What Does It Mean to Have 'Repeated Contacts' With Russian Intelligence?

Tuesday evening, The New York Times reported that associates of then-candidate Donald Trump, including within his presidential campaign, had had “repeated” contact with Russian intelligence officials, and that American intelligence and law-enforcement officials had records of intercepted communications to prove it. The news came a day after Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser after having misled the vice president about the substance of his own conversations with the Russian ambassador prior to Trump’s inauguration.

The nature of the contacts the disclosed Tuesday were murky; the four current and former officials who described them to the paper declined to specify what, exactly, those contacts entailed; how many people were involved and who all of them were; and what their aims might have been. American intelligence had been investigating the possibility of collusionreport noted that the officials interviewed had “seen no evidence of such cooperation.”