The Russia House

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials." (emphasis mine), The New York Times,  January 11, 2019

There are several scenarios that are so outlandish and horrifying to the American mind that they belong solely in the realm of spy fiction or "Truther" websites: Among them, the US government pulling off 9/11; JFK's assassination was carried out by the CIA and the Bushes; That Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons.

     Many of these and others are pure rubbish, to put it charitably, and belong in the gauzy, semi-plausible world of fiction and conspiracy theory websites. But now we're faced with another, one that has absolutely no currency with the birther/QAnon/Deplorable crowd- That Donald Trump is a real-life Manchurian Candidate who'd conspired and colluded with Russia to win the presidency. Or that he was an unwitting dupe or a "useful idiot" as the Soviets famously put it.

     To be fair to the red hat NASCAR/WWE crowd, neither are appetizing scenarios.

     There's just one problem with this particular "conspiracy theory": Robert Mueller.

     Looking at the infamously hermetic Mueller investigation from the outside is like looking at a tapestry from the back: All we see are the loose threads and muddy colors and are left almost entirely to our imagination and amateur deductive reasoning as to what really happened between Trump Tower and the Kremlin. What we don't have is the unbroken thread through this particular Minotaur's lair and the film noir smoking gun (or smocking gun, if you're Donald Trump).

     Yet the promise of a judicial guillotining was strengthened over the weekend with one bombshell after another that only began with the NY Times revealing the Justice Department had begun a counterintelligence investigation on "President" Donald Trump right after FBI Director's James Comey's firing on May 9, 2017, an act of which Trump was bragging to high level Russian officials in the Oval Office the very next day (After kicking out all western media and leaving just the Russian state-run TASS to take pictures of Trump's bowing and scraping to then Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and Foreign Minister Lavrov.).

     It continued into Saturday with the WaPo breaking the news that Trump had confiscated his own interpreter's notes after meeting with Putin in Hamburg and kept the details from his own aides and advisors. It continued into Sunday with Max Boot, again of the WaPo, methodically laying out a case for Trump being that fabled Manchurian Candidate for the Russians. Then on Tuesday, the NY Times took center stage again by revealing a bizarre phone call between Trump and Putin aboard Air Force One in which Trump privately assured Putin that he dismissed his own intelligence agencies and "that the Russians were falsely accused of election interference."

     After digesting all that, the news that once professional "fixer" Michael Cohen was acting on the direction of Trump during the campaign to bribe the CIO of Liberty University with $50k to skew polling data to favor Trump was almost met with a yawn and a shrug. If this steady drip drip drip of limited leaks qualifies as exquisite torture, then the ancient Chinese couldn't have done it any better. And, after this nearly two year-long edging, tens of millions of us are looking forward to a blissfully huge, sheet-soaking ejaculation of jurisprudence.

The House of Putin

With a congenital liar like Donald Trump squatting in the Oval Office, everything he says and does can be very readily applied to a moral allegory. Witness the MSG and polyunsaturated fat orgy he'd prepared for the undefeated Clemson Tigers after they'd won the national college football championship. It could easily be said that the gaudy repast that he'd recycled as a White House dinner was a flawless symbol or synecdoche of Trump's every statement being junk food for the undiscriminating mind. In the end, Trump couldn't even be honest about the number of "hamberders" that were offered. 300 instantly ballooned to 1000 and just as instantly deflated back down to 300 by the White House staff. It was such an embarrassing publicity stunt that Alinea's, a Michelin-rated three star restaurant, had to step in and offer the players real food that was denied them by Trump's White House.

     And the high fat, low nutrition contents of Trump's mind has kept an already fat, flabby and complacent American Deplorable mind fat, flabby and complacent with endless denunciations of "No collusion!" and wearisomely calling the Mueller investigation "a witch hunt". But, just with the diversionary tactic of shutting down a quarter of the government over a wall that most Americans don't want, when it comes to the Mueller investigation, Trump has no wiggle room. Because even looking at that shaggy and drab backside of that tapestry, we're increasingly led to one of two conclusions- That Trump either colluded with the Russians or was an oblivious dupe.

     Even with what relatively little we know, it seems there's absolutely no possibility for innocence except if being a clueless boob in service to the Russians can be considered "innocence."

     Which is not a trait one would expect or honestly hold in high esteem in a presidential candidate.

     One of the greatest public misconceptions of the Mueller probe is that Trump campaign aides were approached by Russian bad actors. In fact, the FBI, despite Trump's one man propaganda campaign against them, initially sought to shield him and his campaign from those bad actors. That's what counterintelligence operatives do- Counter the efforts of foreign entities that have unsavory designs on our democracy.

     But then on May 9, 2017, Donald Trump made perhaps what will be ultimately the costliest mistake of his purloined presidency and that was firing James Comey. Then bragging about it to the Russians, calling Comey "a nut job" to the Russian Foreign Minister just before giving them top secret Israeli intelligence. And just like that, Trump went from being a target of the Russians to a target of the FBI. Suddenly, in their whip-lashed minds, Trump went from being a democratically-elected American president to a possible stooge of the Russian government.

     They already had the stage set for such an investigation: Two Russian mobsters were already doing their nefarious business as residents of Trump Tower with Bayrock's convicted mobster, Felix Sater, a more regular feature at the Kremlin-on-the-Hudson than fake Time covers at Trump's country clubs.

     And when one ties up all the loose ends of the back of that tapestry, one sees a slowly rendering picture of a man so obsessed with power that he allowed himself to be leveraged by an enemy government by taking a $100,000,000 loan from them, allowing his campaign to be practically staffed by Russian agents, hosting meetings between Russian agents and his own namesake, son in law and campaign chair and all the other troubling and disturbing revelations, one has to ask a Trump dead-ender:

     Since there's no longer any possibility of plausible innocence, which would you prefer: A president who'd colluded with a foreign power to overturn our very electoral system, the bedrock of our democracy, or one who was too stupid and oblivious to know he was being exploited by said power?