It’s all happening so fast. It’s easy to be overwhelmed. One minute, Kid Rock, in what we can hope is just a bid to sell a few thousand more of his ridiculous “dumbfuckistan” t-shirts, announces a bid to take on Debbie Stabenow for the Senate, and, the next thing you know, Caitlyn “just because she’s transsexual doesn’t mean she can’t also be a reprehensible human being” Jenner, is announcing that she might be following in his terrifyingly unqualified footsteps, because, you know, it’s just politics. It just never seems to end… this constant onslaught of stupidity… this army of idiots and con-men, emboldened by Trump, jumping in to fill the gaping void left open by the implosion of the Republican Party… With all of this going on, it’s hard to stay focused on the big picture. If we going to stop this slide into insanity, though, it’s what we have to do. If we’re going to ensure that this never happens again, we’ve not only got to get Trump out of office, but we’ve got to make him pay such a price that no human being in history ever attempts to do what he’s done again. And we have to be sure that his followers come to see the truth, or, at the very least, slink quietly back into the shadows, never to be heard from again, like all those Germans who cheered on Hitler to victory in the 1930s.
As for how we get there, I’m not so sure. But I have to think there’s a path that will get us back on a path to sanity. We just have to work together to find it.
The good news, as we’ve been discussing, is we’ve finally got something to work with. A narrative is coming into focus – one that we can share with others – one that explains exactly how all of this came about, and why.
We now know that, in early June, 2016, just after Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination, an email was sent to his son Donald Trump Jr., alerting him to the fact that Russia not only supported his father’s candidacy against Clinton, but wanted to help him defeat the former Secretary of State. We know this because we’ve seen the emails between Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone, the intermediary in Russia, who had worked with the Trump organization in 2013 to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. [Goldstone, as I understand it, helped secure the financing for the event, by bring in a Russian oligarch by the name of Aras Agalarov, who agreed to put the money up in exchange for letting his son, a pop singer by the name of Emin, headline the soul-crushingly hollow tit and ass parade.] These emails, as everyone who gets their news from sources other than Fox News and Breitbart now knows, included phrases like “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump” [Goldstone] and “I love it” [Trump].
We also know that Trump Jr. apparently took this offer of help very seriously. Just six days after the initial email from Goldstone offering assistance from the Kremlin, people were flying in from Russia, not just to meet with Trump’s eldest son, but also his son-in-law and confidant Jared Kushner, and his ascending campaign manager Paul Manafort, who, just a few months later, as you’ll recall, left the campaign, when his extensive ties to Vladimir Putin became public, threatening to kill Trump’s chances in the general election. [We’ve heard since from sources within the intelligence community that, last summer, communications were intercepted between Russian intelligence officials discussing how Manafort could be used to influence Trump. And, today, as coincidence would have it, news just broke that New York prosecutors have subpoenaed Manafort’s bank records.]
Donald Trump Jr., of course, denied that any of this happened, at least at first. For months, he denied vehemently that there had been any meetings with the Russians, and only came clean once the emails noted above were forwarded to the New York Times by an anonymous source within the White House. And, even then, he first lied about the content of the meeting, saying that he and the Russian woman he’d met with, whose name he didn’t even know, had only talked about the possibility of once again making Russian orphans available for U.S. adoptions. [The adoption program had been closed in response to sanctions imposed against Russia by the Obama administration.]
Sean Spicer said in a press conference today, that “there was nothing (about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians) that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for (a) discussion about adoption,” but that doesn’t jive with the information known thus far about what was promised in advance, what Donald Jr. has already admitted to, or the fact that Manafort and Kushner were brought into the meeting. [One doesn’t have to have experience running presidential campaigns to know that the top three people working for a candidate don’t typically drop everything to attend meetings about international adoption policy.]
At any rate, there was a meeting between Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Kremlin attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rob Goldstone, a person described as an interpreter, and least two other people, who those in the meeting, at least at first, refused to name. While the eighth member of the meeting is still unknown, we’ve since learned that the seventh was a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer by the name of Rinat Akhmetshin, who, as coincidence would have it, just happens to have an aptitude for hacking. [Akhmetshin claims to have just dropped by the meeting on a whim, as he happened to be in the area, but it seems unlikely.] Here, in case you missed it, is how the news concerning his identity broke.
NBC EXCLUSIVE: A Russian-American lobbyist—a fmr Soviet counter-intel officer was also in Don Jr./Russian lawyer mtg pic.twitter.com/6EmikNzsh0
— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) July 14, 2017
While it’s unclear that a quid pro quo was established at this meeting, the circumstantial evidence would appear to confirm that some kind of agreement was struck, in which the Russians would work to actively to discredit Clinton and assist in Trump voter suppression efforts in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against their country and the passing of legislation more friendly to Putin and his cronies in Russian organized crime… Just after the meeting concluded, as I suspect you may have heard, Trump began, for the first time, talking about Clinton’s deleted emails and the possibility that they might somehow surface. And, as you’ll recall, about a month later, at the Republican National Convention, the only addition the Trump campaign had to the GOP platform was the stopping of support to those in Ukraine fighting against the Russian military… Oh, and then, this past May, Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly settled a money laundering case being handled on behalf of Russian organized crime figures by our old friend Natalia Veselnitskaya. The case, which had been filed by US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara in 2013, according to Foreign Policy magazine, “alleged that 11 companies were involved in a tax fraud in Russia and then laundered a portion of the $230 million they got into Manhattan real estate.” [I’ll leave the discussion of Russian money laundering by way of Trump properties for another occasion.]
So, stay with me here… On March 10, Donald Trump fired Preet Bharara, and, then, on May 12, Sessions, without warning, settled the $230 million case that Bharara had been handling for less than $6 million… It kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Well, as you might imagine, the 17 Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee would like to know more about this case… Here, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is a clip from their letter to Jeff Sessions, demanding answers.
You might think that the Attorney General of the United States would be anxious to help in an inquiry regarding a money laundering racket being run on American soil by a hostile foreign nation that the FBI, NSA and CIA all feel confident worked to subvert our 2016 election, but apparently that’s not the case. Citing the importance of his “personal privacy,” Sessions has declined to disclose his contacts with Russians. And, it’s worth noting, he’s done this in violation of a court order. This, I should also add, comes after Sessions lied on his SF86 security clearance form by stating that “No,” he had not had any contact with foreign government officials in last seven years. Oh, and then there’s the matter of his lying under oath during his confirmation hearing, saying that he’d not had contact with anyone connected to the Russian government during 2016 election, when, in fact, he had… His end, I suspect, will come like Michael Flynn’s, who also denied talking to the Russians until tapes were apparently produced by the intelligence community… A fitting end, in my opinion, for the man who civil rights leader Coretta Scott King warned us back in ’86 was a threat to American voting rights. In the meantime, though, Sessions will keep looking for ways to take more cash and property from American citizens, while giving more cash and property back to members of the Russian mob.
I suppose it could all be a coincidence. It could be a coincidence that Flynn, Kushner, Trump Jr. and Sessions all just happened to forget their many interactions with Russians prior to the election. And maybe Trump sent his entire senior campaign staff to meet with a Russian delegation promising information harmful to Hilary Clinton because they somehow knew they’d really just be talking about the plight of Russian orphans, which is a cause that’s close to all of their hearts. And maybe it’s a coincidence that, while the President talks shit about every other global leader, he only praises Putin. And maybe there’s nothing to the fact that Sessions quietly settled that Russian money laundering case, and that the Trump campaign’s only contribution to the GOP platform in 2016 was that language about how we’d stop assisting those fighting against Russia, a country that, not too long ago, we used to refer to as the “evil empire.” And maybe the former Russian intelligence officer with a background in hacking, who Trump Jr. neglected to tell tell us was at that meeting, really did just happen to tag along with a friend, as he was in the area and had nothing better to do that day. And maybe there’s nothing to the news about how Kushner had sought a private back channel so that he could communicate with Moscow outside the established State Department channels. And, I suppose, the investigations into how the Trump campaign could have coordinated the strategic placement of fake news stories about Clinton with the Kremlin could lead nowhere. But, really, how likely do we think any of that is? I mean, the odds against all of those things just being coincidence is pretty astronomical, right? And I feel like more is coming. My sense is that it’s inevitable, that this administration has to completely unwind at some point. I mean, the alternative is unthinkable, but it’s more than just wishful thinking on my part, I think. There’s just too much smoke, and there’s more and more if it every day.
As I’ve told others, though, I suspect it would have been even worse if Trump had lost. I really believe that it would have been even uglier, with a sizable percentage of our fellow citizens thoroughly convinced that “Crooked Hillary” had “rigged” the election, and stolen the White House from Trump. I think it could well have torn the nation apart, and this cold civil war of ours could have quickly turned hot. At least now, we have an opportunity to work through this together in the light of day, and move forward. It’s just a question of how. How do we break through to the viewers of Fox News, InfoWars and Breitbart News, and convince them that it’s all been a con? How do you pull someone out of a world like that when they’ve been brainwashed for over a decade, told repeatedly that our last president was an America-hating Kenyan marxist, and that Hillary Clinton operated a child sex ring beneath a D.C. pizza parlor? And, more importantly, how do you ensure that it never happens again? Do models exist for the mass deprograming of entire populations? How was it done in Germany and Japan after WWII? How did we convince people to accept the truth of what had happened? The easiest way, I think, would involve a full confession from Trump… a complete retelling of the entire thing from his perspective, starting with the lies of birtherism, and going right through the campaign, admitting to every lie, and explaining to the American people how he conned them by stoking their fear and appealing to their most base instincts. I don’t think, however, that’s going to happen. So maybe we’d better start planning now for contingencies.
This isn’t, of course, to say that we should let up on the health care debate. We should continue to push back, build on our successes, and use it as an opportunity to talk with others Americans about the differences between our parties and our visions for the future. With that said, though, I don’t think we’ve got a chance of rolling back the Trumpification of American politics, and the army of con-men like Kid Rock in our future, without a clear focus on the Russia investigation. Health care is a battle. But Russia is the war. And, in my opinion, we have to proceed with that in mind. The attack on health care will be back. The Empire, as we know from Star Wars, will keep rebuilding the Death Star. The only way to end it once and for all is to get at the root from which all of this terrible stuff is growing, which is ignorance and fear. And the only way to do that, I’m convinced, is to wake the American people up to what’s been happening. And Russia, I think, is the key. It’s the story that shocks them into waking up. And we can’t let go of it, for even a minute.
