Russian Roulette summary

Trump had been this close to his face-to-face meeting with the most powerful man in Russia. Instead, he was left bitterly disappointed with Putin’s no-show at the pageant.

It wouldn’t be long before Trump’s dreams of a new Trump Tower in Moscow were brought to a standstill, but this was due less to the missed connection and more because of diplomatic changes between the US and Russia.

To say Putin didn’t like Obama and Clinton would be a severe understatement. As a Russian nationalist, Putin despised these two figures and looked upon them as enemies impeding Russia’s goal of increasing its global power and extending its sphere of influence.

Russia and the US were returning to their old Cold War relationship of the 1980s, except now there was a new weapon with which to wage this war – social media.

Both the Trump campaign staff and the Trump administration have seen a lot of personnel come and go, but one of the more interesting people was Paul Manafort, who joined Trump’s campaign in May of 2016 as chairman and chief strategist.

By that time, Manafort already had an impressive resume as a Republican Party consultant, having worked on the campaigns of George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Yet Manafort appealed to Trump because, according to his own estimations, he didn’t carry any “Washington baggage” as he’d been away from the capital for some time.

Another top aide in the Trump campaign was the candidate’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. On June 3, 2016, he received a very sensitive email from Rob Goldstone – a publicist and key figure in the attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Goldstone’s email had intriguing news: according to the Russian pop star, Emin Agalarov, the son of the Moscow real estate developer Aras Agalarov, Putin wanted to help Trump win the election. Not only that, but Russia’s Prosecutor General and Putin ally Yury Chaika was said to have incriminating information on Hillary Clinton that he would be willing to share.

In the first week of July 2016, FBI director James Comey was preparing to share some critical information – the results of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information.

During Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, it was found that she’d sent emails containing top secret information using a private email server. Comey announced the highly anticipated results of this investigation, saying that while Clinton had been extremely careless in her handling of sensitive information, the FBI was not seeking to prosecute.

On July 22, 2016, Julian Assange made an announcement. The founder of the whistle-blowing organization Wikileaks sent out a tweet stating that he would be starting a series of publications to release the twenty-thousand emails that had been hacked from the DNC.

The timing of this was quite intentional: it was the day before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, with delegates preparing to nominate Clinton as the official candidate. Several emails revealed senior Democratic officials scoffing at rival Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and favoring Clinton. Clearly, Wikileaks was trying to further the already tense divide within the Democratic party. Sure enough, when Sanders supporters arrived in Philadelphia, there was already a good share of outrage being expressed.

While President Obama couldn’t make a public statement about Russian efforts to interfere with the election, there was an opportunity for him to do something.

In September of 2016, the G20 Summit being held in China presented Obama with the chance for a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin. And that’s just what happened.

October 7, 2016 would turn out to be an especially wild one for those following the news cycle.

The US intelligence community no doubt imagined that their press release about the Russian state-sponsored hackers would be the biggest news of the day. After all, the US government had never accused a foreign nation of interfering with the election process before. But this news had some significant competition.

By election day, much of the voting public was still in the dark about how much Russian interference had really been going on.

But the FBI was well aware of Russia’s assault on social media, with thousands of fake accounts flooding Facebook and Twitter with fake anti-Clinton and pro-Trump messages. They’d also opened an investigation into possible links between Trump and Russian officials, though they weren’t ready to divulge details.