Treason- What We Know Now

Here is a brief summary of what we know about the connection between the Trump administration and the Russians:

1.  We now have evidence of about thirty contacts between the Trump campaign and transition team with the Russians, all conducted in secret, and all denied vehemently by Trump and his spokesmen, until every one of them was proven to have taken place.  Not one single person will talk openly about what happened in these conversations.

2.  Trump has engaged in repeated behavior which can have no intent except to benefit Vladimir Putin and Russia, at the expense of our own country:

We learned today that after he took office, Trump immediately made an effort to remove American sanctions on Russia:

"According to the report, top Trump administration officials tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.

This horrified staffers, who then reached out to Congress to try and get them to take legislative action and make it more difficult for the administration to unilaterally revoke the sanctions."

We also have seen Trump repeatedly and deliberately attempt to damage the United States' relations with its allies, from his belligerent behavior to the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Australia, to the massive damage that he did to our relationship with all of our NATO allies on his recent trip, all but repudiating our commitments to mutual defense.  And actions like today's repudiation of the Paris accords must have been done with the awareness that this behavior was going to set our country against practically every nation on earth.

3.  And finally, from his attempts to threaten James Comey into keeping his mouth shut, to his open attempts to sabotage or stop investigations into his Russian connections, to his deployment of teams of political hit men to assassinate the character of anyone who speaks out on the issue, Trump has engaged in repeated clear acts of obstruction of justice and misuse of the power of his office, which all indicates absolute knowledge of guilt.

Despite all of this, Trump's defenders, and this includes essentially every Republican leader in the country, still scream on a daily basis that we know nothing, that nothing has been proven, that the whole thing is a Democratic plot.

Let's say what needs to be said here:  There is still much to be revealed; I expect far more than we already know.  But taken together here, what has already become public amounts to as airtight case as you could ever have, short of the confession which we will never have from these evil people.  The most clueless person could not look at all of this and not see evidence of the most vicious kind of treason.  We must not stand silent in the face of Republican efforts to deny our right to know what really happened, but we already have far more than enough knowledge to see the betrayal of our country clearly, and to demand the appropriate penalties.


Update:  And may I add that Trump's belligerent betrayal of the Paris accords has managed, among other disastrous effects, to alienate the United States government from almost every decent person on earth, both inside and outside the country- a massive free gift to Vladimir Putin, and, I suspect the real reason that this decision was inevitable.


And More:  Trump has just announced his intention to appoint an investment banker who was a former captain in the Marines to be Secretary of the Navy.  A captain. In the Marines. Not a general, not a colonel, not a major, a captain.  I have not been able to discover yet what this guy did in the Marines, but I can assure you it had not one thing to do with naval maneuvers or operating naval fleets. You can imagine how much experience this guy has running the Navy.  One more step in destroying our ability to defend ourselves.  This is a level of treason that is almost unfathomable, yet the obvious nature of what Trump is up to will be totally ignored by the mainstream press.
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