History on the line as we wait with bated breath
No matter
what Attorney General William Barr reveals — or doesn’t —about Special Counsel
Robert Mueller’s report, everything Congress needed to know about Donald Trump
and Russia was already clear as follows:
October 7, 2016: The Washington Post reported on the Access
Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women by the pu**y.
That shock battered the campaign. Even then GOP Speaker
of the House Paul Ryan declared publicly that he was sickened by Trump and he canceled a joint appearance
with him, and declined to answer whether he still supported the Trump
candidacy.
Less than one hour later, same date: WikiLeaks dumped its largest and
most damaging trove of hacked emails to and from Democratic operatives. It
included two emails sent years before to the future Hillary Clinton campaign chairman
John Podesta. The messages criticized the teachings of the Catholic Church on
women and sexuality. The Trump campaign instantly seized on them as proof of
the Clinton campaign’s supposed anti-Catholic animus—a useful weapon to help
erase memories of Trump’s Twitter attacks on the pope earlier in 2016.
That huge dump took a while to be analyzed and
absorbed. It did not immediately displace the salacious Access Hollywood story
from the top of the news.
Second week of October 2016: WikiLeaks was profoundly engaging
the U.S. voting public. Using the Google Trends tool, the website Five Thirty
Eight tracked how public interest in the hacked emails surged.
Not coincidentally, it seems, Clinton’s poll lead over Trump peaked on October
17, and steadily shrank thereafter.
FBI Director
James Comey’s October 28 letter reopening the Clinton email case delivered the
final blow to the reeling Clinton campaign. This timeline is one thing to keep
in mind as details emerge from the Mueller report.
Agents purporting to represent Putin’s Russia
approached the Trump campaign in June 2016 via Donald Trump, Jr. asking him
whether their help would be welcome, to provide “Dirt on Hillary Clinton” to which
Jr. replied: “If it’s what you say I love it especially
later in the summer.”
Trump himself then publicly
welcomed that help saying in part: “I love WikiLeaks!”
That is solid political science that this help from Russia via WikiLeaks
was crucial, possibly decisive, to Trump’s success in the Electoral College in
November 2016.
Mueller was
asked to investigate how much the Trump campaign knew in advance about this
Russian help. Along the way, the special counsel also apparently became
interested in the question of why Putin was so eager for a Trump presidency.
Did Putin have some kind of prior hold over Trump, financial or otherwise?
For two years,
Americans and the world have speculated and argued about the inquiry. But along
the way, we have often lost sight of the core truth of the Trump presidency: For all its many dark secrets,
there have never been any real mysteries about the Trump-Russia story that is: The
president of the United States was helped into his job by clandestine Russian
attacks on the American political process.
That core truth is surrounded by other disturbing
probabilities, such as the likelihood that Putin even now is exerting leverage
over Trump in some way.
Related from The Atlantic in May 2017: It’s very possible
that Trump himself broke no criminal law in accepting campaign help from Putin.
This ultra-legalistic nation expects wrongdoing to take the form of
prosecutable crimes — and justice to occur in a courtroom. Many wrongs are not
crimes. And many things that are crimes are not prosecutable for one reason or
another — for instance, when a statute of limitations expires.
Finally: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has
served our country by advancing the inquiry into Trump-Russia at a time when
Trump’s enablers in Congress sought to cover up for him.
Now since
the 2018 midterm elections, Congress has regained its independence and can
recover its integrity. Mueller’s full
report will surely inform and enlighten Americans about many details of what
exactly happened in 2016.
The lack of
further indictments by Mueller underscores that the job of protecting the
country against the Russia-compromised Trump presidency belongs to Congress. It
always did.
My 2 cents: This is an excellent and detailed
analysis of what we have learned since early 2016 – God only knows what occurred
prior to that election.
My suggestion: Stay tuned and follow the facts of the
money. That is the key to all this bet on it.
Thanks for stopping by.
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