Originally Posted by
reagansghost
On Friday, the New York Times broke the news that the FBI investigation of Trump wasn’t just checking how many times his campaign touched based with the Kremlin (that would be, over 100 times). Nope. The FBI was checking out whether Donald Trump was a genuine, honest to Stalin, asset working for the Russian state against the interests of the United States. It’s a story so big, that even the FBI agents investigating the idea were freaked out by it. And it was really this aspect of the investigation that made Rod Rosenstein throw up his hands and pass the whole hot mess to Robert Mueller.
So … yeah. At the end of a week when we learned that Donald Trump’s campaign manager traveled to Europe, met secretly with a Russian operative, negotiated over the fate of US ally, and handed over inside polling data from the Trump campaign because for some reason that stuff had a high value to the Russian government, that turned out to not be the big news.
On Saturday, the Washington Post chimed in to report that, sure enough, the investigation into Trump includes “a counterintelligence component to determine if the president was seeking to help Russia.” Eye-popping as all this may seem, this whole thing was kind of implicit from the beginning. After all, as the Associated Press might say, it takes two to conspire. If Russia was pitching in to help Donald Trump—and there’s zero doubt they were—then … why? Sure, Trump’s an incompetent ass, and having him in a position of power is a win for Russia all by itself, but how much of Trump’s incompetence, his divisiveness, his racism and xenophobic, how much of his attacks on American allies and the rule of law is the result of simply being an idiot, and how much of it is following orders?
What does Vladimir Putin want from Donald Trump, and what has Trump promised to do? That’s a question that not even the top officials in Trump’s own White House can answer, because as the Washington Post also points out, Trump has hidden the contents of his talks with Putin from his own staff. That includes going to extraordinary steps like taking notes away from his own interpreter and “instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.” That’s when Trump didn’t meet with Putin without even a US interpreter present. Which happened. Remember, Donald Trump can still be an incompetent ass, and also be an active Russian asset. The two things are not necessarily incompatible.
In the old days, the Soviets used to promise turncoats in the West that there was an Order of Lenin waiting for them when they were eventually forced to defect. Sometimes they would even be shown pictures of “their” medal. Is there an “Order of Putin” now? Did Trump got to see his on that weekend visit to Moscow? After months of wondering if we’d ever get to see the pee tape, it’s probably going to turn out that what Trump did with prostitutes was the least embarrassing part of that trip.
~ Mark Sumner
Bookmarks