MEMBERS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MAY BE IN VERY DEEP LEGAL DO-DO

…Gee, A Russian American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, that was a veteran of the Soviet military in counter intelligence, attended the Trump Jr. meeting in Trump Tower.

 

The Trump/Russia scandal has entered a whole new phase, and there’s no going back.

 

Well, we knew there would be more "shoes to drop" on the Donald Jr. meeting with the Russians.  But now we’d better get prepared for an 18 wheeler that will turn over on the Brooklyn Bridge with a full load of Nike’s.

 

For six months, the White House falsely claimed that this Russia scandal was nothing more than pure innuendo.  But at first, it was about a Trump campaign innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.

 

Well, the Russia scandal has now entered a whole new phase, and this time there’s no going back.

 

For six months, there were piles of smoke without any obvious fire.  President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the “thing”.  I was also getting to a point that I was wondering if the national reporters were really grasping at straws and that they needed to get back to the real issues of health care, tax reform and the so called, "Republican agenda".

Was there collusion? No one could see it, but the gut feeling was that it really was there. I was still open to seeing empirical evidence, but they had to show it to me and the rest of the world.

 

Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is just circumstantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them, and we didn’t know.

 

But now the evidence is shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This started with an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself.  It had been written that there was a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election.  Then an old business connection proposed a Trump Jr. meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, it was stated that the Kremlin itself was willing to share through this supposed Russian attorney, troves of incriminating Hillary documents from a Russian Prosecutor General.

 

Donald Jr. emailed back. “I love it.” Those could be fatal words as that would definitely be a level of collusion

 

Once an American has said “I’m in,” it then makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, or that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought that he was going to get in the meeting, as well as what Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort expected, who were forwarded this same correspondence.  They were invited to the meeting, and they attended knowing what was offered.

 

Donald Jr. has said “It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.”

 

But we have now learned that there was information passed to the attendees and in more of their drip, drip, drip, it was belatedly stated that there was a former Russian counterintelligence individual in attendance and a Russian translator.  The main point that the Russians learned from the meeting was that, the Trump campaign at very high levels was open to dealing with the Russians for info on Hillary Clinton.  A point that would put them all in a seriously compromising position.  Three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play, and it may turn out that they did collaborate more fruitfully. We really don’t know yet, but even if nothing else is found, the evidence of having the meeting is very damning.

 

Yes, Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity it was ”a shame”.  On the contrary, it may have been a stroke of luck. If the Russian lawyer or the other attendees did deliver real stuff, Donald Jr. and the others will be in far deeper legal trouble. It is already incompetent collusion, and amateur collusion, but comically failed collusion?  Maybe not.

 

It’s pathetic to hear the Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other people’s elections, and they in ours.

 

You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power. One might even add the work of groups supported by the US during Russian parliamentary elections, the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Hillary Clinton, then a US Secretary of State, whom Putin accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trump-ites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: “Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.” There is nothing left of their credibility, if there was any, when they make such a total 180 degree about-face?

 

And besides, “No.......not everyone does it.”

 

It is one thing to be open to “opposition research” dug up somewhere in the US. But not in getting your dirt on the opposition directly from Russia.  Who just happens to be a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors like Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine.  A hostile nation that also buzzes our planes and ships while in international waters, and one that opposes our every US move and objective around the globe.  It was just last week the Kremlin killed additional UN sanctions the US was looking to impose on North Korea for its latest ICBM test.

Yes, that same hostile nation of Russia.

 

Unfortunately, there is no actual statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election.  What Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort did may in fact, not be criminal. But it is not just totally stupid, it is so deeply wrong, and a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.  It’s degusting that these so called “American patriots” actually were open to accepting help from a foreign hostile power and thinking the Russians were trying to “help with no other ulterior motives”.  Give me a break!

 

They obviously didn’t consider that they could be seriously compromised and could have been easily threatened after having such a meeting with the Russians.  That’s more than being just stupid.  That’s totally pathetic.

 

The lawyers will eventually deal with the legalities of whether it will be considered real “collusion” with a foreign adversary. 

 

But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump on-going defense of “collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election”, that defense is now officially dead.

 

The reality is that Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn could all be end up being in very deep do-do when the Special Counsel Robert Mueller is done with his very deep investigation.

 

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