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Jay Sekulow, a member of President Trump’s legal team, pointed out on CNN’s “New Day” Wednesday that Democratic National Committee (DNC) operatives had coordinated with the Ukrainian government to dig up opposition research on the Trump campaign.
“The Ukrainian government was giving information to the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s people on who? Donald Trump,” Sekulow said in a discussion about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. “So we’re acting like this doesn’t happen, but it does.”
“Ukraine is not Russia,” CNN’s Chris Cuomo replied, implying it was all right for one campaign to get “opposition research” from a foreign power, but not the other.
Sekulow pushed back on Cuomo’s reasoning, saying “That’s not the law.”
Cuomo argued that the two countries “would be analyzed differently” because of the threat they each posed to the United States.
According to a January Politico report, veteran DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa met with Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on Trump and his campaign:
[Chalupa] occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 — months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa recalled. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election,” said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was “Putin’s political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.”