The art of the smear
M
ove along, nothing to see here — just a son and son-in-law of the presumed Republican nominee for President and his campaign chairman clearing time in their busy schedules last June to meet at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer bearing gifts.
Specifically: the emissary from abroad offered compromising information on presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the better for Donald Trump to bludgeon her. From where? Who cared? Not Don Trump Jr., who for months after denied ever meeting with Russians in connection with his father’s campaign. Only on Sunday did the New York Times force him to admit in the face of the facts, oh yeah, they had talked with some lady promoting adoptions of Russian children by U.S. parents.
Just hours later, Jr. had to further concede that smearing Clinton was the actual reason the meeting was scheduled.
Not Jared Kushner, who would proceed to omit contacts with foreign emissaries from the paperwork required for his White House security clearance as a top aide to the President — with a “whoops” once he, like Don Jr., got caught.
Not Paul Manafort, a longtime fixer for Ukrainian political leaders closely allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had failed to register as a foreign agent and would likely have well understood the implications of lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya’s Trump Tower pitch:
Putin had banned U.S. adoptions as retaliation against a U.S. law sanctioning Russia for grave human rights abuses. Any discussion of reopening adoptions would, sooner or later, have to touch on the sanctions themselves — passed by Congress in 2012 with bipartisan furor at the persecution and murder of those who dared stand up to Kremlin potentates.
With so much forgetting going on with this crew on the matter of their Russian affairs, it will fall to special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee to assist with the remembering.
Both are conducting dead-serious investigations into any ties the Trump campaign and transition may have had to Russian efforts to hack Democratic Party emails and disseminate propaganda smearing Clinton, with the intention of installing Trump in the White House.
However desperately Trump Jr. protests, taking to Twitter in flailing imitation of dad, it is no longer possible to deny or dispute that the three men in the room actively sought foreign help in obliterating the opposition.
Some dirty play of the sort signaled by the Trump Tower meeting could conceivably have been forgivable had Donald Trump and his transition responded with appropriate, Earth-shaking outrage once U.S. intelligence services publicly reached the unanimous conclusion after the election that the Russian government invaded U.S. computer servers, including those of state election agencies.
Instead, following months mostly disputing Russia’s responsibility, the President greeted Putin at Hamburg’s G-20 summit last week with a back slap and a shrug, capped with the preposterous idea their two nations could jointly thwart hackers.
It’s too late to call off the goons — but not for the Congress that used to care so much about Russia’s lawless ways to act with all appropriate outrage and force.