The Trumps Need to Keep Talking

     Just about the only good thing we can say about the verbal diarrhea of the Trumps is that, like a nugget of gold in a pile of ore, once in a while they'll reward us by shooting themselves in the foot. They do this for two reasons: They think they're above the law and, as with their father, the unholy trio of spawn that's currently running wild on Capitol Hill when they're not jet-setting to China to Trump-brand massage parlors and prostitution services is just plain stupid. At the very least, the four elder Trumps are bereft of the common sense that Mother Nature invested in the common recluse spider.
     Because as it turns out, on June 9th last year, Donald Trump, Jr, Jared Kushner and soon to be anointed Trump campaign chairman Paul "Show me the rubles!" Manafort sat in with a meeting of a Kremlin-affiliated lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. Trump Jr had been contacted by this Russian agent and lured in with the promise of some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Then when he got there, he found out they didn't have shit on her. Nothing worth mentioning, anyway.
     It was the classic Russian Trap. Just as every chess player knows about the variations of the Sicilian traps and are trained to spot them before placing themselves into one, so those versed in geopolitics know enough not to fall into this classic bait and switch game.

     Long after the fact and right after the revelation this meeting had occurred, Junior sarcastically sneered on Twitter that he was "the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting about an opponent." No, he wasn't. But it was the first documented case of a presidential campaign official (in this case, three) to take such a meeting about an opponent from an agent of a hostile nation.
     It betrays desperation on both sides- The Trumpers were desperate for any dirt on Hillary Clinton as she was rolling to a Democratic nomination and the Russians were nervously sniffing around for the latest on the lifting of the Obama-era sanctions on their country.
     It was bad enough when the news broke last spring of Kushner's undisclosed meeting with Sergey Kislyak and an official of an Obama-sanctioned bank, which Kushner had deliberately omitted from his SF86 form (the form administration officials need to fill out to obtain security clearances). Lying or failing to disclose meetings with foreign officials over the last seven years is a federal felony that should result in arrest and jail time for those breaching that law. Now, with this meeting with Veselnitskaya that Kushner also attended (and also elected to hide on the SF86), the case to arrest him gets stronger.
     And as Olbermann's people at GQ discovered, that very same day that Junior had the meeting with the Kremlin-linked lawyer, Trump started tweeting about Hillary's missing 33,000 emails (followed up by, the month after, an open call for the Russians to hack Camp Clinton (this, coming from the guy who's flat-out refused to release 20 years of tax returns).
     Just another log for Robert Mueller to grimly but efficiently throw on the pile of others. It's a smoldering mess that will eventually erupt and consume this entire corrupt palimpsest of an administration.