Guess who's coming to a White House dinner, sometime between now and the November midterms? The man who ordered the Russian government to mount a wide-ranging hacking and propaganda campaign to alter the results of the United States presidential election, Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin.
We are almost certainly learning about this now because Sarah Sanders only herself learned of it now. And from the sounds of it, it's likely to happen.
To emphasize, just last Friday the United States indicted 12 Russian military officers for their part in a broad Russian government-sponsored plot to manipulate the United States presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump. Last evening, we learned that Donald Trump had before his inauguration been personally briefed with top-secret evidence of Putin's personal involvement in the plot, a revelation that is likely only being leaked now because those American intelligence sources were long ago rendered useless—or killed.
Only days after these new indictments, Donald Trump again denied that such an effort ever took place; only yesterday he flatly told a reporter that he did not believe intelligence community warnings that Russian hacking efforts were ongoing. He is now inviting the architect of these past and present acts, the man who our intelligence community identified as specifically ordering them, to the White House.
And neither we nor the United States military has any idea what else Donald Trump may have told Putin during their private, one-on-one meeting that no other American officials were allowed to attend. It is not clear whether another such meeting will now take place in the White House itself.