Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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It’s been clear for weeks now that President Donald Trump is unhappy with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And in public, Trump has framed his unhappiness in terms of the legislative agenda, complaining in tweets about the Senate’s failure to pass a health bill, tax reform, or an infrastructure program. But a juicy new report from the New York Times’s Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin suggests there’s another, familiar reason for Trump’s irritation: the Russia scandal, and specifically, McConnell’s failure to protect him from investigations into it.

It’s already been reported that in a tense phone call between Trump and McConnell on August 9, Trump was angry about the health care bill’s failure.
However, Burns and Martin add a new key detail — that Trump “was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.” Yet again, it seems, the president of the United States is intimating in private conversations with other government officials that investigations that could incriminate him or his associates should be bottled up — at a time when he’s already reportedly under investigation for obstruction of justice.

The New York Times adds an intriguing new layer to Trump’s feud with Mitch McConnell - Vox