Bungled Collusion Is Still Collusion...By Charles Krauthammer

[mystery-ak]

 Bungled Collusion Is Still Collusion
Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails discredit the ‘nothingburger’ argument the president’s supporters have been advancing for months.
By Charles Krauthammer — July 13, 2017

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 circumstantial 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.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/449481/print

[Jazzhead]

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an e-mail 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 documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a State Prosecutor.)

Donald Jr. e-mails 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 copied on 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.

There may or may not be a legal issue here, but it is trumped by the moral issue that's shouting from the rooftops:   Junior (and, it appears, Kushner and Manefort) were willing to entertain the possibility of working with information provided by the Russian government in order to win the election.   How is that not profoundly disturbing to each and every member of this forum?   

And not just from the standpoint of colluding with a foreign adversary.   That e-mail that Junior jumped on appears to have been a set up,  for the purpose of creating a clear trail of willingness-to-collude that could be used to blackmail the Trump administration.   From that perspective, it's good that Junior released it to get it out in the open.  But now the sordid situation is out there as political fodder for Trump's domestic enemies. 

[EasyAce]

http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,271671.0.html