Finding a Path past Trump

The results of last week’s gubernatorial election in Virginia were startling.  Glenn Youngkin ran a traditional campaign, emphasizing keeping schools open to students and their parents, and by muting Donald Trump.

Read up on the 54-year-old Virginia native here, here, here, and here. His is a fascinating story.

The Virginia election is already in the rearview mirror. Attention turns next to what it means for the Democrats.

The rod to November 2024 is long and full of twists and turns, but the terrain along the journey has definitely changed.  EP will leave developments to the political writers.

But democracy in America has definitely entered a promising new chapter..

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Back in 2019, Attorney General William Barr asked US Attorney for Connecticut John Durham to investigate the sparks that kindled the FBI’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s Russian connections. A few weeks after the 2020 election, Barr appointed Durham special counsel to the department, insuring that his probe would continue into the Biden administration.

Last week urham indicted a Washington-based Russian national for lying to the FBI about sources of information that became incorporated in the “Steele dossier.” The report was compiled by a former British MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, funded by political opponents of candidate Trump, including an attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. When it surfaced in January 2017, the dossier’s claims became part of investigations by the FBI and other intelligence agencies that eventually evolved into special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Specifically, Igor Danchenko was accused of lying about his contacts with Sergei Millian, at a time when the latter was president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the US. WSJ reporter Mark Maremont wrote Saturday, “Mr. Millian has been identified in media reports, including in The Wall Street Journal, as a source for some of the key claims in the dossier, a compendium of lurid and largely discredited reports about Mr. Trump and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign….”

The Editorial Page of the WSJ has long been fixated on the Steele dossier, which it believes was the document on which was predicated the FBI’s investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, “It should have been called the Clinton Dossier,” wrote WSJ columnist Kimberley Strassel Friday. “The Clinton dossier should go down as one of the biggest scandals in US political history,” she concluded. “Not just for the breadth of the con, but for the time it has taken to expose it.”

Most of the rest of us date our curiosity about the candidate Trump’s relations with Russia over the years to June, 2016, when he fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and named lobbyist Paul Manafort to the position instead. Perhaps the FBI perked up then as well. A lot of dirty tricks were played during the 2016 campaign. I guess we’ll just have to wait to compare one with the others until John Durham delivers his report.

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