Category Archives: NRA

Why InfoWars, The NRA, Rightwing Media, And The GOP Should Be Labeled Terrorist Organizations.

Posted on by

Following the insurrection at the Capitol, the FBI classified the Proud Boys as a terrorist group. Even prior to the attack on our democracy, the FBI warned Congress of the threat posed by domestic terrorists. But no one in the Trump administration or in the GOP seemed to listen. Why? Because they had been inspiring domestic terrorists for many years.

Indeed, I believe the violent insurrection of January 6, was the inevitable result of decades of racist, anti-Democrat, anti-government rhetoric.

For example, the GOP reached out to white supremacists as early as the 1960s. The so-called southern strategy was to embrace southern racists who were unhappy with Democrats following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Racists have been a reliable part of the Republican base ever since.

In 1968, Nixon and Agnew ran as “law and order” candidates as a way of courting white voters. (Ironic isn’t it, given their own crimes?) In 1980, Ronald Reagan served up racist dog whistles to assure southern support. And, by ending the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, he made the rightwing propaganda network possible, opening the airwaves to people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity, and others to spout anti-government, anti-immigrant, and anti-Democrat hate 24/7. As more Americans tuned in to their hateful rants, the GOP lurched further and further to the extreme right. But not even those hatemongers could have envisioned what was to come.

Once Alex Jones entered the arena in 1999, the Republican Party began its descent into the dark sewers of politics. Jones used his InfoWars radio platform to peddle bizarre conspiracy theories and mostly worthless junk. InfoWars made Jones rich. But it also incited the lunatic fringe, which by then had become the base of the Republican Party. He claimed President Obama was a foreign-born Muslim terrorist. He dismissed mass shootings, including the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary, as “false flag” events staged by Democrats and liberals in order to institute gun control measures. He claimed a US military training exercise in the Southwest was an Obama plot to institute Sharia law. A master of getting attention, he further convinced his followers that Democrats and liberals were the root of all their problems; that they were actively trying to destroy America.

The rhetoric of Jones and the rest of the Republican propaganda network led to a series of angry confrontations between elected officials and armed Tea Partiers at Town Hall Meetings. It likely inspired the armed confrontation between the Oath Keepers and Bureau of Land Management officers at Cliven Bundy’s “ranch.” It almost certainly led to the armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

These events seemed to serve as preliminaries for the insurrection to come and ushered in the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

From the time Trump descended his faux gold escalator to announce his candidacy, he pandered to racists by labeling immigrants as rapists, murderers, and thugs. And by calling for an end to political correctness, he was emboldening white supremist groups that were inclined to violence. In cities and towns nationwide, people of color were subjected to verbal and physical abuse as never before. People were berated, told to go back to where they came from, and beaten or killed. Brown babies were ripped from their parents’ arms and thrown in cages. Refugees from predominately black and brown countries were banned from entry. The violence of the racist mob in Charlottesville was dismissed by Trump stating there were “fine people on both sides.” Black Lives Matter protestors were called “very bad people” and “thugs.” And the almost mythical Antifa (short for Antifascists) was called worse.

Throughout, the NRA has continued to provide arms to potential terrorists and insurrectionists under the guise of freedom. Acting as a carnival barker for the gun industry, it pushed for more permissive gun laws and ever more lethal weaponry as a “guard against tyranny.” It made violent militias such as the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, the Oath Keepers, QAnon, and others possible. And it supported the campaigns of increasingly anti-American GOP candidates such as Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko, Jay Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

All of these people and organizations, as well as the billionaires who fund them, set the stage for the violent attempt to overthrow our democracy in favor of an autocracy to be led by president-for-life Trump.

Trump and his GOP enablers called his electoral defeat the result of fraudulent voting. They incited their violent followers to overturn the election using rightwing media as their megaphone. They told them to fight, to march to the Capitol and take back their country. Alex Jones and others called for a civil war against liberals and Democrats. And those who were inspired to attack the Capitol and Congress, were armed by guns made available by the NRA.

They are terrorists, plain and simple, who have caused more harm to Americans than al-Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban combined. If they were Muslim or a foreign-based terrorist group, we would be readying drone strikes or preparing for all-out war. Instead, Republicans are asking us to move on, to simply forgive and forget. That is not only unrealistic. It’s unthinkable. All of them should and must be held accountable.

Now Available On Amazon:

Posted on by

Ironically, in the age of information, our nation has been compromised by lies and disinformation as never before.

Decades of consolidation, short-term thinking, corporate greed, extreme political ideologies, and poor leadership have left our nation’s economy, healthcare system and its citizens unnecessarily vulnerable.

Many of the decisions that led us to this point were made in good faith. Some were dictated by difficult situations. But others were made willfully and knowingly, their true purpose and their all-too predictable results hidden in a fog of falsehoods and lies. This book attempts to cut through the misinformation to examine the problems, explain how they happened and reveal the truth.

Destruction Of The US. (Part Thirteen – Putin)

Posted on by

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the world was hopeful that Russians would enjoy the benefits of democracy. Instead, it has become a brutal dictatorship led by a former KGB operative, Vladimir Putin. Using techniques he learned in the KGB, he controls almost every aspect of Russian life. He not only controls the government and the military. He and his criminal associates control the nation’s industries, technologies and natural resources.

As Malcolm Nance states in his latest book, The Plot To Betray America, there are four classes of society in Russia: From the top down, they include the leadership , the oligarchs and Russian mafia, the street criminals, and, at the bottom, ordinary people. Putin and his ex-KGB friends use brutality and murder to maintain control and to funnel the nation’s riches off-shore to their private bank accounts.

Nance describes Putin as a wannabe Charlemagne writing “Putin, with the Russian Orthodox Church patriarchy, would put forward a template to unite a new, conservative Europe under a Christian banner. America could come along too. He set his spymasters to develop an intelligence operation to bring the Americans along by making common cause with ideological soul mates across the Atlantic.”

Obviously, those soul mates are Trump, the GOP and evangelical Christians.

To push his agenda, Putin has used his billions and the billions of other Russian oligarchs to support political campaigns, to publish pro-Russian lies in mass media, to promote division via social media, and to meddle in Western elections.

In the US, he directed his efforts against President Obama and Hillary Clinton. And to aid Donald Trump. From the Mueller investigation, we learned that Putin’s GRU (successor to the KGB) hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the chair of Clinton’s campaign. The information gleaned was directed to the campaigns of GOP candidates, including Trump’s.

In addition, Mueller documented more than 100 meetings between Putin’s officials and members of the Trump campaign. Putin’s operatives engaged the NRA and his Russian oligarch friends funneled campaign donations through the organization to GOP campaigns. Mueller also documented that GRU operatives, disguised as Americans, posted millions of divisive messages and fake news on social media.

Not coincidentally, once Trump won the nomination, his campaign rewrote the GOP platform to soften its approach toward Russia. Since then, the Trump administration and GOP congressional representatives have only reluctantly criticized Russia while putting forth debunked conspiracy theories originating in Russia. (It’s Putin who’s behind the crackpot idea that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election.) Additionally, Trump has requested that Russia be re-admitted to the G7 despite Russia’s ongoing war and occupation of Ukraine territory. He appeared subservient to Putin at their public meetings. And, we can only imagine what has been said in their private meetings since Trump has refused to allow anyone to attend except a translator (and he confiscated the translators notes). Moreover, the transcripts of Trump’s private phone calls with Putin have been hidden away in classified servers. Lastly, Trump has abdicated US leadership in the Middle East by betraying our Kurdish allies leaving Russia to fill the void. Indeed, many of the Trump administration’s decisions seem to benefit Russia more than the US.

Given all of the evidence, one can only conclude that our president and the GOP leadership have become little more than puppets with Putin pulling the strings.

Destruction Of The US. (Part Eleven – Guns)

Posted on by

Few things have impacted life in the US more than the increased availability and lethality of guns. Since the 1960s, Americans’ gun ownership has evolved from a variety of bolt-action, pump-action and lever-action hunting weapons to semi-automatic assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns.

Where once only police and those who could prove a need could legally carry a handgun, we now must assume that everyone on the street or in public places is armed. Moreover, given that there are, on average, roughly 15,000 non-suicidal gun deaths and 350 mass shootings each year, many Americans now live in near constant fear that they could soon be included in those statistics. Indeed, if you include gun suicides, deaths by gunfire are as common as traffic deaths.

Given the pervasiveness of guns, Americans must now worry that they could become victims at the hands of a former spouse or lover, an unhappy coworker, a disenchanted student, an angry driver, a drive-by shooter, a white nationalist or a random mass shooter.

Such circumstances are now more worrisome and more deadly than encounters with criminals.

Given this, one must ask why. Why are so many Americans so heavily armed? Why do many Americans feel the need to stockpile military-style weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition? And given the fact that gun owners are more likely to injure themselves or to die from their own guns than from the guns of others, why do so many feel the need to carry them?

I believe those questions can be answered with three letters: NRA.

Since the 1970s, and especially the 1980s, the NRA has pressed state legislatures to eliminate gun laws at the behest of gun manufacturers. Most states now have conceal and carry laws. Many even have open carry laws. And the NRA is pushing to standardize laws across the nation. It has encouraged, even threatened, congressmen and senators to vote against universal background checks, government studies of gun violence, assault weapons bans and bans of bumpstocks. The NRA has accomplished this by misrepresenting the 2nd Amendment and by creating distrust in our own elected government. “Guns are the antidote to tyranny.” “You will have to pry my gun out of my cold, dead hands.” And, as we’ve recently discovered, it has been helped by millions in donations by Russian oligarchs.

Even after we’ve witnessed the slaughter of school children, the NRA has refused to admit that guns are the problem. Instead, it proposes that guns are the answer: “The only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

It must be acknowledged how unusual this is compared to most of the world. The US has nearly 4 times as many guns per 100 citizens as any other nation in the world. And it has 6 times more gun violence than Canada, 12 times more gun violence than Germany and Australia, and 53 times more gun violence than the UK.

Those statistics are not coincidental. More guns means more gun violence. Until Congress recognizes that fact, we will continue to see gun violence in our neighborhoods and in our business districts. We will continue to see mass murders in nightclubs, in churches, in synagogues, in mosques, and at concerts. And we will continue to mass murders of our children.

Mass Murder And Mental Illness.

Posted on by

Despite the fact the US has already experienced 293 mass shootings this year as recorded by gunviolencearchive.org, the president and the GOP do not want to talk about the single biggest issue that contributes to gun violence: Easy access to guns. I’m not referring to shotguns, hunting rifles and six-shooters. I’m referring to weapons of war – AK-47s, AR-15s and 50-caliber sniper rifles – weapons that have no place in the hands of civilians.

Even after the most recent mass murders in El Paso, Dayton and Odessa-Midland, the president and the GOP seem unable to summon the courage to go against the NRA to pass legislation for universal background checks or to pass legislation that would, once again, ban assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Instead, they seem ready to pass legislation focused on mental health.

It’s a ruse…another con from the conman-in-chief.

Certainly, there is a need for more mental health facilities, more in-patient treatment centers, and more counselors. Far too many of the mentally ill are now housed in prisons with no access to treatment. And when their behavior becomes extreme, they are moved to solitary confinement for the rest of their lives where most Americans can forget they ever exist.

But the truth is, focusing on mental illness will do little, if anything, to stem gun violence. That’s because the vast majority of those with mental illness are far more of a threat to themselves than to others.

The most likely to commit mass murders with guns are white nationalists and neo-Nazis – extremists, many of them Bible-thumping racists who want to turn back the clock on America to make it white again. People who can’t stand the inevitability of the US becoming majority non-white in the next few decades. People like those in Charlottesville who marched with torches shouting, “You will not replace us.” People who were resentful of the election of President Barack Obama and who have been inspired by Trump, the racist in the White House who, after seeing video of Charlottesville claimed “there were good people on both sides.”

The only thing that will curb gun violence in the US is to keep the most lethal weapons out of the hands of extremists by passing universal background checks, passing red flag laws, and passing laws banning the sale of weapons of war, including high-capacity magazines. But I would urge Congress to also pass funding to treat those who are mentally ill. Especially, the one who most obviously is suffering from mental illness and who controls the most lethal weapons of all: President Trump.

Destruction Of The US. (Part Three – Racism and Discrimination)

Posted on by

One of the many ways that Trump and the GOP are destroying our democracy is through discrimination – creating fear of those who look different, who speak a different language, who practice a different faith, or who love someone of the same gender. Under the guise of rejecting “political correctness” the GOP and its propaganda outlets, such as Fox News, have emboldened their followers to blame the “other” for all of their social and economic problems.

Their political strategy has led to a divisiveness not seen since before or after the Civil War. It has also led to increasing violence.

For example, inspired by Trump, two Boston brothers brutally attacked and urinated on a homeless Hispanic man. Three Trump supporters in Kansas planned to bomb Somali immigrants. A white male in Washington stabbed an interracial couple, citing Trump’s rallies. The young man who rammed his car into a crowd of people protesting the racist Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia killing Heather Heyer was emboldened to act by the election of the most overtly racist president since Woodrow Wilson or, perhaps, even Andrew Johnson. An ardent Trump supporter in Miami was moved to send package bombs to Democratic leaders and the media he believed engaged in “fake news.” Likewise, the mass killers in Pittsburg and El Paso were inspired to act by Trump. In addition, there have been many less visible and less successful domestic terrorists who were inspired to violence by Trump.

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has led to dozens, maybe hundreds, of threats and hate crimes against brown and black people – some of them US citizens – for daring to speak Spanish or to look like immigrants. In addition, there has been a growing number of hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. GOP-nominated judges have sanctioned discrimination against gays and lesbians on so-called religious grounds (the religion of hate). And the rhetoric of GOP candidates and supporters has inspired anti-abortion protesters to murder doctors, nurses and patients at medical clinics.

At the same time, the Trump administration has used ICE and CBP to engage in a form of violence against immigrants – many of them seeking asylum from dangerous and hopeless situations – by ripping their children from their arms and, in some cases, placing the children in foster homes or putting them up for adoption. They have crammed immigrants into cages with no toiletries, no soap, no showers and no beds, often without sufficient room to even lie down.

All the while, Trump’s supporters, including many so-called evangelical “Christians” have cheered.

And, for decades, the GOP has practiced racial discrimination by gerrymandering districts to minimize the impact of black voters. They have purged people of color from voting lists. They have demanded photo IDs from state motor vehicle departments then closed the locations in black districts. They have also closed polling places in black areas, forcing voters to stand in line for hours.

The GOP has intentionally positioned itself as the party of choice for white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-immigrant militias, and “Christian” evangelicals. Its candidates have all been endorsed and funded by the NRA, which has made gun violence possible, perhaps inevitable. And Trump has even been endorsed by the David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK.

What do all these groups have in common? They are all paranoid, feeling that they are persecuted by the educated and secular “elite.” They fear that our white Christian culture will be “diluted” by people of color and people of other religions. They fear they’ll lose the advantages of their white privilege. And they fear a government that limits their freedom to rape and pillage the land, air and water; a government that forces them to pay for their fair share of infrastructure; a government that denies men the right to control women; a government that denies them the ability to discriminate without consequence.

For more on the subject, I encourage you to read Bring The War Home, The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew.

No, Democrats Have Not Moved Left. The GOP Has Moved Right…Way, Way Right.

Posted on by

It’s popular for the media – even the so-called liberal media – to portray the “Squad” and many of the Democratic presidential candidates as far left. As if they are some aberration from the core party principles. Of course, that’s exactly what Republicans want you to believe. Indeed, even some Democratic leaders and “strategists” would have you buy into that claptrap.

It’s not only not true. It’s not even close to reality.

In the 1930s and 40s, the FDR administration and mainstream Democrats embraced social democracy as part of the New Deal. To rescue our economy FDR, the Democratic Party and even some Republicans incorporated ideas that were socialist in nature in order to move people out of the soup lines and back to work. For example, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) built more than 620,000 miles of streets, more than 10,000 bridges, dozens of airports, hydroelectric dams, public buildings and large numbers of houses and apartments. Much of these are still in use today. Rural electric cooperatives (a form of socialism) brought telephones and electricity to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans who had been ignored by large utilities. In addition, the New Deal’s Social Security rescued the elderly from abject poverty. FDR had even proposed a Second New Deal which included single-payer health care, believing that access to quality health care was a human right.

When fascism and support for Nazi Germany threatened to take over the US, Democrats rejected it. And, when World War II broke out, Americans resorted to what some would now consider socialism by pulling together to produce necessary war materials and to ration consumer products in favor of supporting our troops. Indeed, most of our population temporarily abandoned free market capitalism in order to defeat the Axis powers.

Though many in the GOP opposed some of FDR’s initiatives, they supported others. In fact, the GOP was almost equally divided between conservatives and liberals. But things began to change as the result of Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 50s and the growing Cold War.

As post-war Europe followed the path pioneered by FDR, US politicians from both parties distanced themselves from anything that could remotely be misconstrued as communist. That included social democracy. Yet, even in the 70s, the GOP approved of some liberal ideas. For example, in response to Senator Ted Kennedy’s proposal for single-payer health care, Nixon proposed a health care mandate (Obamacare, anyone?). Nixon also supported the formation of the EPA and OSHA. And he aggressively desegregated public schools.

Only after the GOP saw an opportunity to solidify the Jim Crow South by implementing its southern strategy and creating division over abortion to bring evangelicals into the party, did it begin to lurch far to the right. Since then, it has used race and immigration to divide voters and pander to its rural base. And it has used Christian fundamentalist social issues to hold evangelicals – the so-called “values voters” – in line. Meanwhile, right-wing radio hosts and Roger Ailes’s right-wing propaganda network (aka Fox News) have pushed the party even further to the extreme right.

At the same time, Democrats, in trying to recapture the southern states it lost by pushing through the Civil Rights Acts, began to move to the center-right in order to occupy the space once held by mainstream Republicans. For president, they twice nominated the governors of southern states to win elections. And the party has continued to try to bring southerners back into the fold by moving past the center and trending further and further to the right, at the same time denying or ignoring the wishes of traditional Democratic voters in urban areas and in the rural areas of Rust Belt states.

Voters’ positions on abortion, once a non-political issue, now define them as Republicans or Democrats. And, as the Christian fundamentalists and right-wing media have fomented anger over immigration, gay marriage and transgender use of bathrooms (otherwise known as discrimination) Democrats have struggled to respond. They either had to join in the discrimination or be labeled as extreme leftists.

So here we are. We now have a center-right Democratic party that has struggled to adhere to the principles it once cherished, and an extreme far-right Republican party that uses racism and Christian fundamentalism to disguise its fascist, pro-billionaire agenda.

The GOP has long since abandoned its tradition of fiscal conservatism combined with social compassion. It is now the “everybody for themselves party” that is trying to dismantle every aspect of our government except for the military. It would have you ignore issues such as growing debt and deficits, failing infrastructure, income disparity, the lack of retirement pensions and increasingly unaffordable healthcare. Instead, it would have you blame immigrants, “uppity” people of color and the LGBTQ population for your problems. For those of you who refuse to support the party and its narrow-minded, hateful agenda, it attempts to gerrymander away your rights and make it increasingly difficult for you to vote.

And now that a growing number of Democrats are intent on implementing real, substantive change in order to give ordinary working Americans a fair shake, the GOP and its corporate-controlled media try to label them as leftists and socialists. They would have you believe that they are un-American and dangerous. But they are as American and as mainstream as FDR, JFK, Obama and even Ronald Reagan.

It’s Trump, Mitch McConnell, the NRA and the GOP who fail to live up to the ideals of our nation’s Founders

The 2nd Amendment: What Were The Framers Thinking?

Posted on by

To many gun owners, and especially to the NRA, the right to own guns is as sacred as the right of free speech. The Constitution, after all, includes the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights immediately following freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assembly and the right to petition the government. There it is in black and white: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

However, that’s not the complete wording of the 2nd Amendment. Conveniently, the NRA ignores the first and, I believe, most important part: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” Reading the amendment in its entirety changes the meaning of the amendment dramatically.

So what were our Founding Fathers really thinking when it comes to guns? According to historian, constitutional scholar and author Fergus Bordewich, they devoted little time or discussion to the issue. In an interview on Democratic Perspective, he says, “You would think that something that looms so large for present day Americans must have been something that loomed large for those who crafted the amendment. Not so. I read the debates. And I recommend to anyone who is getting annoyed by what I’m saying here to go read the debates. All the papers for the first congress are in print. It was kind of a collective shrug, frankly. There was no discussion whatsoever of this as a fundamental human right at all.”

This should come as no surprise to any thinking American. The Founders were creating a nation governed by the people. Their only real concerns regarding tyranny revolved around defending the nation from the British to the north and the Spanish to the south, and from giving too much power to a president who might try to become king.

According to Bordewich, “There was no mystery in the [2nd] amendment except that it’s badly written. It’s badly worded because we can still be sitting here 200 odd years later debating what they actually meant. And it’s perfectly clear, if you know the history and context, that they were talking about guns that would be handled by people who belonged to a militia.” That is supported by the fact that the amendment that immediately follows, the 3rd Amendment, prohibits soldiers from quartering in a house without permission of the owner – an issue that had risen out of the actions of the British army prior to and during the Revolutionary War. In other words, the Founders and most American citizens of the time were extremely wary of creating a standing army.

So what changed? How did we get to the point where nearly anyone can go into a gun shop and walk out a few minutes later with a powerful weapon of war? What led us to accepting hundreds of mass shootings and tens of thousands of non-suicidal gun deaths each year as the price of freedom?

Bordewich responds, “You get there by having a powerful, ruthless lobbying organization that’s backed by the arms industry that wants to sell a lot of guns and has convinced people that they are somehow threatened by reasonable legislation to control guns.”

Indeed, many Americans now seem more willing to put limits on the other rights enumerated in the Constitution than they are on guns. If that ever happens, we will have lost our democracy.

Do We Really Need The Mueller Report To Know That Trump Colluded With Russia?

Posted on by

Here’s what we already know about Trump’s business ties to Russia:
1. When US banks refused to lend to his organization after his multiple bankruptcies, Trump sought and received funding from Russian investors.
2. Eric Trump told golf writer, James Dodson, “… we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
3. A Russian mobster was among the first to buy luxury condos in Trump Tower. And David Bogatin purchased not one, but five condos. (Real estate is one of the Russians’ preferred ways to launder money illegally obtained.)
4. Two Russian mobsters are serving time in prison for running an illegal sports betting operation out of Trump Tower just a few floors below Trump’s living quarters.
5. Russian oligarchs have purchased nearly $100 million worth of real estate in Trump buildings in Florida.
6. A Russian oligarch paid $93 million for a Trump-owned mansion in Palm Beach, Florida – well over the market price – only to have it demolished and the property divided into three lots.
7. Trump made his first visit to Moscow in 1987 and he has pursued a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow ever since. His personal attorney was engaged in talks with Russian oligarchs about the proposed project through the first half of 2016.
8. In 2013, the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant was hosted by Moscow and a Putin ally.
9. A Trump business associate, Russian-born Felix Sater (born Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky), who has ties to Putin pleaded guilty to a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian mafia.

Here’s what we know about the Trump campaign connections to Russia:
1. In late 2015, Ivanka Trump connected Michael Cohen with a Putin ally who promised business and political synergy with the Trump organization and the Trump campaign.
2. In early 2016, a Russian with ties to Putin ally, Alexander Torshin, offered Trump a meeting with Putin.
3. In 2016, Torshin attended the NRA’s annual convention where he met with Donald Trump, Jr.
4. George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy advisor, spoke with well-connected Russians who proposed a Trump-Putin meeting.
5. Paul Manafort, a longtime consultant to the Russian-backed president of the Ukraine who was overthrown in 2014 and has a history of multi-million dollar deals with Russian oligarchs, was hired as Trump campaign manager. (Manafort has since been convicted on multiple counts of tax fraud.)
6. Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy advisor with business ties to the Russian state-owned oil company Gazprom, traveled to Moscow in July 2016 with the Trump campaign’s approval. While there, he gave a speech criticizing the US and other Western nations.
7. During the campaign, Trump foreign policy advisor Michael Flynn was paid $45,000 to speak at a Russia Today banquet in Moscow where he was seated at a table with Vladimir Putin.
8. In April of 2016, Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak attended a conservative event where Trump spoke. Kislyak sat in the front row and spoke with both Jared Kushner and then-senator Jeff Sessions, who led the campaign’s foreign policy team.
9. In May 2016, Trump consultants Michael Caputo and Roger Stone communicated with a Russian using the name Henry Greenberg who offered damaging information on Clinton.
10. Donald Trump, Jr. received an email requesting a meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. His response was “I love it.” The meeting took place in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016. (The lawyer has since been tied directly to the Kremlin.)
11. In July of 2016, Trump called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. Hours later, Russian intelligence targeted Clinton’s email account along with more than 70 other Clinton campaign accounts.
12. Trump campaign advisor and personal confidant, Roger Stone, claimed to be friends with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and seemingly tweeted advance knowledge of the release of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
13. After Trump won the GOP nomination, the Republican platform was changed to remove references to US sanctions on Russia.
14. Russian ambassador Kislyak attended the Republican national convention in July of 2016 where he again met with Sessions.
15. During the campaign, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort offered briefings on US politics to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. (It is now known that Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Russia.)
16. Ambassador Kislyak had a private meeting in Sessions’ office in September 2016.
17. After Russians stole data from the Democratic National Committee which included information on more than 120 million voters, they began a Kremlin-sanctioned program to use social media for the benefit of the Trump campaign.
18. The Trump campaign changed its entire social media campaign within days after the Russians hacked the DNC voter data.
19. After the election, and before Trump’s inauguration, Russian ambassador Kislyak maintained regular contact with Kushner and Michael Flynn. The three met in Trump Tower December 1, 2016 where they discussed mitigating US sanctions on Russia. In addition, they discussed creating “back channels” between Russia and the Trump administration.
20. Investigators have found emails, text messages, phone calls and meetings between members of the Trump campaign and numerous other Russians including Evgeny Shmykov, a former military intellence officer, and Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman.
21. The Trump transition team led by VP Mike Pence was warned by the FBI that General Michael Flynn was acting as a foreign agent. Yet they named him National Security Advisor anyway.
22. In January of 2017, Trump campaign advisor and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, traveled to the Seychelles to meet with a Russian oligarch where they reportedly discussed a back channel between Trump and the Kremlin.
23. Leonard Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire who is tied to Putin and a Russian bank, contributed $7.35 million to Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain.
24. Maria Butina, the young Russian operative with ties to the NRA and GOP politicians met with Don Jr. during the 2016 campaign to seek a back channel between Trump and Putin. (Butina has since pleaded guilty to conspiracy and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.)

Here are but a few of the yet-to-be-substantiated claims:
1. Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, offered former Trump adviser Carter Page and his associates an opportunity to broker a 19 percent stake in the company in exchange for lifting US sanctions on Russia.
2. Computer scientists claim to have identified a computer link during the campaign between a Russian bank and the Trump organization.
3. Russia pressured Trump to not name Romney Secretary of State and instead he name Rex Tillerson, a Russian friend, to the office.
4. Russian oligarch Alexander Torshin funneled millions to the Trump campaign through the NRA.

Here is evidence of obstruction of justice by Trump and his administration:
1. Trump asked FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn.
2. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. He then told Russian visitors to the White House, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.” He went on to say, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
3. During the Senate confirmation process, several of the Trump administration nominees lied under oath about their Russian contacts.
4. In his application for security clearance, Jared Kushner omitted his contacts with Russia.
5. Trump fired AG Jeff Sessions over his recusal from the Mueller investigation and installed an acting FBI director who has been outspoken against the investigation.
6. Trump committed witness tampering by calling Michael Cohen a rat for cooperating with the Mueller investigation and praising Roger Stone for saying he would never testify.
7. He helped craft a misleading public statement about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and the Russians.
8. He lied to reporters about his role in hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and others.
9. He dangled pardons to Manafort and others who might testify against him.

As you can see, there is abundant evidence that Trump is in the White House only because of Russian interference and a conspiracy between the Trump campaign, the GOP and Russia. Further, it is clear that Trump has made numerous efforts to obstruct justice.

The only question is: What are we going to do about it?