First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.
What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?
Second, no, not everyone does it. There is no statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election.
What Donald Jr. — and Kushner and Manafort — did may not be criminal. But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.
Charles Krauthammer
Bungled Collusion is Still Collusion
Washington Post, 7/14/2017
Dear Friends,
The pattern has been established. The list of principals expands, sometimes hourly. The certainty and gravity of the offenses grows. And the end is not in sight.
Monday’s ‘nothing burger’ becomes Tuesday’s ‘whopper.’ And when authoritative reporting documents the facts, they are assigned to one of two rhetorical bins in the White House lexicon: ‘fake news’ or ‘greatest witch hunt.’
We cannot know whether this week’s flurry of evidence about a single meeting at Trump Tower with an operative of the Russian government in June 2016 was a one-off, or one among others about which information may soon be unearthed. Nor can we know what outcomes it might have produced, as today’s newest revelations demonstrate. In short, we have no reason to trust anything that comes out of the mouths of Donald Trump or his surrogates.
So, let’s go back a few days.
On July 8th, the New York Times reported:
“Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
“The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.”
The Times’ story also noted:
Representatives of Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Kushner confirmed the meeting after The Times approached them with information about it. In a statement, Donald Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program. The statement did not address whether the presidential campaign was discussed.
On Sunday, July 9th, appearing on Fox News Sunday, White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, declares the story a ‘nothing burger:’
“It was a nothing meeting,” Priebus said. “I don’t know much about it other than it seems to be on the end of the Trump individuals a big nothing burger but may spin out of control for the [Democratic National Committee] and the Democrats.”
On Tuesday, July 11th, responding to a heads-up from the Times that it would publish copies of the email chain documenting the meeting and its purpose — i. e., to obtain ‘damaging information’ on Hillary Clinton from a representative of the Russian government — Donald Trump, Jr. released it on Twitter with a stated intent to be ‘totally transparent.’
But one man’s ‘transparency’ is another’s ‘obfuscation cum opacity.’ To wit:
- NBC News broke a story today revealing the participation of a fifth person in the Trump Tower meeting, hardly a ‘nothing burger’ participant:
“A meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer in June 2016 was also attended by a Russian-American lobbyist who was a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer, NBC News reported on Friday.
“The lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, confirmed he had attended the meeting, the Associated Press reported without providing further details.
“NBC News, who did not identify him, said he had denied any current ties to Russian spy agencies but had served in the Soviet military before emigrating to the United States, where he holds dual citizenship.”
- Following on the NBC story, the Daily Beast made this report:
“The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the now-infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy.
“Rinat Akhmetshin told the Associated Press on Friday he accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to the June 9, 2016 meeting . . .
“Akhmetshin’s presence at Trump Tower that day adds another layer of controversy to an episode that already provides the clearest indication of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In the run-up to that rendezvous, Donald Trump Jr. was promised “very high level and sensitive information” on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
[Note: As of mid-afternoon on July 14, the number of participants in the fabled Trump Tower meeting last June is up to eight]
- Members of the Trump administration cabinet and staff have demonstrated a curious amnesia about contacts with foreign officials in Congressional testimony and on security clearance forms.
We begin with Jared Kushner and a July 14th report from CBS News:
“President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner updated a federal disclosure form needed to obtain a security clearance three times and added more than 100 names of foreign contacts through the updates after initially providing none at all, reports CBS News' Major Garrett.
“The first form had no foreign names on it even though people applying for a security clearance need to list any contact with foreign governments. Kushner's team said it was prematurely sent.
“Then the team submitted the second one after they updated it with all of the names except for one — the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnetskaya . . .
“After omitting her name in the second form, that meeting was then conveyed to the FBI in the third revamping of the form before July.”
And now, presumably, Kushner will need to update the form to include Rinat Ahkmenshin. All in good time, of course.
Add to Kushner’s propensity for Trumpian transparency, this story from the July 14th Washington Post:
“The Justice Department on Thursday released a single redacted page from Attorney General Jeff Session’s security clearance form from November that indicated he had not had any contact with a foreign government official in the past seven years.
“That contradicts his later admission that he had met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, twice last year. At the time, Sessions was a U.S. senator and an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The meetings occurred in July and September.
“Sessions’s omission may not be a violation of security clearance rules as long as the contacts occurred in his capacity as a lawmaker, U.S. officials say. But other experts say he should have erred on the side of transparency.
Before we leave this landscape of tattered transparency and the accumulation of shards showing collusion with Russian interests, although not yet conspiracy, we will note there is growing scrutiny on the question of how Russians were able to so successfully target American political precincts and voter cohorts with their disinformation campaign. It seems apparent that targeting could only have come from those with the most sophisticated data analytics. Newsweek and other sources are investigating whether that source might be a domestic resource and whether it may have connections to the Trump campaign.
http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians-target-dem-voters-kushners-help-613612
This is another story that bears watching.
A closing thought.
There is no joy in undertaking the research required to follow the trajectory of the 45th presidency. And there is certainly no satisfaction from observing how the dots connect, how they proliferate, and how they lead to subterranean, surreptitious places most American never thought another presidency might travel.
But there is a civic duty to be honored here. Each of us can choose to exercise that in whatever way best suits our interests, resources, and strengths.
The majority of Americans did not wish for this 45th presidency, but we have it. Tens of millions did, or at least saw it as preferable to the alternative. This is an unhealthy bifurcation in an already uber-polarized polity, and the distressing truth is that as distasteful as POTUS 45’s antics are, as destructive as they are to the framework of our long-established alliances, and as hapless as POTUS’ shared leadership with Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker Ryan are proving to be, there is the possibility that their failure might ultimately serve a larger national purpose — of forcing Americans to understand what happens when partyism and opponent derangement trump the real national interest.
So, as Pogo observed decades ago, we know who the enemy is: our task is to see what we can do about ourselves. And if we can begin to redirect our deeply divisive trajectory, perhaps some smart political leader will come along and get out ahead of the parade.
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