On CNN Tuesday, analyst Gloria Borger said the new intelligence report on Russia's involvement in the 2020 election concludes something that former special counsel Robert Mueller stopped just short of doing: that the Trump team colluded with Russia — whether they were aware of it or not.
"The report mentions that people close to former President Trump were specifically targeted by Russian individuals and others who had close links to the Russian intelligence community, targeted with a lot of disinformation which these associates of Trump's then repeated on television and elsewhere and spread all these lies and propaganda," said anchor Wolf Blitzer. "It sort of reminded me of what we saw back in 2016, right?"
"There's a little bit of déjà vu there," said Borger. "If you recall in the Mueller report, what Mueller said was there were these proxies, but he couldn't prove a criminal conspiracy. And collusion, of course, is not a legal term, but he couldn't prove collusion, which is why he did not say there was collusion. But what you're seeing here is effectively an intelligence assessment which says, yes, there was, wittingly or unwittingly."
"While Rudy Giuliani is not named specifically, it's very clear that is one person that is referred to in all of this," added Borger. "So there are similarities for some reason, and we don't know what, the president of the United States surrounded himself with people that Russian intelligence felt they could deal with and use their proxies to deal with these people. We don't know the rest of the story yet. That's probably classified. We don't know that, but this comes up time and time again."
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