Collusion?
Lots of cover-up, 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 big reveal
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.
