THE BIG SQUID AND HIS CAPTIVE

 

“All roads with you lead to Putin.”

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi uttered those damning words on October 16, 2019, in a White House meeting, while standing and pointing across the table to the then-President of the United States. The photograph is iconic, and the statement was 100% valid.

While the rationale for the Trump-Putin connection remains as yet unclear, the validity of the Pelosi statement is now verified.

There never was any doubt that Russia worked hard to get Trump elected in 2016.  Mueller explained in his report that he found that the Russian government extended great energy toward electing Trump, told the Trump campaign it was doing so, and the campaign readily, indeed happily accepted Putin’s effort. But Mueller, the reluctant prosecutor, declined to bring criminal charges against the Trump campaigners because “collusion” was not a crime, and he did not think he could meet the legal test of proving a criminal conspiracy. 

Later in the Trump presidency, the United States intelligence services apparently pierced the Putin curtain and were able to see what Russia was doing in connection with our 2020 presidential election. The report has just been declassified. Surprise, surprise, under the personal direction of Vladimir Putin, Russian intelligence services worked diligently to reelect Trump. Using proxies (read Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani), they attempted to feed the American public anti--Biden misinformation. During the campaign, our intelligence services informed the president this was happening. The result? The Trump administration let loose its own campaign of misinformation: Trump appointees William Barr, the Atty. Gen. of the United States, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State of the United States, and John Ratcliffe the Director of National Intelligence of the United States all adopted the same plan of misdirection: they pointed to China, not Russia, as the malefactors, despite our intelligence agencies’ conclusion that China had decided, for its own reasons, to stay out of this campaign.

Really now, should anybody be surprised that this president, who holds what is perhaps the world’s record for telling lies, had appointed sycophants who didn’t hesitate to tell lies in support of their boss?

Yesterday’s release of this latest intelligence report is, I suggest, just one more stride down the path that leads to Trump’s ultimate political irrelevancy.

We still don’t know the nature of the tentacles that hold Trump so firmly in Putin’s grasp. But four years is a long time, and our Intelligence services, Department of Justice, and State Department are now being managed by honest men and women. And there are grand juries at both the federal and state levels that have the former president in their sights. Whether or not citizen Trump goes to jail, the corrosive effect of the facts to be found by these inquiries will chip away the  brass-colored paint on the idol that adorned the stage at the CPAC convention.

And who knows, maybe we’ll learn more about the Big Squid and his captive? 

A bientot.

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