Trump Jr.’s Emails, Smoking Water Gun
Donald Trump Jr. taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer claiming to have ties to the Russian government, to obtain information to hurt Hilary Clinton’s campaign looks bad… Really bad. And while we can question the intelligence and political savvy of the move, the main question anyone and everyone should be asking is what are the legal implications of this? If you can point to a definitive law or statute that has been violated here, please send it to me.
See like almost everything else with the Trump administration this looks bad, but is it actually something that violates the law, or does it just violate accepted norms and expectations of behavior from elected officials and those around them? Where Trump opposition in the media and elsewhere are continuing to fail is that they are too willing to identify bad optics as violations punishable by law, congress, criminal prosecution, or impeachment. Where the media and Trump opposition are getting it collectively wrong is that we currently have all levels of government controlled by the same party, Executive Branch, Congress, the Senate, Governors, all dominated by the GOP. Because the scale is tilted so far in the favor of the person the media and opposition is going after, they need to focus on facts, and punishable violations.
Everything to this point has only emboldened the Trump supporter base, and there is a certain level of “Trump/Russia” fatigue and just Trump fatigue in general that the media must be aware of. While I firmly believe journalists should be chasing down every lead and taking accusations of criminal activity seriously, not every hint of impropriety needs to be reported and debated. Saying it another way, don’t put something out there, until you actually have something! We need selectivity and objectivity. Right now the strategy seems to be take down the Trump administration via death by a 1000 paper cuts, but at this rate he’ll be 7 years into 2 terms before we get to the requisite number of paper cuts.
Donald Trump Jr. showed bad judgment and an overall lack of patriotism by so willingly taking a meeting with someone he thought was a Russian government official offering dirt on Clinton. He may have broken a campaign finance law, he may have wanted to collude with the Russians. From here, it looks like a bunch of “if and buts, candy and nuts”. If the opposition wants to bring a death blow to this administration, they will need something far more substantial than Don Jr.’s bad judgment and big ego detailed in an email.
Every great American scandal follows a similar arc, historians say. One side smells nefarious behavior. The other side contends there’s no there there. Shreds of evidence and whispers of proof energize one side and appall the other. This goes on for a long time.
Sometimes, the scandal talk fizzles out. And sometimes, something comes along that changes everything — the smoking gun.
When Donald Trump Jr. said “I love it” to the prospect of scoring nasty information from friendly Russians about Hillary Clinton in June of last year, did that constitute a smoking gun?
In one America, the answer was a pretty solid yes. Slate, Politico, Vanity Fair and some Democrats straight-out declared the president’s son’s email the “smoking gun” in the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to take down the Clinton candidacy. Many other news organizations hedged a bit, attaching a question mark to the smoldering term.
But in Trump Country, the gun wasn’t smoking — it was just one more toy gun masquerading as the real thing, just one more burst of the same noise that has been cluttering up this presidency since its inception.
Al Baldasaro, a six-term Republican member of New Hampshire’s legislature and an early Trump backer, said on a radio show last summer that Clinton should be “put in the firing line and shot for treason” over her role as secretary of state during the 2012 attacks on two U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya.
Now, Baldasaro sees not treason but normal behavior. In politics, he said, “People come to us all the time with stuff on our opponents. . . . I don’t think there’s anything there. It’s a typical witch hunt. Some media are keeping it alive, making money off this.”
Baldasaro called the president “an honest guy. I would bet my last dime he had nothing to do with it. . . . I travel all over the state and have never come across one person who brings up anything about Russia. They don’t care. They don’t think anything happened.”
But that doesn’t mean that this email is the smoking gun — the one piece of evidence that produces instant consensus that something unacceptably wrong has taken place.
“This is not the [Watergate] tapes, this is not the blue dress from the Clinton scandal” in 1998, Dewberry said. “We still don’t know from this email if President Trump did anything.”
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
