Throughout the 2016 Presidential election, then-First Lady Michelle Obama famously exhorted: “When they go low, we go high!”

Inspiring, yes. But it didn’t prevent Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump from employing Russian Intelligence officers and computer-hackers to win the election.

On June 9, 2016, high-ranking members of his campaign met with Russian Intelligence agents at Trump Tower.

The purpose: To obtain derogatory information about Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Among those attending:   

• Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr.;
• His son-in-law, Jared Kushner;
• His then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort;
• At least two lobbyists with ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya; and
• Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet counterintelligence officer suspected of “having ongoing ties to Russian Intelligence.”

Trump Tower  

(By Jorge Láscar from Australia)

This was nothing less than treason—meeting with officials of a hostile foreign power to manipulate an American Presidential election.

After The New York Times broke the story, Trump “helped” his son draft a false statement to explain the purpose of the meeting. 

On July 8, 2017, Donald Trump, Jr., issued the following statement: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government.”

Confronted with overwhelming evidence, President Trump tweeted on August 5, 2018: 

“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

On July 22, 2016, Trump said at a press conference in Doral, Florida: “Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find the 33,000 emails that are missing [from Hillary Clinton’s personal email server].  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” 

Thus, Trump called upon a foreign power, hostile to the United States, to interfere in its Presidential election.  

Hours later, the Main Intelligence Directorate in Moscow targeted Clinton’s personal office and hit more than 70 other Clinton campaign accounts. 

Donald Trump

On December 16, 2016, then-FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. agreed with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House.

“When they go low, we go high” did not deter Trump from threatening his Republican and Democratic opponents with violence. 

No other candidate—Republican or Democrat—had ever made such repeated and brutal use of threats of physical assault in pursuing the Presidency.

• On March 16, 2016, he warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
• An ABC reporter summed this up as: “The message to Republicans was clear on [March 16[: ‘Nice convention you got there, shame if something happened to it.'”
• Republicans clearly saw this as a threat: Paul Ryan, their Speaker of the House, said on March 17: “Nobody should say such things in my opinion because to even address or hint to violence is unacceptable.” 
• Philip Klein, the managing editor of the Washington Examiner, wrote on the eve of the Republican National Convention in July: “Political commentators now routinely talk about the riots that would break out in Cleveland if Trump were denied the nomination, about how his supporters have guns and all hell could break loose, that they would burn everything to the ground. It works to Trump’s advantage to not try too hard to dispel these notions.”
• On August 9, Trump told a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
• “Well, let me say if someone else said that outside of the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him,” said Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). 

Making threats against anyone under protection by the U.S. Secret Service is a felony. Yet Donald Trump was never held legally accountable by the Justice Department.   

Threats of this type continued to be made by Trump supporters right up to the day of the election.

• On July 29, Roger Stone, a notorious Right-wing political consultant acting as a Trump strategist, told Breitbart News: “The first thing Trump needs to do is begin talking about [voter fraud] constantly. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”
• At a town hall meeting where Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence appeared, a woman named Rhonda said: “For me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself am ready for a revolution.”