By Peter Lance July 15th, 2017. Seven months ago, to the day, marked with a launch piece in The Huffington Post, I started this website as a resource for other investigative reporters and the public. The idea was to help my colleagues and all those for whom truth matters, to get a daily record of the best enterprise journalism devoted to the campaign, transition and presidency of Donald J. Trump.

At this point investigatingtrump.com has grown to nearly seven hundred pieces, with four hundred of them focused on THE TRUMP-RUSSIA CONNECTION. The site also features in-depth coverage of 45’s many CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, his broken CAMPAIGN PROMISES and his vitriolic MEDIA ATTACKS. Until April, when my work schedule got more intense, I filed a number of my own HUFFPOSTS as I continued to maintain my original news site peterlance.com

All of the stories curated for the new site were reproduced faithfully as they appeared in their source media, with all hyperlinks back to The NYT, WP, AP, WSJ, CNN, MSNBC, THE DAILY BEAST, POLITICO, YAHOO NEWS and the other print and broadcast entities that first published them. From a few hundred followers on TWITTER @PETERLANCE_ the number grew to nearly 2,400, many of them the reporters whose work the site celebrated.

A TURNING POINT IN THE INVESTIGATION

With each new revelation, the site content grew exponentially, from one or two pieces a day, to some days, in recent weeks, when there were three, four and even five pieces in a given 24-hour news cycle, each one of which might have merited page-one-above-the-fold status in any normal era.

But if Donald Trump has proven anything it’s that none of the traditional rules of “normality” apply. If there ever was a legal, moral or ethical rulebook, he’s shredded it. And yes, come to think it, there is — it’s called The U.S. Constitution.

As such, keeping this site fresh and up to date has become a full-time job and since I am now, as I have been since 9/11 when I began reporting on the FBI in four books for HarperCollins, a lone wolf reporter, my current work load demands that I hit the pause button. 

I’m currently at work adapting those four books into a ten hour dramatic series titled “Deal With The Devil” after my most recent book. I’ve also assembled more than 5,000 pages of research for my next project, a book on Trump-Russia, that I hope will break some new ground.

But since it was revealed by The NYT last weekend that Donald J. Trump Jr. colluded with agents or representative close to Vladimir Putin — the kleptocrat who  engineered a cyber coup d’état on the U.S. presidency — all official investigations have taken an exponential turn.

Given the utter unwillingness to even embrace the reality of the Russian hack by the White House and the slow roll of the GOP controlled Congress, I’m not optimistic that the truth will emerge on Capitol Hill. And as something of an expert on the multiple failures and conflicts-of-interest within the FBI and Department of Justice, I’m loathe to put my faith in Special Counsel Robert Mueller who is, himself, a creature of the Bureau and the DOJ.

But as we experience a renaissance in investigative reporting not seen since Watergate what gives me hope that is that the dogged work of reporters will get us, in the words of Carl Bernstein, “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

So as this new generation of reporters continues to peel back the shocking layers in the Trump-Putin scandal, I will keep pushing. In the meantime this site will remain a dynamic resource for research and dot connection as we move forward.

As I learned way back in the Sixties as a cub reporter for The Newport Daily News, one of the oldest newspapers in the country, never assume, always question the legal authorities and never, ever, stop digging. Keep the faith…