Rachel Maddow's Dogged Reporting May Take Trump Down

We've long been confident that Rachel Maddow would be among the journalists standing up to Donald Trump and his deplorable administration. She's continuing to come through -- Wednesday night she did an excellent job of assembling and presenting the evidence on his campaign's alleged collusion with Russia in the election, in one of several segments she's done on Trump and Russia.

On her MSNBC show, Maddow noted that the one thing Trump campaign officials seemed to care about when the Republican platform was being drafted last summer was making sure it did not call for the U.S. to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia's invasion. "It was weird at the time, and yes, there was a lot else going on in presidential politics ... but even then, as the Russia-Trump questions continued to percolate and ultimately got more acute over time, ultimately Trump the candidate did have to answer for what his campaign did regarding the platform."

Trump claimed he was not involved in it, as did his then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as shown in clips Maddow played. "Now that bizarre nonexplanation, those denials, have fallen apart," she said, as now former Trump campaign official J.D. Gordon has acknowledged making the push to soften the language on Russia, at the behest of Trump himself.

This is coming out now, she said, in light of a Politico report that the FBI is investigating Russian citizen Konstantin Kilimnik, who has said he met with Manafort and played a role in getting the platform changed.

"You can feel the pillars sort of start to sway here a little bit, right?" Maddow said, adding, "Every day in the last few days we've had a new piece of this fall into place." She went on to note the reemergence of British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, author of a dossier containing many damaging claims about Trump's relationship with Russia, including that Russian officials would work to help him win the election in return for removing Russia's intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue. The information in the dossier remains uncorroborated as a whole, but every day supporting details are checking out, she said. Just today, California Rep. Maxine Waters claimed the salacious sex allegations about Trump in the dossier are, in fact, true (Waters then walked back her explosive statement).

"We're learning more every day about what bullpuckey of the Trump campaign denials were on some of this stuff," she added.

Maddow also made a strong case that the Russian push for Trump's election was partly due to a desire to dismantle the U.S. State Department, long a thorn in the side of Putin. Since former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a friend of Putin's, was confirmed to lead the State Department, the diplomatic agency has been weakened through massive layoffs and budget cuts.