In Shocker, FBI and NSA Testify That Trump Is Full of Shit

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Today’s big event is the testimony before Congress of FBI director James Comey and NSA chief Mike Rogers. Everyone seems very excited about this except me. Let’s listen in:

“The F.B.I., as part of our counterintelligence effort, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 president election,” [Comey] continued, adding that the investigation included looking at whether associates of Mr. Trump were in contact with Russian officials, and colluded with them.

….Mr. Comey told the House intelligence committee, “We have no information to support” President Trump’s assertion on Twitter that President Barack Obama tapped Trump Tower.

….The N.S.A. chief, Admiral Rogers, weighed in as well, saying that he had no knowledge of anyone asking the British or any other ally to wiretap Mr. Trump. That refuted another claim made by the White House….He then explicitly denied having any indication that Mr. Trump was wiretapped by British intelligence at the request of Mr. Obama.

So the FBI is investigating possible ties between Russia and some of Trump’s campaign aides, but Obama didn’t order any kind of wiretap or surveillance of Trump Tower. We already knew this, right?

Now, none of this means there was any Trump-Russia collusion, nor that there was no surveillance of Trump. The first is still under review, and the second could have been ordered as part of a criminal investigation that Obama had nothing to do with. But it does mean, essentially, that Trump’s March 4 tweets were just made-up rubbish based on a Breitbart story that someone stuffed into his pile of reading material. Of course, we already knew that too, didn’t we?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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