Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer says recent revelations make it abundantly clear that the Trump campaign sought to collude with Moscow amid last year's election.
"The evidence is now shown," Krauthammer wrote in a Thursday column in The Washington Post. "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."
Krauthammer said the meetings between Trump associates and Russian officials, some of which were casual encounters in large groups such as Republican National Convention, were circumstantial evidence at best but failed at first to point to any real crime.
He called defense of the "incompetent collusion" pathetic, saying that "Trump apologists" have been maintaining for six months that no collusion ever happened and then once evidence surfaced they began saying, "Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it."
"It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion," Krauthammer said. "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."
The newly revealed emails showing Trump Jr. setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer are what changed his view of Trump's team amid probes into possible ties between his campaign and Russia, Krauthammer said Tuesday on Fox News.
"I defended them, because up until today there was no 'there' there," he said. "Well now there is a 'there.'"
Krauthammer also recently broke with Trump's attack of "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski's physical appearance, criticizing the tweets on Fox News saying, "presidents don’t talk like this."
