Reuters reported Thursday morning that Trump’s campaign had at least 18 calls, e-mails, and text message exchanges with Russian officials and people connected to the Kremlin during the final months of the 2016 campaign—contacts they did not previously disclose.
Six of those conversations—which are now under scrutiny from the FBI and the four congressional committees investigating the Trump-Russia morass—were reportedly with Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn resigned in February after it came to light that he had lied about a December meeting with Kislyak in which he discussed lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. Flynn’s records of this meeting have since been subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
These newly revealed conversations happened between April and November of 2016, at the same time the world was learning of Russian efforts to intervene in the U.S. election on Donald Trump’s behalf. The unnamed U.S. government officials who described these contacts to Reuters said, however, that they saw no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion.
