Simpler Explanations Are Usually Correct. Even on Russia.

The Trump-Russia story is becoming surreal. It's worth pausing for a minute and applying a tool that's getting rusty from disuse -- Occam's razor, and specifically Isaac Newton's take on it: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."

Here's a simple example. BuzzFeed on Tuesday came out with a story about the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation checking into 60 transfers sent by the Russian Foreign Ministry to embassies around the world with a note that the money was meant "to finance election campaign of 2016." Russia says that meant the Russian parliamentary election that took place in September 2016, not the U.S. presidential election. The voting for that election was organized in 147 countries; some 1.9 million Russian expatriates could come to hundreds of diplomatic missions to cast their votes, though only some 216,000 ended up doing so.