‘These Are Not The Actions of an Innocent Man’
Trump’s after-the-fact complicity in Russia’s election meddling is abundantly clear.
.. Earlier, it may have been suggested, sympathetically, that
- the case had not yet been proven. That
- Trump’s vanity blocked him from acknowledging embarrassing facts. Or—more hopefully—that
- he was inspired by some Kissingerian grand design for a diplomatic breakthrough.
- Or that he was lazy. Or stubborn. Or uninformed. Or something, anything, other than … complicit. Not anymore.
.. his willingness to smash the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies in order to protect Putin, Russia
.. “Then you hear it’s 17 agencies [who agree that Russia meddled in the elections], whoa, it’s three. And one is [former CIA Director John] Brennan, and one is whatever. I mean give me a break, they’re political hacks. … So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with that.”
.. A year after the 2016 election, the Trump administration has done nothing to harden U.S. election systems against future interference
- .. It refuses to implement the sanctions voted by Congress to punish Russia for election meddling.
- The president fired the director of the FBI,
- confessedly to halt an investigation into Russia’s actions—and
- his allies in Congress and the media malign the special counsel appointed to continue the investigation.
These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.
.. In ways we cannot yet fully reckon—but can no longer safely deny—the man in the Oval Office has a guilty connection to the Russian government. That connection would bar him from literally any other job in national security except that of head of the executive branch and commander- in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.
.. It’s graver still at a time when this president seems determined to lead the United States into a preventive war in the Korean peninsula.