https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...fbf_story.html
Bungled collusion is still collusion
By Charles Krauthammer Opinion writer July 13 at 7:51 PM
The Russia scandal has entered a new phase, and there’s no going back.
For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.
Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is cir stantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them. We didn’t. Some of these were casual encounters in large groups, like the famous July 2016 Kislyak-Sessions exchange of pleasantries at the Republican National Convention. Big deal.
I was puzzled. Lots of coverup, but where was the crime? Not even a third-rate burglary. For six months, smoke without fire. Yes, President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the something.
My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.
The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating do ents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)
Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.
Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.
“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.
It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.
It’s rather pathetic to hear 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. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election? One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.
This defense is pathetic for two reasons. 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. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.
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.
I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.
Now that look like triggered.
when the surly blue bird from the muppets has turned on you, you know youre ed.
Triggered Pavs.
Only response to OP is laughy laugh and subject change.
Chucho triggered by word triggered.
Already lost it.
*ding*
Pavlov losing grip on schtick like Fascist Left lose elections.
OK, talk about article then.
Pretty airtight. All apologist can do is move goalposts now.
Dems not only did it but also initiated it with Ukraine.Second, no, not everyone does it.
Fusion GPS was paid by Dems to compile the Steele dossier. Two Russians at the meeting with Trump Jr worked with Fusion GPS. Meeting was a trap setup by Fusion GPS which implicates the Dems.
How do you spin that?
You only pretend be serious when triggered. Why so?
Until TSA get new marching orders, response to Trump/Russia issue be some combination of following:
He not able to explain any of it but still fun to ask him.
Then he make it personal.
False premise, but you still want talk about me and not article?
Great work by the DNC setting Uday, Cuckner, and Manafort up like that and then never going public with the smoking gun.
Krauthammer another cuck democrat blaming Russia for their loss in an election they should have won
Great work by the DNC setting Uday, Cuckner, and Manafort up like that and then never going public with the smoking gun.
The righties tighties turning on one of their own because he wrote an article calling the dear leader out.
yeah pretty ing stupid for them to wait until 8 months after the election to say gotcha
NO NO NO NO.
NYET.
It make perfect sense. TSA say so.
TSA have perfect explanation. Ask him.
Charles Krauthammer has not liked trump for day one
Wallace is the best person on fox by far
you say that like it's a bad thing
How would they go about doing that without a smoking gun of their own?
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