Russia investigators probe 2016 GOP platform fight
Congressional investigators have interviewed ex-Donald Trump aides about the campaign’s push to remove proposed language that called for giving weapons to Ukraine.
www.politico.com/story/2017/11/08/republicans-russia-platform-fight-244672
U.S. investigators are focusing on an enduring mystery of the 2016 election: whether Trump campaign officials made the Republican Party platform more friendly to Russia as part of some broader effort to collude with the Kremlin, according to congressional records and people familiar with the probes.
Congressional investigators have interviewed ex-Donald Trump aides and advisers including J.D. Gordon, the national security policy representative at last year’s GOP convention, about the campaign’s push to remove proposed language from the 2016 Republican platform that called for giving weapons to Ukraine. People involved with crafting the platform also were expecting interest from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, such as witness interviews or producing documents, some of those sources said.
The Trump campaign’s position in the platform fight was seen at the time as making the official GOP stance friendlier toward Russia because the proposed language they defeated would have endorsed sending weapons to aid the Ukrainian government’s fight against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. Many leading Republicans backed the idea, so the platform fight came as a surprise.
Now that year-old debate is getting fresh scrutiny from the ongoing investigations into how Moscow meddled in the 2016 election and whether any Trump aides were involved, including then-convention manager Paul Manafort. The president has repeatedly denied any collusion, calling the investigations a “witch hunt.”
Gordon, who has been a senior national security adviser or spokesman to four GOP presidential candidates since 2012, has largely escaped the harsh spotlight on some other Trump campaign officials. But while he has not been accused of wrongdoing, he has been questioned, in part, because of his role in the platform fight and his job overseeing two campaign volunteers, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who communicated with Russian officials or operatives last year.
[...]Investigators are focusing, in part, on whether those activities were part of any choreographed effort by the campaign to forge closer ties to Russia or to exchange promises — such as dropping U.S. sanctions, if elected — in return for help defeating Clinton. Lawmakers continue to ask about the 2016 platform fight as part of that probe, and Page, a campaign foreign policy adviser, faced questions on the subject when he appeared before House investigators last week.
Gordon told POLITICO in a series of exchanges that he wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing and that he wasn’t aware of any suspect activities by Manafort or other campaign officials or advisers. He said investigators were probing other people involved in pushing the platform change that the Trump campaign opposed, though he would not identify them.
"Investigators are rightly looking into whether or not crimes were committed by individuals connected to Ukraine, including possible FARA violations and other illegal activities,” Gordon wrote, referring to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. “I applaud them for conducting a thorough investigation as there are clearly two sides to the GOP Platform controversy."
Gordon said it would be up to Mueller to reveal whether the special counsel’s office had reached out to him or interviewed him, and he declined to provide specifics of his talks with congressional investigators except to say that they covered a range of topics. He agreed to speak on the record to POLITICO only via text message exchanges, given what he said was the sensitivity of the investigations and efforts by some Trump opponents to thrust him into the middle of them.
The “stakes are too high for error. Prison, impeachment proceedings, lawsuits,” he wrote in one text message.
“Impeachment of a President at stake,” he wrote in another. “Would prefer people stop trying to use my head as a battering ram.”
Thread from Seth Abramson about it:
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J.D. Gordon threatened me repeatedly over my posting of the thread below.
He tried to get me fired; he threatened to sue me; he threatened to have me arrested; he reported me to the FBI.
All this has been going on behind the scenes.
Now we know why he tried to intimidate me.
twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/855861076411506688