The Beginning Of The End
By
Leonard Zwelling
The end of the Trump Presidency has begun to roll out.
Even Mr. Trump has admitted that the meeting in Trump Tower in June of 2016 in which his son Donald, Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner participated was with Russians and was to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. It is my understanding that this constitutes a violation of election laws that keep foreign governments out of U.S. campaigns. Thus Mr. Trump has essentially admitted that his campaign colluded with the Russians for nefarious and illegal purposes and did so knowingly. The only real question is what did the candidate know and when did he know it. Sound familiar? It should. This is Watergate Redux. It is a presidential candidate sanctioning dirty tricks and then trying to cover them up.
This means several things.
First, Both Mr. Trump and his son have been lying about this meeting for months. It was not about adoption and it was collusion to undo the Democrats. Second, there has been collusion and what’s more, it might actually have been illegal. A group of Americans involved intimately with the Trump campaign met with a group of Russians for the purpose of undermining their opponent. That’s conspiracy and collusion with a foreign power in an American election, and, from what I read, that is illegal.
This is no longer about the moral relativism involved with meeting with the Russians. This is about the actual potentially criminal act, certainly worthy of Mr. Mueller’s activities, which are no witch hunt unless hunting for real witches is a bad idea. It’s not.
I think what we will learn as time progresses is that Mr. Trump DID know about this meeting BEFORE it took place and sanctioned it and even if he did not (or there is no evidence that he did) he actively tried to cover-up the purpose of the meeting, much as Mr. Nixon tried to do with the Watergate burglary.
It is also likely that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that Mr. Mueller will probably use Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial records to demonstrate that Mr. Trump was in the pocket of Russian oligarchs to whom he owed money. We will also learn that Mr. Trump is not all that rich and like Paul Manafort is walking a knife edge to maintain his lifestyle while actually being cash poor. (At least the plane is free to Trump now.)
This is going to get ugly before it is over and Mr. Trump knows it. He is slashing around at the media and Mr. Mueller trying to divert attention away from the truth that he is probably no where near as rich as he likes to make out and that he has committed serious crimes, covered up others and is beholden to some unsavory characters who are close to Vladimir Putin.
My guess is that Mr. Mueller will let this play out for a while before he makes his final report after the November elections, and there is still a chance that Mr. Trump will fire Rod Rosenstein and install some toady as the Deputy AG who will be asked to fire Mueller. Congress will not do the right thing and protect Mueller with an extra layer of bureaucratic insulation, but this investigation won’t stop.
Trump is toast. The final acts have yet to be played out, but they will be. Have faith. The die is cast.
