1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

This is an important to remind ourselves of Trump’s impeachment and Russian interference in US elections. We cannot let the US be run by this felon. Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign. Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election. But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia. IMPEACH TRUMP AGAIN! DO NOT LET THE US SUPPORT RUSSIA