On Tuesday Donald Trump Jr. released the email chain that led to his meeting a Russian lawyer with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and his dad's then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. There was much screaming of 'collusion' from pretty much every left-leaning news source the minute Dipshit Jr. released the emails, with the same matching yawns and shrugs in conservative circles. Actual lawyers say that the emails by themselves are damaging but not enough to go to court let alone get a conviction, but, there's outrage to be had so the hell with those people.
I've written before about why I'm skeptical of the whole Russia business because I've always felt that it would be used as a distraction by the Democratic Party to point the finger at the traditional boogeymen of The Rooskies meddling in American affairs to cover up their own plentiful failings losing an election they should have easily won. And for the most part, I still believe that. I don't see Trump losing anything or Democrats gaining anything they didn't already have as a result of this so I'm more than a little frustrated that they still make this such an important cornerstone of their opposition to Trump. But, we'll get to that. First off I want to actually look at these emails and what we should, and should not, glean from them.
The headline exchange happens right away, with British music publicist Rob Goldstone telling Jr. that he knows a lawyer with documents from the (not-actually-a-thing) "Crown Prosecutor of Russia" to use against Hillary Clinton. Goldstone also says that the documents come straight from the Russian government as part of "[their] support for Mr. Trump." Jr. took the meeting and, according to him, did not receive any information since the lawyer just wanted to talk about adoptions. According to Jr., the whole thing lasted twenty minutes and was done. Leaving aside that his defense of not colluding with Russia is "I fully intended to receive incriminating information from possibly dubious sources, but since that was just a ruse, it's kinda like I'm the victim here" it's worth the effort to breakdown the law people are claiming he violated and whether or not the emails prove that he did.
So, the rope people are wanting to hang Jr. by is campaign fiance law 52 U.S.C. 30121, 36U.S.C. 510 which says:
"A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election."The law also says that a political campaign cannot solicit or receive donations of value from foreign entities, with the specific language relevant to that being:
"No person shall knowingly provide substantial assistance in the solicitation, making, acceptance, or receipt of a contribution or donation."So does Jr. solicit a contribution from an outside source? Not in the way we usually think of it, no. Goldstone made first contact so from what we have, nothing shows anyone related to the campaign reaching out to Goldstone or anyone else asking if they have contacts in the Russian government and if they could hook them up, so that just leaves the "substantial assistance" path in going to the meeting under the belief he would be accepting a contribution. It's there, but it's also not a lot.
Second, did Jr. receive anything of value from the meeting? There's no proof that he did, either in the emails themselves or from any other reporting, so that, too, is something of a dead end until we have you know, actual proof and stuff. Which, I understand not believing him about not getting anything, especially since he changed his story regarding this meeting three times, but if you want him to get dragged into court over this, you need more than "He's a lying piece of shit" to submit into evidence.
Even then, if evidence came out detailing that Jr. did indeed receive something from this meeting, we aren't quite done yet. Because then you would to prove that whatever hypothetical thing Jr. received at the meeting was something of value. So if this information was something that was public record, it's hard to see that meeting a specified definition of value in court considering that anyone could have found it and given it the Trump campaign, if said documents even exist. Without knowing what information theoretically was on offer, or the methods it was obtained by, saying that Jr. went to receive hacked information is just reckless and only sets people up to issue yet another retraction to anything involving Russia and the hacking scandal.
The other part of the emails I want to look at is whether we should actually believe Goldstone was acting on behalf of the Russian government like he claims. Goldstone's email does lay out his own connections to Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov (Goldstone represents Agalarov's popstar son), who met with a man named Yuri Chaika (who is Russia's equivalent of an Attorney General) who would pass along the information to a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya who then, in turn, would pass it on to the Trump campaign. It's a believable, self-contained chain of events, but I have three main hangups. The first is that this spy-novel chain of association is proof of espionage is the exact same kind of reasoning used against political dissidents in both of our previous red scares so I think it's good to be resistant to anything that pulls you in to the same fever dream of paranoia like we've already done. The second is believing that a government run by a former KGB agent who has in all probability assassinated people for possibly exposing his activities would orchestrate a plan to give out secret information via two guys using their personal emails and signing each one in their own fucking name. It's a Get Smart chain of events that's too stupid to believe happens in real life.
The last hangup I have is that the thing Jr. says Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about, the Magnitsky Act-which bars certain Russian officials from entering the U.S. or using U.S. banking systems- is something Putin has been trying to get reversed since it was passed in 2012. Also keep in mind that Veselnitskaya has usually been the front woman for that lobbying and that she was involved in the criminal case that got the Magnitsky Act's namesake killed regarding the $230 million fraud that was settled for $6 million in May. Point being, there's good enough reasons to believe that the meeting was to set up a more mundane form of corruption than the sensational. If you're wondering why all the pretense then, if it's just the usual level of evil, consider how the Trump's have no interest or understanding of actual policy so if they had been contacted with a proposal to talk with a Russian lawyer about a law they probably couldn't even name until they needed to say it on T.V. this week, they would've never been let in the building. But, if the meeting is some cloak-and-dagger nonsense about juicy state secrets passed on by the Russian government, well, here we all are.
What the emails do prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the Trump campaign was perfectly willing to knowingly accept dirt from the Russian government and lie about it. And as for the line that Trump himself didn't know about the meeting? Bullshit. There's no way his eldest son, son-in-law, and campaign manager have a meeting in his own building a floor beneath his office and he doesn't know.
So, what does it all mean for us as a country? In my opinion, this will turn out to mean very little, if anything at all. If we all woke up tomorrow with video evidence of Vladimir Putin speaking, in English, to Donald Trump about how he was going to rig the election for Trump, I doubt you could find a significant amount of Republicans to believe it, or care even if they did. To them, it'll be just another Fake News story trying to tear down Trump over the Russia business. Even for the ones left in reality, do you really expect a Republican voter to care that Hillary Clinton got cheated out of an election? Please. Republicans will upgrade gay people from deviant abominations to maybe real people before they shed a tear for anything that befalls Hillary.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are wasting whatever political interest or goodwill they could've mustered by focusing on a vague, abstract injury than the real, specific ones Trump is trying inflict on people. Instead of talking about how Republican governors are lowering the minimum wage in four states, Democratic politicians and media pundits are content to stay focused on Russia, just to be sure the image the party has of caring more about it's own political ambitions and prospects than the lives of actual people outside of the coast cities doesn't get replaced by anything more, I don't know, worthwhile. God forbid the party change tactics and try to get more people to show up and vote for them, then they could be held accountable for shit instead of just saying how terrible Republicans are. I am honestly curious how Democrats expect their bleating about Russia to bring back young and independent voters who abandoned them for policy reasons, but, if the people who lost 1,000 seats at all levels of government think this is a winning strategy, who is anyone to say otherwise?
But wait, I'm sure some of you will say, they talk about it all the time because it violated our democracy and national character, or something. To which, I say, the United States has never been all that interested in being a functioning democracy that let everyone have a voice, and indeed had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so. And even today, the whole of the South is still trying to make sure as few black people vote as they possibly can, because fuck them, right? So, whatever spirit of democracy got offended was just the one we pretend to have instead the one that actually exists. I do agree on the second point, though, that an interference in our election would be a blow against our own sovereignty and character, but, who do you really think we are?
National identities, like everything else, aren't intrinsic, they're made. At the end of the day, the Constitution is just a bunch of words on a page, the principles behind them don't mean anything unless people make the conscience choice to force their government to live by them, and we, as a country, have abandoned that for a long time now. You can't really have a meaningful protection against unreasonable search and seizure if you live in a country where the government intercepts and records every single communication you make. Torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and imprisonment without trial are sorta incompatible with the whole due process and trial-by-jury things. We willfully traded all those away and either exiled or imprisoned anyone who bothered to remind us that these things were kind of awful. When it comes right down to it, Russia interfering in our elections amounts to one oligarchical state taking pot shots at another oligarchical state that has a high value on pretense. If you factor in all the democracies we've overthrown, then it looks more like an amateur giving an old pro a solid punch to the nose it didn't see coming. In that context, it honestly makes more sense to me why we would take the Russia thing so horribly: it means we're becoming just like everyone else. And that, is the worst thing in the world to us.
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