David Frum: Trump's Astonishing Confession

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/trump-says-hed-accept-foreign-electoral-aid/591577/

Trump’s Astonishing Confession
The president said he would accept information from foreign countries if it were to help his presidential campaign.
Jun 12, 2019
David Frum

snip//

“There’s nothing wrong with listening,” he told George Stephanopoulos. “If somebody called from a country, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ I think I’d want to hear it.”

This confession carries heavy implications, starting with the question of whether Donald Trump Jr. lied to Congress when he denied telling his father in advance about the famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in which he believed that a representative of the Russian government would be offering dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report found that the Donald Trump campaign desperately wished to collude with Russian intelligence—but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone in the campaign had actually done so. But after three years and the special counsel’s investigation? Trump acknowledges that he would do it all again, if given the chance.

Will he be given the chance, whether by Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi or Israel or Pakistan—or, for that matter, any number of foreign non-state actors, legitimate or criminal, with intelligence-gathering capabilities?

Yoni Appelbaum argued in an important cover story for The Atlantic in favor of opening an impeachment inquiry into the president. I worried some weeks later on this site about the political and institutional risks of proceeding down that path. But Trump himself gets a vote; Trump himself forces the hands even of those who might wish to restrain the hands. He is such an institution-wrecker—his instincts are so lawless—that he may simply refuse to allow Congress not to impeach him.

Confessing a willingness to collaborate with foreign spies against his domestic political opponents is a hand-forcing move. The risks of proceeding are still there. But the risks of not proceeding? Trump just forced us all to confront them in the most aggressively public possible way.

[Tanuki]

1. Frum also has a long and ver good twitter thread on the distinction between

Trump's criminal behavior and legit opposition research:

Link to tweet

[babylonsister]

2. Thanks for that, Tanuki.