“…it is really whether or not the criminal investigation that is ongoing at the FBI is gonna be able to follow the money around to his associates during the campaign…”

Senator Claire McCaskill (D) continued her face to face contact with constituents in Missouri yesterday with several events in Kansas City.

The Greater Kansas City Women’s Political Caucus hosted a forum with Senator McCaskill midday. Close to one hundred fifty individuals attended. The Senator spoke for about twenty minutes then took questions for about an hour.

Senator Claire McCaskill (D) – May 6, 2017.

One of the questions was on Donald Trump (r) releasing his tax returns:

Senator Claire McCaskill (D): ….I don’t know whether we’ll ever see Donald Trump’s taxes or not. I am not as convinced that his taxes would tell us a lot. Um, you know, tax returns are not as informative as people might believe, um, especially when you have a lot and lots of complicated financial structures.

Um, it, it is really whether or not the criminal investigation that is ongoing at the FBI is gonna be able to follow the money around to his associates during the campaign. And whether or not there will ever be enough, either circumstantial or direct evidence, to indicate that he was aware of some of the activities that were going on.

And that is way more important. Now, I get it that he is the first president that hasn’t done it. And it’s possible, because you do have to disclose foreign money, it is possible that there’s foreign money on those taxes. Um, but, I do think that, and the taxes may end up being produced as part of these investigations, ‘cause we’ve got three different investigations going on in Congress. And then of course, we have the FBI investigation.

Um, I, I, I know some things that are classified that I can’t share with you, but there’s many things that aren’t classified. And that is, for example, Russia had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people on their payroll doing nothing all day but creating Facebook accounts. All day long. For months on end. In order to drive news stories and to drive, and we know the algorithms jumped right before the election. And we believe these algorithms jumped because of these Russian efforts. And what they were doing, they were trying to hit three places in the key states, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, and Michigan. What they were doing, they were to hit African American men, Bernie Sanders supporters, and, um, [….] young women, maybe. And they were trying to feed into their Facebooks, for example, for African American men they were feeding into the Facebooks the comment that Hillary Clinton made at one point about predators. And they were, they were doing a complicated algorithm where they were trying to find Facebook pages where there was some indication that some member of their family had been in jail or was in jail. [voice: “Oh my God.”] And they were targeting Bernie supporters with, the reason all that stuff about the rigged primary happened when it did? They released that right as we went into the convention, the Russians did. That all of the hacked e-mails, to try to undermine unity, undermine enthusiasm within the Democratic Party for Hillary Clinton.

So, this was sophisticated stuff Russia was doing. And that kind of stuff hasn’t gotten as much attention as some of the other things that they’ve done. So, um, and, then we know that many of their associates had direct and indirect contact with Russia in a variety of capacities. So, there’s real stuff going on in these investigations. And shoes will continue to drop. We had another shoe drop just yesterday where we now learn that they were copying classified documents in the transition office and removing them from there, uh, around the time Michael Flynn was meeting with the Russian ambassador who, um, he knew was directly tied to Russian intelligence, so. [Voice: “We’re really in a mess, aren’t we?”] Kinda are.

[….]

Oh my.

Previously:

What a difference eight years makes (April 13, 2017)

If only Roy Blunt (r) could give him something to do at one of his open town halls in Missouri (April 13, 2017)

This ain’t 2009 and right wingnut billionaires ain’t paying to rile up teabaggers (April 13, 2017)

Senator Claire McCaskill (D): press availability – Parkville, Missouri – April 13, 2017 (April 14, 2017)

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D): on Zombie Trumpcare – May 6, 2017 (May 7, 2017)