The newest developments in the Trump-Russia scandal, explained

by Zack Beauchamp at Vox

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/27/16552458/trump-russia-clinton-steele-cambridge-analytica

"SNIP..........

This story concerns a new set of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by Congress earlier this year as a kind of punishment for the election hack. The bill required the Trump administration to, by October 1, identify which Russian entities, precisely, would be hit by the new sanctions.


By Wednesday afternoon, more than three weeks after the October 1 deadline, the Trump administration still had not complied. Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was angry — and he let a group of reporters know it.

"I'm going to get on the phone with someone,” Corker said. “I don't have any way of evaluating whether it's purposeful or not purposeful."

It seems that Corker’s inquiry got results: the State Department released the required list on Thursday evening. But Corker’s Wednesday comments were still extremely telling.

In any other administration, the delayed implementation of a Russia sanctions bill would be assumed to be an innocent bureaucratic screw-up. Indeed, that was the official administration line — State claimed it was overwhelmed by sanctions work.

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