Embattled Republican leaders trash Gov. Cuomo

Sunday Freeman columnist Alan Chartock discusses potential state of New York state races in 2018.

The Russia scandal has entered a new phase and there’s no going back.

For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.

Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is circumstantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them. We didn’t. Some of these were casual encounters in large groups like the famous July 2016 Kislyak-Sessions exchange of pleasantries at the Republican National Convention. Big deal.

I was puzzled. Lots of coverup, but where was the crime? Not even a third-rate burglary. For six months, smoke without fire. Yes, President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the something.

My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a State Prosecutor.)

Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.

Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were copied on the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other people’s elections, and they in ours. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election? One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?

Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.

There is no statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election. What Donald Jr. — and Kushner and Manafort — did may not be criminal. But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.

Charles Krauthammer is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have tried their best to soar gracefully above the raging dumpster fire that is the Trump administration. Unhappily for the handsome couple, gravity makes no allowances for charm.

Kushner, already reported to be a “person of interest” in the Justice Department probe of the Trump campaign, is arguably the individual with the most to lose from the revelation that the campaign did, after all, at least attempt to collude with the Russian government to boost Donald Trump’s chances of winning the election.

The president’s hapless eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — who convened the June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer for the purpose of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton — had no operational role in the campaign. Paul Manafort, who also attended, was the campaign’s chairman; but his many shady business dealings with several Ukrainian and Russian characters were already under scrutiny, so the encounter with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya could be seen as just another item on the list.

Kushner was at the meeting too, however, and he had oversight of the campaign’s digital operations. That could be a problem, given the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered with the election and that the meddling took place largely in cyberspace.

And unlike the other participants, Kushner has an official position in the Trump administration. He serves in the White House as a senior adviser to the president with responsibility for numerous high-profile initiatives — and with a top-secret security clearance, which should immediately be revoked.

Trump Jr. says that Kushner didn’t stay long at the session with Veselnitskaya and that no damaging information about Clinton was imparted. But since he kept the meeting secret for more than a year, scoffing indignantly at the very notion of collusion with the Russians, and then twice lied about the nature of the meeting before finally coming clean, no one should believe another word Trump Jr. says on the subject. At least, not until special counsel Robert Mueller puts him under oath, which I believe is likely to happen.

At one point in his changing story, Trump Jr. claimed that Kushner and Manafort didn’t even know what the meeting was about. Yet he copied both of them on an email chain that begins with an intermediary’s offer of campaign help from the “Russian government.” The proper thing to do would have been to call the FBI, but this crowd knows nothing of propriety.

The Veselnitskaya encounter was one of more than 100 meetings or phone calls with foreigners that somehow slipped Kushner’s mind when he applied for his security clearance. He revealed this one in one of his subsequent efforts to amend the form. It is hard to imagine what connection Kushner might have had to the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee computers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. But there was another component of the clandestine effort to help Trump get elected: Investigators believe that as Election Day approached, Russian trolls and “bots” flooded the social media accounts of key voters in swing states with “fake news” disinformation about Clinton, according to a report Wednesday by McClatchy newspapers.

How would the Russians know which voters to target, down to the precinct level, in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan? This is a question that surely will be posed to Kushner, since at the time he happened to be overseeing a sophisticated digital campaign operation that tracked voters at a granular level.

Ivanka Trump’s name has not surfaced in the Russia affair. But she, like her husband, is serving as a presidential adviser, and she received unwanted attention when she briefly took her father’s place at the head table during the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. We expect officials representing our country to have been elected by the voters or appointed because of merit, not installed by the caprices of heredity.

She also received unwanted scrutiny when three labor activists were arrested in May for investigating alleged sweatshop practices at a factory in China where Ivanka Trump shoes have been manufactured.

Among Manhattan’s progressive upper crust, Jared and Ivanka — they really are firstname-only celebrities at this point — were expected to at least temper the hard-right policy positions being pushed by other presidential advisers. If this indeed is what they are trying to do, they’ve had negligible impact to date.

Writing in Time magazine, Henry Kissinger wished Kushner well “in his daunting role flying close to the sun.” Jared and Ivanka have first-class educations. They know how the Icarus story ends.

Eugene Robinson is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Ivanka Trump’s name has not surfaced in the Russia affair. But she, like her husband, is serving as a presidential adviser, and she received unwanted attention when she briefly took her father’s place at the head table during the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.