What's Happening

CORRECTION: My dates are screwy. Not thinking clearly. H/T Jean for catching me.

In 1960, the Kremlin made a similar offer to support the candidacy of John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon, but the Kennedy campaign rebuffed it. Likewise, when the Al Gore campaign in 2000 received confidential materials relating to the George W. Bush campaign, it called the F.B.I.

Trump Jr. didn’t call the F.B.I.; instead, he responded, “I love it.

[...]

The writer Stephen King put it this way: “The news is real. The president is fake.”

The question is where this goes next.

[...]

[E]xplore how Trump Jr.’s attempt at collusion with Russians may relate to the bizarre effort by Kushner to set up a secret communication channel with the Kremlin.

  NYT

I wondered that myself, but when I checked, the request for a secret channel was back in December of 2016. Junior's meeting was in June 0f 2017. Where's the connection other than that the Trump cabal has been working with Russia since he announced his candidacy - and before?    Obviously, I made a major miscalculation.  Junior's meeting was June 2016, so the December secret channel request was later, in December.

Barton Gellman, a careful national security writer, has another theory. He notes that James Comey, the ousted F.B.I. director, in testimony to Congress referred to the risk that this channel could “capture all of your conversations.” Gellman suggests that this may mean that Kushner sought mobile Russian scrambling equipment to take to Trump Tower.

So they tried to get equipment to hide what they were doing, but when that failed, they simply went ahead wtih easily traceable meetings and phone calls? Yeah, I don't buy it. Unless Junior just didn't get the message. But then why would Kushner go to the meeting? And the reports that US Intel knew about the secret channel attempts came out in May, before the meeting, so they knew Kushner was busted on that count already.

These are Keystone Cop Gangsters.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.