This Is Not Normal

This is not normal. It is an obvious statement, but one that bears constant repetition in our time or else we will fail to notice the utter degradation of the executive branch as it happens. Over the last week the New York Times has broken a series of stories about a meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian lawyer - known to be close to members of Putin's ruling circle - during the campaign. This lawyer apparently enticed the younger Trump into a meeting by offering damaging information about Secretary Clinton, which Don Jr. was informed before he accepted the meeting had come from the Russian government. He took Jared Kusher, the president's son-in-law and close adviser, and then campaign manager Paul Manafort to the meeting with him.

To summarize, the son of a presidential candidate took two close advisors from the campaign, one of them the campaign manager, to a meeting at which he intended to accept help in an American presidential election from a hostile foreign power. The law explicitly prohibits a campaign from accepting "anything of value" from a foreign national and this situation seems to place Jr. and potentially others in legal jeopardy.

That meeting was, given the most charitable possible interpretation of the actions and motives of the people involved, an act of breathtaking stupidity and irresponsibility. But there is very little reason to believe that such an interpretation is plausible. The Trump campaign and Trump administration, especially the president himself, have dismissed the extensive evidence that Russia interfered in the election with considerable scorn. There is video of Don Jr. himself calling the Russia stories a desperate invention of the Democratic Party, not long after the email exchange took place. We now have been given proof that at minimum the Trump family and two principal campaign figures were aware of the effort by the time he won the nomination. 

The only possible interpretation of those denials, Trump's included, is that they are knowing and shameless lies. While no one has an email addressed to the president in which he is told the Russians were interfering, it is literally incredible that Manafort, Kusher, and Don Jr. would all be aware of such a consequential piece of information and the candidate himself would not.

The thing that jumps off the page at me when I read the email is that Don Jr. is told that the information he's being offered "is part of Russia and its governments support for Mr Trump." The casual tone implies that this is not new information. There is no "Russia is offering to support your father! This is huge!" Just another instance of an ongoing project to be noted. It is very suggestive, and I have a hard time believing that campaign principals and the candidate were not well aware of Russian efforts before the email was sent.

I don't pretend to know exactly what happened during the campaign last year. I admit that before this email was reported on, I had assumed that no campaign aide would be so utterly careless as to accept a meeting like the one Don Jr. and Kushner attended, least of all keep an email record of it. That being said, the unending train of deceptions has become impossible to ignore. I'm not sure exactly what Trump's people are hiding, or how important it is, but when people lie so brazenly and consistently it becomes obvious that they are hiding something.

As for Trump himself, there may be no way to be sure whether or not he was aware of the meeting. Yet, the same day that Don Jr. confirmed the meeting, Trump himself gave a speech in which he promised damaging new information on the Clintons. Is it entirely coincidental that on the very day that his son is offered allegedly compromising information and sets up a meeting to receive it, Trump would himself preview soon-to-be-released new dirt? Given the consistent pattern of deception and continuous new revelations of irresponsibility on the part of Trump associates where Russia is concerned, it is difficult for me to assign that development to chance alone.

But let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact of the matter is that a large (as of this writing a minimum of eight participants were present) meeting took place on the pretense of America's chief geopolitical enemy  supporting a presidential campaign, and that campaign did not scruple to accept the offered help regardless of whether any useful information was actually ever exchanged. The immediate legal jeopardy may be with regard to campaign finance law (Don Jr.) or misrepresentation on security clearance forms (Kushner) but the real shame is that a winning presidential campaign openly courted the assistance of a foreign rival. That is dangerously close to treason.