Politics Trump knew of Russia from the get go.

[Rhal]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/...ackage-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

On Monday, standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk back his words and sided with his intelligence agencies.

On Wednesday, when a reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot back, “No” — directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was responding to a different question.)

Trump knew before his inauguration that Russia had run a complex cyber attack on multiple different levels to help effect the 2016 election. Instead of doing the right thing and investigating this he has thrown shade over and over again and tried to give Russia the benefit of the doubt by saying it could easily have been others or just plain flat it wasn't them. With every lie he uttered on this topic he was covering up for Russia, every time he threw shade at Russia and tried to smooth the waters he was committing treason, helping a foreign power against the US.
If we had 8 years of bengazi and 4 years of investigation about Bill Clinton we should damn well have more of a bipartisan ship on getting the to bottom of this and if the President was purposely protecting Russia and misleading the US, an entirely different issue then collusion, then that should be grounds for impeachment. Instead we have a joke of an Intelligence committee were Nunes has done everything he could to mislead and ignore everything he could to make sure the Intelligence committee gets nothing done and Paul Ryan is fine with that.