Criminal collusion

Trump’s allies are engaged in a new and frantic effort to spin away the true meaning of his comments on ABC News, in which he issued an open invitation to foreign powers to attack our political system again on his behalf and made it absolutely clear that he will not alert law enforcement if his campaign learns of such an effort.

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In a new interview with CBS News, the Trump campaign’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, gamely tried to lie away what Trump said on national television.

Asked what Trump intended to convey, McEnany insisted that Trump essentially said he would alert the FBI if a foreign power again offered dirt on an opponent. “He said he would likely do both — listen to what they have to say, but also report it to the FBI.”

Trump just offered his own version of this spin on “Fox & Friends,” saying: “I think I said I’d do both.”

Trump said nothing like this, and the content of the obscuring lie is itself revealing. In reality, Trump said he “maybe” would call the FBI — but only if he concluded that there was “something wrong” with the foreign power’s overture. He said this while also signaling that he would not ever conclude there was, in fact, anything wrong with it.

Trump was very clear in telegraphing that latter point. He said that “there’s nothing wrong with listening,” i.e., there’s nothing wrong with accepting information from a foreign power.

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But that’s not all. Asked if he is okay with such “interference” in our elections, Trump said: “It’s not an interference. They have information.”

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Remember, in the case of 2016, Trump and his campaign actively encouraged and happily benefited from the Russian interference effort, which involved massive cybertheft as part of a broader effort to destabilize the U.S.-led liberal order and use disinformation warfare to sow racial and social divisions in our country.

Trump and his 2020 lieutenants continually say either that none of that ever happened or that it’s a big nothing. They have openly said this again and again. This is the case, even though the full dimensions of that interference effort have now been revealed.

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[E]ven though we now understand these full dimensions — now that we understand that this effort was a wide-ranging criminal scheme designed to harm our democracy and country — Trump has confirmed that he would happily profit from such an effort again, and wouldn’t alert law enforcement about it.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has offered his own variation of that spin. Speaking on Fox News, he painted the whole affair as a non-story, by saying that, now that we’ve seen the Mueller report, it’s “case closed.”

It isn’t, of course. But the real point here is that McConnell, too, is trying to make not just Trump’s admission, but also the bigger scandal that it has underlined for all the world to see, disappear.

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The comments, according to interviews with nearly a dozen law enforcement veterans, have undone months of work, essentially inviting foreign spies to meddle with 2020 presidential campaigns and demoralizing the agents trying to stop them.

  WaPo

Impeach the motherfucker. Congress has the duty and the mandate.