Playbook Audio Briefing is sponsored by Google Search in 2017.

Good morning, and welcome to your political playbook audio briefing.

I'm Jake Sherman here with Anna Palmer and Zach Montalara.

We're talking about Russia, an issue that's consumed much of the first year of Donald Trump's presidency,

and an issue that really doesn't seem to be going away for him.

No, I think this is something that clearly, obviously, President Trump had to deal with on the campaign trail.

It has been kind of an underlying issue for all of 2017.

There's investigations going on.

The special prosecutor has gotten into this.

And clearly, you know, we're looking at this being something that they're going

to have to deal with in 2018 and also on the campaign trail. I think the big issue is some of the

alleged misstatements, right? I mean, you talk about the campaign saying that they forgot about

conversations about Russia or they didn't remember things.

And it, I'm not intimating anyone specifically is misleading, but it's hard to believe,

considering Russia was such a big part of the campaign in 2016, right?

I mean, they, the president or the now president, then the candidate Donald Trump asked

Russia to retrieve

emails from Miller-Clinton server. There were questions about why Donald Trump was so close

with or was speaking so nicely about Vladimir Putin, the strong man leader of Russia. So I think

there are a lot of answers that have been not, a lot of questions that have been not answered in the last year. And when questions don't get answered, it lingers. So we see that, too, in the indictments and the plea bargains that Robin Moll's team has gotten from Trump campaign associates, and as they like to classify it as hangar-ons, in former General Flynn, in Paul Manafort, in Gates. Everybody's a hangar-on, right? If they, you know, getting coffee, the coffee boy, Trump had a lot of coffee boys. Well, it's interesting in the coffee boy realm. I mean, this is a guy who was celebrated with great fanfare. And when he went overseas, when he went to Greece, we're talking about George Papadopoulos and who the Trump campaign is dismissed as a low-level aid, although he was in meetings with senior members of the campaign. I can tell you on Capitol Hill, the committees are digging into this, the intelligence committees, the, there's special committees, and I don't think there's any, I don't think there's any sense that they will take their foot off the

gas before they get some answers. I think that's right. And the one thing that to me has been

pretty interesting has been how this White House has really dealt with us, right? From the podium,

...