Well, I respect the move but the entire thing has been a witch hunt.
And there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign
Two things are true about the Trump Russian investigation
which heated up this week with the first public indictments.
Thing number one there is still no smoking gun
that proves Donald Trump's campaign colluded with the Russian government
in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Thing number two: it is almost impossible now to look at the full weight of evidence
and believe that there was no collusion. If there was no collusion, it would be astonishing.
Of course, that is what Trump wants you to believe.
We've been saying from day one there's been no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion
and nothing in the indictment today changes that at all.
Let's run through the new information we've got
and how it fits into what we already knew here.
So most of the focus has been on the indictment of Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort.
Two senior members of the Trump campaign team
including former campaign chair Paul Manafort
surrendered themselves to federal authorities.
Who turned out to be hiding payments and hiding work he did
on behalf of a Russian affiliated political party in Ukraine.
But to me the most interesting part of all this by far
is George Papadopolis.
Because what he says upends our timeline of what the Trump campaign knew
about the Russian hacks and when they knew it.
So Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign
in March 2016 as a foreign policy adviser
and almost immediately he begins emailing with two Russian sources
with ties to Vladimir Putin's government.
A couple months later, in London, he meets with one of these sources.
A guy known as quote "The professor."
And the professor tells him, they [the Russians] have dirt on her.
The Russians had emails of Clinton. They have thousands of emails.
So this means that three months before the DNC's hacked emails were released
and more than six months before WikiLeaks released
Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's hacked emails.
Before all of that, one of Trump's foreign policy advisers knew
the Russians had thousands of Clinton related emails.
Now we know all of this because because in July the FBI arrested George Papadopolis
as part of Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's possible collusion
with the Russian government. And they arrested him because
he had lied about all of this in a previous interview with the FBI.
This fits into a broader story.
The Russians really did hack into John Podesta's and the DNC's email accounts
and they really did find and release emails that damaged Clinton.
Both their targets and their timing were incredibly sophisticated for a foreign government
that has traditionally shown itself to have a poor understanding of American politics
and all this joins a few other things we know.
Like we know that Donald Trump Jr. got an email saying a Russian government lawyer had incriminating
information on Hillary Clinton and he said in reply:
"if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."
And Don Trump Jr. got Jared Kushner and yes, Paul Manafort to attend the meeting with him.
Oh and by the way, the emails, they did come out that summer.
And we know that Trump after all this, he publicly asked Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton's computers
and find other emails that she had not released to the public.
Russia if you're listening I hope you're able
to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.
It's almost like he thought they had that capability.
And of course after all that Trump won the election.
And he was so afraid of the Russia investigation that he fired James Comey in order to stop it.
I was going to fire Comey. My decision. It was not . .
You had made the decision before they came in the room.
I was going to fire Comey. There's no good time to do it by the way.
This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.
It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.
So we know Trump and Russia were trying to achieve the same thing: Hillary Clinton's defeat.
We know that both sides knew about the hacked emails in advance.
We know they were interested on both sides and working together
and we know that the actual crime, the release of these emails it really happened.
And it happened on a timetable meant to help Trump.
We know they had tons of connections that would have made it possible for them to work together.
So as I said there's no smoking gun here we don't have final evidence of collusion.
But damn, sure is a lot of smoke.