Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, formerly stated that it was “very clear” that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election; however, Special Counsel John Durham’s report contradicted this statement.
“It has become abundantly clear that the Trump campaign and the Russians conspired to subvert the election,” Nadler told CNN in November 2018. The president’s ability to place himself above the law is running out, so he is justified in his current state of anxiety.
The comments now go against what was said in the Durham report, which said in May that there was no “actual evidence of collusion” to support the investigation into Trump and Russia. This added to the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019 that there was no proof of a criminal plot to change the results of the 2016 election.
In the 2018 talk, Nadler said there would soon be proof that Trump had personally worked with Russia to do something terrible.
Nadler said, “The walls are getting higher about what he knew about working with the Russians.”
This proof never came up, but Nadler later said in an interview with CBS in January 2020 that Trump tried to fix the 2020 election “just as he worked with the Russians to try to fix the 2016 election.” The words came when people were trying to get Trump removed from office because he called the Ukrainian president to ask him to look into then-candidate Joe Biden.
“He did that to get a foreign government to smear his political opponents for his own personal gain and to help try to rig the 2020 election, just like he worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election,” Nadler said. “Same pattern.”
The Durham report concluded that the investigation into Trump and Russia was based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.” The Department of Justice and FBI “failed to keep their mission of strict fidelity to the law” by starting the investigation even though there was no evidence. The report also said the agencies depended heavily on information “provided or paid for (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents.”
