Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) on Wednesday delivered a blistering denunciation of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) for trying to brush off former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s past ties to Russian agents as perfectly normal.
As part of his opening statement about hearings into the contents of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Nunes claimed that Mueller documented “a long litany of ordinary contacts between Trump associates and Russians,” while also claiming that “no conversations actually created or even discussed a conspiracy.”
Himes shot down Nunes’s claims during a House Intelligence Committee meeting by pointing out that Manafort’s history of working with pro-Kremlin political parties and his massive debts to a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch were far from ordinary. He also called out Nunes for shrugging off Manafort’s decision to share internal Trump campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian national with alleged ties to Russian intelligence, in the hopes that he would give it to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
View the complete June 12 article by Brad Reed from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.