Senate hearing revives Democratic campaign over alleged Trump-Russia connections
By
Patrick Martin
10 May 2017
A hearing before a Senate subcommittee Monday became the occasion for the Democratic Party and the bulk of the corporate media to revive their campaign of unsupported allegations that the Trump presidential campaign collaborated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 election.
The two witnesses were former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who served as acting attorney general for the first 10 days of the Trump administration. She was fired by Trump on January 30 for opposing his executive order to ban travel from seven predominately Muslim countries.
Clapper added little to his previous appearances before House and Senate committees in which he repeatedly claimed there is massive evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, while declining to detail any of it on the grounds that the subject is classified. These unsupported allegations are accompanied by the declaration that there is no evidence of collusion between Trump campaign aides and the alleged Russian hackers.
The testimony of Yates was widely anticipated because of the dramatic circumstances of her dismissal from the Department of Justice, after she instructed US attorneys not to defend Trump’s first executive order imposing a temporary ban on visitors and refugees from seven mainly Muslim countries. She has not previously spoken in public either about her firing or about the discussions she had with White House officials that led to the ouster of Trump’s first national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Yates described a series of meetings and phone calls with White House Counsel Donald McGahn…