Overwhelmed by Trump-Russia stories? You're not alone
Latest on ties just another piece in 'exceptionally complicated puzzle,' says Washington Post journalist
The Washington Post's Adam Entous concedes journalists trying to unravel the significance of connections between the team behind U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia are finding themselves overwhelmed by tantalizing pieces of information.
"Why do you have official contacts, and unofficial contacts? And actually, most importantly, why isn't the administration being more transparent about all this? And that's why, frankly, as we continue to get more and more information, it raises more and more of those questions."
The pursuit of answers has meant daily stories from the U.S. news media, not to mention round-the-clock cable-news coverage, pointing to one connection or another, such as the the story Entous wrote earlier this week.
He learned of an apparent attempt to set up a secret "back channel" between the Trump transition team and Russia, at a meeting held in the remote Seychelles Islands just days before the Jan. 20 inauguration.
"Meetings like this are designed to be deniable. The point is having a contact that you then can disown, if you decide it doesn't meet expectations, Entous said in an interview this week with CBC's The Investigators.
Indeed, Trump's spokesperson has since denied one of the people at the meeting, Erick Prince, was acting for Trump, yet the man best known for founding the private security firm Blackwater is known to have had close access to the president's transition team.
The story itself is just another piece of what's become a exceptionally complicated puzzle.
Entous admits he and others assigned to make sense of it sometimes lose track of the mass of information being published and broadcast, not to mention three separate investigations, including one by the FBI.
'Pieces are moving every day'
He understands why Americans and Canadians trying to keep track of it all, likely can't.
"I definitely feel for them. We struggle here, too, to try to keep track of this. It's very complex. Pieces are moving every day. We don't want to make it seem like we're just providing information because we see a connection. We're trying to provide information that we think, eventually, will help build — hopefully — a broader picture of what went on here."
Watch the full episode of The Investigators below, where CBC News senior correspondent Adrienne Arsenault talks about finding herself the subject of fake news, and Radio-Canada reporter Brigitte Bureau talks about her investigation into devices used to spy on cellphones in Ottawa.
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