much worse. It needs to be done right. Give it time.

The only new thing I learned from yesterday's news was the President Obama had warned Trump about Flynn at their meeting in the Oval Office right after the election. But of course, he-who-is-never-wrong appointed Flynn anyway when a little work at confirming President Obama's advice might have saved him a great deal of bad press.

We will find out eventually, but it will be years.

Not just bad press, but potentially putting the country at risk. This is so much more than bad press.

Seriously? Do we ever really know the full truth about anything? How long has it been since Kennedy was assassinated? We still don't know the full truth about that.

Not just yours but all your allies too. I've said this before, this blatant lack of understanding and his gun-ho attitude regarding security and intelligence gathering that Trump and his band of merry men take so lightly is affecting others too. Giving Flynn the highest level of security without proper procedural vetting and disregarding information that he ( Trump)was given .....why because his ego couldn't take being advised by someone more knowledgeable? not only puts your country at risk but the whole world at risk.

Or maybe because Putin has Trump on a blackmail leash and can call in the directions whenever he (Putin) pleases.  Nice to think about our country being run out of the Kremlin and bowing to its will, isn't it?

I think that enough of the truth will come out for Flynn to be prosecuted and go to prison. When the Democrats win back Congress in 2 years, Trump will be impeached.

Just from what has already been revealed, serious and treasonable offenses have been committed. I don't see how either party can ignore it.

I served in the military under Reagan during the Cold War. It's unfathomable that the greed of our elected officials has overtaken their patriotism to this degree. What a difference a few decades makes.

I was listening to an interesting interview today about how Trump hasn't really done anything yet that has benefited Russia, although he's gone a lot easier on China. Although that could just be dumb luck. He cancelled the TPP more because he didn't think we should do a trade deal, but it benefited China as well.  With this whole Russia business in the spotlight, it makes it difficult for this administration to do anything favorable for Russia - so I wonder if there is Kompromat if/when it will come out. What is Russia's end game?

They certainly benefit from having Trump versus Clinton, but I don't know if Trump will do anything very beneficial for them? Anything Trump does about Russia now will be in the spotlight and scrutinized heavily.

My thinking with what I watched yesterday (I watched a solid couple hours while folding a mountain of laundry) is that the senate committee members are working on trying to come to a consensus that a special independent investigation needs to happen, purely because there is so much that was/is confidential. There are SO many people in this administration with their fingers in this that I can't see how they will be able to avoid it. By the time all is said and done multiple people are going down, I have no doubt about that. It's just a matter of how far up the food chain all of this goes, who knew what and when, and how many are involved in the coverup.

I'm guessing Putin has more on him than anyone knows. Trump is as shady as they come and I don't believe for a second he isn't/hasn't done something that will destroy him. Why else would he protest so much? I don't trust him at all.

I don't know that Putin needs Trump to do anything in particular. So long as the situation benefits Russia, he'll be happy. That could happen in a variety of ways.

Obviously, the easiest way for Russia to benefit is for the sanctions to be lifted. That probably would have happened, if the Trump team hadn't been so openly incompetent about their relations with the Russians. Without the Steele document, we probably wouldn't know quite so much as we do.

But there are other ways Russia could benefit. By bringing chaos and distrust to the US, it does serve as a preoccupation. If the US is more concerned with civil unrest here, we won't be as concerned with the fate of Ukraine, the Blatics, etc.

If the EU collapses, they will no longer be working as a unified front against Russia. Sanctions by the EU would no longer be effective. Again, if they are concerned with their own issues, they won't be concerned about what their neighbor to the east is up to.

The alt-right and the white nationalist groups love Russia because they think that Russia 'gets it' - they are white, they don't like Muslims or gays, etc. They don't see that for Russia, they are just a means to an end. If Russia could get the same results by supporting liberal, minority candidates - they would. So many in this whole mess are just being used without being aware of it. They are useful idiots. And this is not a high-cost gamble, for Putin. It's not as expensive a a regular war, bots and trolling operations are very cheap. Get some alt-right types who are willing to work for free (they believe they are fighting a race war and are eager volunteers) and if only half of your attempts to sway elections/sow discord are successful, it's a huge payout.

All I know from watching 60% of the hearing yesterday was that Sally Yates pwned those Senators who thought they were smarter than her....and yes, I'm talking about you John Coryn and Ted Cruz. She made them looks like the incompetent assholes they are.

Here's what WaPo published as the 10 most important unanswered questions (IMO we will get answers and I'm okay with those investigating to take their time and get all their ducks in a row so when the narcissist prick we have in the WH goes down, it will be in flaming glory)

1. Did McGahn travel to the Justice Department to review the evidence against Flynn? If so, when? On Jan. 30, Yates let McGahn know that the intelligence he asked for was ready to be reviewed. She got fired that same night for refusing to defend the president’s travel ban. Thus she could not say either way whether the White House counsel ever came to review the material.

2. What exactly did the president know and when did he know it? Sean Spicer said during his briefing on February 14th that, "Immediately after the Department of Justice notified the White House counsel of the situation, the White House counsel briefed the president and a small group of senior advisors. The White House Counsel reviewed and determined that there is not a legal issue, but rather a trust issue.”

3. Assuming McGahn passed along to Trump what Yates had told him, why did the president choose to keep a “compromised” national security adviser in his inner circle? Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) speculated that Trump might have been protecting Flynn primarily to prevent more people from falling: “You ask yourself, why wouldn't you fire a guy who did this? And all I can think of is that he would say, ‘Well, we've got all these other people in the administration who have had contacts. We have all these other people in the administration who coordinated, who are talking.’ Maybe that. We're trying to put a puzzle together here, everybody. And maybe, just maybe, he didn't get rid of a guy who lied to the vice president, who got paid by the Russians (and) who went on Russia Today because there are other people in his administration who met secretly with the Russians and didn't reveal it until … they were caught. That may be why it took him 18 days, until it became public, to get rid of Mike Flynn, who is a danger to this republic.” After outlining this theory, Franken asked Yates: “Care to comment?” “I don't think I'm going to touch that, senator,” she replied.

4. What contacts did Flynn have with the Russians during the 18 days the White House knew he’d been compromised but he remained as national security adviser? Two days after Yates alerted McGahn about a threat from within, Flynn sat in the Oval Office with Trump as he talked to Vladimir Putin on the phone. During Flynn’s tenure, he had several follow-up conversations with Kislyak, and at one point Flynn even proposed that the two have lunch. “The Russian Embassy called repeatedly to collect on that offer, officials said, until Flynn was fired and the calls stopped,” Greg Miller and Adam Entous scooped last Friday.

5. Would Trump have ever acted if The Washington Post hadn’t broken the story that Flynn was not telling the truth? It appears no meaningful action was taken until The Post reported details on Feb. 9 of the Flynn-Kislyak conversation that contradicted what he had told his West Wing colleagues. Even then, it took four more days for Flynn to go. In that time, he traveled with Trump to Mar-a-Lago for a bilateral meeting with the leader of Japan. Who knows how long Trump would have tried to sit on what Yates had said if the truth had never come out via the press?

6. Why did Trump completely dismiss Obama’s warning about Flynn? It emerged yesterday in the hours before the hearing that Barack Obama personally told his successor he should not hire Flynn during their sit-down two days after the election. The outgoing president had fired Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. The warning about Flynn “was not a prepared talking point,” a former Obama administration official told Philip Rucker, meaning it was not a subject that Obama had planned to raise with his successor: But as the two men discussed personnel, Obama expressed caution about putting Flynn in a high-level position. There were multiple reasons, including Flynn’s poor performance leading the DIA, his attendance at the RT event in Moscow and his controversial statements on Islam. “There wasn’t certainly at the time the thought that he’s compromised” by his association with Russia, the former official said. “It was more a confluence of red flags.”

7. What exactly did foreign intelligence agencies turn over to their American counterparts? James Clapper, who also testified yesterday, was asked about a news report that Britain's intelligence service first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious interactions between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence agents. The same story also said multiple European allies passed along information in the spring of 2016. Asked if that is accurate, the former director of national intelligence replied: “Yes, it is and it's also quite sensitive. … The specifics are quite sensitive.”

8. What is the current status of the FBI investigation into whether any of the president’s associates coordinated with the Russians to meddle in the presidential election? James Comey has confirmed that the FBI is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, and that this includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

9. Why is Trump still so cagey when it comes to assigning blame to Russia for election interference? Administration officials have taken a harder line on Russia since the chemical weapons attack in Syria, but the president himself has not always followed suit. Asked last week whether he now believes the allegations of Russian meddling in the election, Trump deflected. He said he’ll “go along” with the intelligence community’s consensus but then quickly added that it “could have been China.” “Could’ve been a lot of different groups,” he told CBS’s John Dickerson.

10. Will Flynn face any criminal charges? Yates declined to say whether Flynn may face criminal charges related to what he said during his interview with the FBI in January. The retired general is also under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over $45,000 he accepted for appearing at a 2015 event in Russia and $530,000 his former consulting firm was paid for work tied to the Turkish government. NBC News reported yesterday that the Defense Intelligence Agency also didn't know Flynn had been paid nearly $34,000 by Russia Today when it renewed his security clearance in April 2016.