Charles Krauthammer went on Fox News' "The Story with Martha MacCallum" and eviscerated the Trump administration's bogus talking points of "never meeting or having anything to do with Russia at all" during the 2016 election campaign.
MacCallum asked that even if the Russians didn't give Trump Jr., anything, "is that in it of itself collusion, when there was no fruit from the actual meeting?"
Krauthammer said, "Well, it's a hell of a defense to say your collusion was incompetent and that it didn't work out. This is not just opposition research."
"This is a foreign power and not just any foreign power, an adversary foreign power. A foreign power that invades our allies," he said.
After listing a host of offenses Russia has perpetrated around the world, Krauthammer said, "But here's the deal, they denied this. They agreed with the critics, that this is a bad thing to do and they were saying for six months, 'we didn't do it, there's no evidence that we did it. How could you even imagine that we could do it?"
"Now they're saying, yeah we did it but it wasn't so bad."
He continued, "If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods and it turns out the stolen goods don’t show up but the cops show up, I think you’re going to have a very weak story saying, ‘Well, I got swindled here.’
Charles then took to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to restate his opinion.
Bungled collusion is still collusion
The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor.
Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.
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It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other people’s elections, and they in ours.
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First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.
What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?
But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.
Trump surrogates can't spin their way out of this.
