Trump got more bad advice during golf today after he went on a tweet rampage when he woke up, but the next day should be interesting as he refuses to cancel his annual performance review with Master Putin.
More amusing is his attempt to tweet a distraction before bedtime asserting that the GRU is composed of “individuals”. How deliciously libertarian! The Russians have “rogue” agents who perhaps share romantic text messages!
Shrimp on the brazen, as the Australian consul who reported George Papadopoulos to the US IC might have said.
Trump’s confabulation about his meeting with Putin will be even more bizarre if he thinks as does Giuliani, that the now 25 Russian indictments are vindication.
Likely the “collaboration” proposed multiple times in 2017 to share cyber-security responsibilities as a working group will re-emerge, because in the Soviet style, continuing to hammer away at an issue in public is a feature, especially to FM Lavrov.
So perhaps Trump will propose a working group on national drug policy with DEA and MS-13. Or conduct offshore wind energy policy working groups between coal companies and the owners of Scottish and Irish golf courses.
Trump knew the indictment was coming when he bragged about what an easy meeting he would have with Putin. He knew it was coming when he once again attacked the investigation by his own government as “rigged.” And he knew it was coming when he rambled on about an agenda for the Helsinki summit that would cover just about everything but the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Talk about brazen.
On Friday, the only White House comment after the indictments was not a condemnation of the Russian campaign, as outlined in damning detail in the indictment, to subvert American democracy. No, it was simply a partisan statement of support for the President, noting that all those charged in the case were Russians. “This is consistent with what we have been saying all along,” the statement said.
Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani went further, calling it “vindication,” a claim so breathtaking in its brazenness that the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, responding on CNN, joked that if Trump were taken away in handcuffs by federal agents, Giuliani would call that vindication, too.
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Trump, in fact, is the one who initiated this mystifying get-to-know-you summit, and he did so despite warnings from many in and out of his Administration. They knew, they had to know, that such a summit could be reckless and counterproductive—and politically risky in the extreme. No other politician in such a circumstance would even consider a summit now with Vladimir Putin. But Trump is not like any other politician: he is the first, and only, American President whose legitimacy in office has been tainted by a state-sanctioned Russian campaign to help him win. This was going to be the summit without an agenda. Mueller and Rosenstein have just forced one on Trump that he did not want.