Trump lashes Democrat ‘treason’ over claims of Russia links

Donald Trump has accused Democrats of treason following claims the party’s operatives sought to fabricate links between him and Russia.

Former president Donald Trump: ‘In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.’ Picture: AFP.

Donald Trump has accused Democrats of treason following allegations by a US Justice Department special prosecutor that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign sought to fabricate links between Mr Trump and Russia by trawling internet use at Trump Tower and later the Trump White House.

Special counsel John Durham made the claims in a 13-page court filing, alleging a technology company executive with links to the Democrat Party had “mined” the internet to establish “an inference” and a “narrative” tying Mr Trump to Russia.

“In doing so, [the executive] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs’, referring to individuals at … the Clinton campaign,” the indictment claims, prompting a series of furious statements from the former president, who had been mocked in office for suggesting he had been spied on by Democrats.

“What Hillary Clinton and the radical Democrats did with respect to spying on the president, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate,” Mr Trump said, referring to the infiltration of the Democratic Party offices by Nixon operatives in the 1970s.

“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

Mr Durham said he could find “no support” of claims members of the Trump White Hour were using “supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations”.

The claim was part of an indictment in which Mr Durham, appointed in October 2020 to investigate the FBI’s inquiry into Russia’s involvement with the publication by WikiLeaks of hacked Democrat campaign emails, accused Democrat lawyer Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI about his links to the Democrat Party.

Lawyers for Mr Sussman on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) denied the allegations, slamming Mr Durham’s charges of politically motivated spying as “irrelevant … and plainly intended to politicise this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool”.

The former president’s supposed relations with Russia and Vladimir Putin were a constant frame of Democrat attack, culminating in the Robert Mueller probe, which in a final report in 2019 found the former president and his campaign had “numerous connections” with Russians but nothing that would constitute a crime.

“It was all a crock, bought and paid for by the Hillary campaign and dutifully reported by the corrupt corporate media,” said Republican senator Ted Cruz, a former rival of Mr Trump’s for the Republican presidential nomination.

The allegations, which will be tested in court this year, prompted some Republicans to call for the resignation of Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who in late 2016 as a top Clinton campaign official publicly linked Mr Trump to a Russian bank.

“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Mr Sullivan claimed, a claim that an FBI investigation later determined to be false.

“This is a big deal,” Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio said. “It’s shocking to me that this is not receiving more coverage in the press.”

Except for the Wall Street Journal and Fox News the mainstream media in the US largely ignored the allegations.

Senior New York Times writer Charlie Savage, defending the non-reporting, said “the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong … [and required] readers to expend significant mental energy and time – raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims”.

The allegations follow the implosion of the so-called Steele Dossier – a widely reported 2016 unsourced “dirt file” paid for the Clinton campaign – as a fabrication last year.

Mrs Clinton, who hasn’t commented on the claims, is due to speak in New York at a Democrat party campaign event on Thursday.