"I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does."

— President Donald Trump, on Feb. 16.

That Trump statement is growing harder and harder to believe as revelations about links between the president and his associates expand so quickly it's hard to keep a tally.

- White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn already has been forced to resign because he lied about talking about U.S. sanctions against Russia with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — before Trump was president.

- Trump's brand new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had to recuse himself from further investigations of Russian campaign links because he, too, had undisclosed meetings with the ambassador.

- Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, tagged along with Flynn in a meeting with Kislyak at Trump Tower.0

- Trump consultant Paul Manafort maintained close ties with his longtime business associate, a former Russian officer investigated in Ukraine of being a Russian intelligence agent. Manafort, whose name even turned up on on a secret ledger suggesting he had received $12.7 million from Ukraine's pro-Russian former president, was Trump's campaign manager when the first batch of hacked Democratic National Committee emails went public on WikiLeaks.

Manafort, favored to take over Trump's campaign by Kushner and Trump's daughter Ivanka, was forced to resign in late August after the Ukraine ledger was found. Manafort's name surfaced again in a dossier put together by a former British intelligence operative who claimed an "extensive conspiracy" between Trump and the Russians to weaken the Clinton campaign. The dossier says the conspiracy "was managed of [sic] the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT."

- Trump's campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, a former mid-level member of Merrill Lynch's Moscow office, met with Kislyak during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Page also took a leave of absence from the campaign in September amid reports that U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating his interactions with senior Russian officials, including former Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin and Deputy Chief for Internal Policy Igor Diveykin — the man U.S. officials believed was in charge of "intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election," according to Rolling Stone.

- J.D. Gordon, the Trump campaign's national security adviser, also met with Kislyak during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Gordon recently told CNN that the Trump campaign's bewildering obsession with gutting a Republican Party plank that supported arming Ukraine in its fight against rebels supported by Russian forces was not, as widely believed, to be Manafort-influenced. Rather, Gordon told CNN, orders to reword the platform came directly from Trump himself at a March meeting in Washington. According to Gordon, Trump said he didn't want to "go to World War III over Ukraine."

- In August — about the time Manafort resigned, close Trump confidant and conservative political operative Roger Stone said he was in touch with WikiLeaks. And in early October, Stone hinted in a tweet that he had inside knowledge that WikiLeaks was about to make Hillary Clinton's campaign "done." WikiLeaks released the first batch of emails hacked from top Clinton aide John Podesta just five days later.

- Trump himself in July invited further Russian hacking and involvement during a campaign press conference: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing."

- Kislyak attended a foreign policy speech Trump gave last spring — and the reception that preceded it. Stories from that event in both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times note that Trump was introduced to and met with the ambassador.

- It has been widely reported that Trump had business dealings in Russia going back years. Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." In 2013, Trump himself traveled to Russia to host the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned.

- Wilbur Ross, Trump's secretary of commerce, during the Clinton administration served on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund, an effort to bolster businesses in post-Cold-War Russia. During his commerce confirmation hearing, questions arose about Ross' ownership of a bank on Cyprus that, according to McClatchy news reports, "caters to wealthy Russians" in need of money laundering. One of those was oligarch Dmitry Ryvoloviev who, in 2008 as real-estate prices were softening, purchased Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for $95 million, about twice its worth. Ryvoloviev also took a nearly 10 percent stake in Ross' Bank of Cyprus.

- Rex Tillerson, as the former head of ExxonMobil, helped negotiate a massive agreement between the Russian government and ExxonMobil-Rosneft, a partnership between the two companies. Tillerson was subsequently awarded the "Order of Friendship" by Putin. Now Tillerson is Trump's secretary of state.

It's certainly expected that a president or president-elect — perhaps even a candidate — might meet with foreign leaders and have foreign ties. What's not expected, nor appropriate, is to do so seemingly en mass when that foreign government is known, for months upon months, to be meddling in the U.S. election and trying to swing the election in that candidate's favor.

Did Trump have to seek out and hire staff like Manafort and Flynn and Tillerson and Ross and Page and Stone — men who had extensive and well-documented ties to the Russian state? Did Trump have to propose weakening America's commitment to NATO, an action that helps Russia? Did he have to repeatedly praise Putin?

Doesn't it make you wonder?