USA -The White House: The web of relationships between Team Trump and Russia - by Philip Bump

In the most abstract sense, there is nothing noteworthy about a government official meeting with an ambassador from a foreign country. When such an interaction becomes important is when that official is an ally of a presidential campaign that’s got a complex set of possibly inappropriate relationships with other representatives of that ambassador’s country — and when that official while under oath says he did not have communications with representatives of that country.

What we’re going to endeavor to do here is to parse out that complex set of relationships, using the information we have at hand. In this case, as you’ve hopefully ascertained, the country at issue is Russia and the campaign is that of President Trump. The official, of course, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And the ambassador is, at this point, the linchpin of a lot of the interactions between Trump and the rest of his team.

We’ll consider three Russian entities.

• Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Russia’s man in Washington.
• The Russian government. Kislyak is part of this government, of course, but we’ll use this as a shorthand for interactions with President Vladimir Putin or other government agencies (who may or may not be known). Included here is RT, the Russia-backed and -based television network.
• Russian business interests. This encompasses everything from Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, to sketchy Russian oligarchs.

As for the American side, let’s start at the top and move outward through Trump’s network.

For the complete report click here: The web of relationships between Team Trump and Russia - The Washington Post