Some Thoughts on the fateful meeting in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016

---an immodest pat on my own back -- when the meeting was first made public and the 3 Stooges (Donnie Junior, Big Paul and Jared) said: "We were only talking about adoptions."  I said -- "Talking about adoptions means talking about sanctions." 

Living in the moment doesn't mean total ignorance of the past. (And that also goes for modern  journalists -- great and crappy alike, who never studied history but turned their college years into a Trade School for Journalism.-- It was a difficult moment for me when one of my few favorites said: "Bill Clinton was almost impeached." AIYEEE!)

 This is what I wrote on 10/28/2017.

1 -- I'm thinking think Putin is giving up on Trump and doing as he is reputed to always do when someone is no longer useful  -- throwing him to the dogs. Because Trump couldn't lift the sanctions, instead, was so ham-handed and over-confidently arrogant, his behavior prompted the Sleeping Beauties of Congress to wake up from their dream of no taxes for the rich or health insurance for the poor long enough to pass a bill increasing sanctions.  

Underneath it all, Putin's smarter than Trump (Well -- duhh).

He realized that sooner or later, Trump would turn on him, as he does to anyone who no longer professes love for him, and if still in the oval office, could do his typical petty denunciations through a huge megaphone. Putin is almost infinitely smarter than Trump, but just as pathologically unable to accept blame for anything, or allow anyone to criticize him.

It would explain why Natalia Veselnitskaya, mob lawyer for Putin's Cosa Nostra, just confirmed that the fateful Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016-- the meeting with Donnie Junior, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort  was "to lift sanctions." It would then put all three in violation of the Logan Act of 1799, which makes it a felony to negotiate with foreign governments.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

When Little Donnie came out and said "We were only talking about adoption," he prompted Stephen Colbert to walk toward the camera on his opening monologue and say he apologized to Eric Trump for "always thinking HE was the dumb one."

Adoptions?

Because "talking about adoptions" meant talking about sanctions, and now the round-faced Russian lawyer has confirmed that it was a test to see if he was willing to meet -- along with Jared and Manafort -- and even if it didn't go any further, the act itself of going to a meeting in which the agenda would be to discuss getting "Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton," was an act of collusion with the Russian government. Just showing up crossed the line whether they got to actually conspiring with them to influence the 2016 election. And perhaps also a test to see how far the President's son would go to get his father's approval, even commit a felony.

Why was "just talking about adoptions" a violation of the Logan Act? The refusal to allow Americans to adopt Russian orphans was Putin's response to the sanctions placed on Russia with the Magnitsky Act, which punished the high Russian officials involved in Magnitsky's death by refusing to allow them entry to the United States or use of our banking system. (High Russian officials =  Pals of Putin)

Putin's counter-punch to that was to suspend all American adoption of Russian orphans and punish Trump supporters, since, unlike Chinese orphans, Russian orphans are white.

(Putin and Trump -- neither can let anyone else ever have the last word -- would be justice on a higher than usual plane  to lock the two of them in a basement in the Kremlin and let them kiss and hug and/or beat each other to death while each one shouts: "YOU started it!" "No. YOU started it."