« on: January 24, 2017, 02:00:08 am »
A look at the scope of the intelligence community's probes into Trump's ties to Russia
Natasha Bertrand The US intelligence community has opened investigations into several members of President Donald Trump's inner circle over the past year, focusing on the advisers' potential ties to Russian government officials throughout Trump's presidential campaign and beyond.
The probes appear to have begun as early as last spring, when the CIA established a US counterintelligence task force to investigate possible Russian funds flowing into Trump campaign coffers. The task force consisted of the FBI, the Treasury and Justice Departments, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency.
The BBC first reported on the existence of the investigation earlier this month, which McClatchy also reported was still ongoing. The probe sought, among other things, to determine who financed the hacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and whether any of Trump's associates served as middlemen between his campaign and the Kremlin.
The former director of the CIA, John Brennan, also received a recording of a conversation last year from one of the Baltic states' intelligence agencies about money from the Kremlin going into the Trump campaign, the BBC reported.
One night before Trump's inauguration, The New York Times reported that intercepted communications were part of the investigation into ties between Russia and people close to Trump, but that it was "not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself."
The BBC report indicated that the task force was granted a warrant by a judge in the FISA court — named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — on October 15 to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks that may have been implicated in the money transfer. Trump was not named in the warrant, but three of his associates were the subject of the inquiry.
All three associates contacted, but not named, by the BBC, denied the allegations contained in the report.
The four big names
Trump's potential ties to Russia have come under increased scrutiny amid allegations contained in an unverified, 35-page dossier from a former British intelligence officer. The claims contained in the dossier include that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the election to undermine Hillary Clinton.
Paul Manafort, Trump's one-time campaign manager who served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012, emerged as a central figure in both the dossier and in the intelligence community's early inquiries into Trump's ties to Russia. <..snip..>
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-advisers-russia-investigation-2017-1
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