Free Republic

Court documents call him Person A, but descriptions match the officer to Russian intelligence and to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Buried in a late-night court filing in Robert Mueller’s expansive probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was an explosive claim: An adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams had knowingly been in contact with a former Russian intelligence officer as late as September 2016, prosecutors said. The revelation is the strongest connection to date between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s intelligence services, which U.S. officials say were behind the cyberattacks on Democrats during the election....

Pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine smashed their way into public buildings and burned Ukrainian-language books on Sunday in further protests following two deadly clashes in the region last week. Protests, some several thousand strong, spread to Russian-speaking southern districts as Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, under the control of the Russian military for two weeks, voted in a referendum on joining Russia. [...] In Kharkiv, Reuters Television footage showed pro-Russian activists scaling an iron gate, smashing a van and breaking into the offices of a Ukrainian cultural center. Two policemen stood nearby, examining the van. The footage then showed young men seizing...