What If It's All True?

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/and-it-was-all-true/533265/

What If It's All True?

For months, President Trump and his aides have insisted that any suggestion of collusion with Russia was bogus. But if the Trump campaign was eager to receive information from the Russian government, what else might have happened?
David A. Graham
Jul 11, 2017 Politics


For months, rumors, innuendos, and allegations about collusion between the Trump campaign, the Trump administration, and the Russian government swirled around Washington, sometimes in great gushing floods, other times in lazy rivulets. Time and again, Donald Trump and his allies denied it. They said there was no contact before the election. They said that any meetings that were held were routine, or that campaign officials might not have known they were meeting with Russian officials. They pinned any misbehavior on low-level staffers and failed disclosures on honest oversights.

The most far-fetched claim of all was that the Trump campaign could have colluded with the Russian government. Donald Trump’s affection for Vladimir Putin could be explained away by his admiration for authoritarians, his ignorance of foreign affairs, and an opportunistic chance to hurt both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Apparent Russian hacking targeting John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee made sense given Putin’s hatred of Clinton and desire to disrupt the American election. But the notion of actual attempts to work together seemed implausible to even many of Trump’s harshest critics—a liberal fever dream at best, a return to McCarthyist red-baiting at worst.

Yet with Donald Trump Jr.’s release of self-incriminating emails on Tuesday, the nation learned that the wildest of fantasies was all too real: Granted the chance to take what he believed to be damaging information about Hillary Clinton from a Russian government official, provided because the Kremlin wished to aid his father, Trump Jr. eagerly seized the opportunity. “If it’s what you say I love it,” he wrote to an intermediary. Not only that, but he brought along his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The disclosure of the emails raises a host of questions: Did anyone tell Donald Trump, and if so, when? (The White House and Trump’s attorneys both say he did not attend and was not aware.) Did lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya actually hand over any incriminating information at the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower? (Both she and Trump Jr. say she did not.) Why release documents that, according to some analysts, already implicate Trump Jr. in a federal crime? And why do it now?

snip//

If Trump really knew nothing about the June 9 meeting, one wonders what it was that he was so eager to suppress in his calls to the intel chiefs and his firing of James Comey. And as the collusion scenario that once seemed so implausible is verified by an email trail, which of the other allegations are true, too?

[onecaliberal]

1. Clearly it is all true. Remember all the times dump said something big was coming?

[MineralMan]

2. It's all true, and more...