With the release of Trump Jr.’s Russia emails, and plausible deniability significantly more difficult to come by, some Republicans are beginning to abandon ship

Yesterday, Drudge posted a link to a real news article about this on their front page, and today Fox News is actually addressing it. It does feel like the worm is turning a bit.

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/884977260293496837

Lindsay Graham and John McCain don’t count. They left the Republican Party years ago.

Yes, Trey seems to me to be a stand-up guy.

However, Goldstone was the guy who helped fabricate “Peegate”. He may be instigating dirty tricks for the DNC.

Conservative Max Boot: If Republicans do not start breaking with Trump “sooner rather than later, they will join him on the ash heap of history.”

Even if it was a sting operation (doubtful), Don Jr, Manafort and Kushner fell for it. And failed to report it.
Don Jr’s defense appears to be “I meant to collude, but then she wasn’t interested.”
And while it’s true that collusion with a foreign government is not illegal, lying under oath is. And trading favors for information from foreign governments is extremely illegal. Not proven yet, but it will be established soon enough.
What has been established, that should be of use legally is that the campaign had prior knowledge of the Russian efforts to influence the election.
What needs to be established conclusively is the degree of the Trump Organizations financial ties to Russia or any other ways in which Trump is compromised by their influence (aka peegate)
Then there is the tricky business of Trump revealing his own hand, or their being some trail that demonstrates he has lied about what he knew and when he knew it. I’mrelying on the intelligence community to establish that (Sorry Wobblie)
Everything is falling into place.

Bill Kristol, another Republican: “The emails exist. The meeting was not made up. And I’m inclined to believe, @realDonaldTrump, that you knew about it.”

What is clear to me is that Trump and his inner circle of dumbasses have no idea how to weave their way out of the messes they have gotten themselves into. They can blame Hillary, the DNC, Obama, Comey, fake news, and the media all they want. None of this will change the fundamental fact, however, that in Washington the chickens come home to roost.

Piss off the wrong people (as the Orange Menace seemed to take pride in during the campaign) and they will fuck you up, particularly the press, the FBI, the CIA, and anyone else who either has an axe to grind or cares enough about our country to risk their careers by ‘leaking’ information that will add fuel to the smoldering fire.

As Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men” … Deep Throat: Look, forget the myths the media’s created about the White House–the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand …

In the famous words of Walter Sobchak “Donnie, you’re out of your element”.

Also, something new from Bill Kristol.

“WHOA. Don Jr.’s false statement Sat. was drafted by WH aides & seen by Trump. This wasn’t Jr being dopey. This was an attempted WH cover-up.”

Another conservative has seen the light.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Here is a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump: Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it.

This was true of clients and contractors and creditors throughout his business career. It was true of the sycophants and opportunists before whom he dangled cabinet appointments during the campaign and then, oh, never mind. It has been true of his cabinet members and spokesmen, whose attempts to defend and explain their boss’s conduct are gleefully undercut by the boss himself. And it should be true — for the sake of their souls, I sincerely hope it’s true — of the Republican leaders whose reputations for probity and principle he has stomped all over since winning their party’s nomination.

And now it’s true of me.

The benefit of the doubt I extended to Trump was limited, but on a rather important subject: I thought that direct collusion between his inner circle and Russian officialdom during the 2016 campaign was relatively unlikely and the odds of ever finding proof of such a conspiracy vanishingly low. A lot of weirdness around Trump and Russia, I argued, had a more normal explanation — he had made business deals with Russians, he still harbors a 1980s-era vision of superpower cooperation, and as a foreign-policy neophyte he clutched the idea of détente like a security blanket even as the Russians separately made moves to help him win.

You can read my argument in full here; it’s a mere six weeks old. It’s also no longer operative, because we know now that Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and his campaign manager all took a meeting in which it was explicitly promised that damaging information on Hillary Clinton would be supplied as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/trump-russia-collusion.html