Donald Trump. (photo: Martin Schoeller/TIME)
14 July 17
The story around Donald Trump Jr and Jared Kushner are titillating. But the real issue is: what did the president know and when did he know it?
n
the unfolding Russia scandal enveloping the White House, we are so
fascinated – and entertained – by the supporting cast that we are losing
sight of the man in the starring role, Donald J Trump.
This week, thanks to great reporting by The New York
Times, we’ve been captivated by some new characters: Donald Trump Jr, a
Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rob Goldstone, the rotund
music promoter who was their go-between.
Then, there is the president’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, who accompanied Trump Jr to the June meeting with the Russian
lawyer to gather damaging goods on Hillary Clinton. Did he dime out his
own brother-in-law and disclose the meeting in order to draw attention
away from himself?
As the Trump campaign’s digital captain, did he have
the skill to direct all the Russian bots and trolls that spread dirt on
Hillary Clinton in key political precincts? (This theory of the case was
put forth in a recent coop from McClatchy). Should Kushner’s security
clearance be rescinded? Should he be prosecuted for leaving out
information about his Russian contacts on Form 86, the required
disclosure for White House officials?
Yes, this is all titillating stuff, but it diverts us
from the real issue at the heart of the Russia scandal: what did the
president know and when did he know it?
From the first disclosures about fired national
security adviser Michael Flynn’s meetings with the Russian ambassador to
the US, Sergey Kislyak, that question keeps getting overlooked. Why
would Flynn have initiated these meetings on his own? Surely, someone
else must have deputized him to be the emissary between Russia and the
campaign.
Similarly, it strains credulity that Kushner, a
complete neophyte in foreign diplomacy, would have undertaken on his own
the setting up of a secure back-channel to the Russians. Who suggested
he do so? And Jr? He is nothing other than his father’s cypher and
surrogate.
It’s true that Donald Trump Jr and Kushner have
business ties to rich Russian oligarchs and Russian banks involved in
their real estate deals. It’s possible that Kushner’s originally
undisclosed meeting with banker Sergey Gorkov during the transition was
about his family’s troubled investment in a Fifth Avenue office tower.
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr gushed about “all the Russian
money pouring in” for New York real estate. But the timing of their
meetings – right after Trump clinched the Republican nomination and
right before he took office – suggests politics, not business, was the
subject at hand.
Let’s remember that the Russians all had something
they desperately wanted and needed out of the new Trump administration:
the lifting of US sanctions against the outlaw state for its Crimean and
Ukrainian land grabs. Isn’t it clear that this scandal is about a quid
pro quo: Russian help to elect Donald Trump so that he could free his
friends from the bonds of the sanctions.
It’s simply ridiculous that such a deeply corrupt and
grand bargain, had it been made, could have been struck without the
express knowledge and direction of Donald J Trump. There’s no way the
father was an unwitting chump.
He says he did not know about his son’s tete a tete
with the Russian lawyer, but surely he knew the Russians were lobbying
to relax the sanctions, including the Magnitsky Act. His son-in-law would never have attempted his back-room pirouettes without his father-in-law’s express blessings.
Anyone who has watched the Trump family dynamics knows
that the sons, son-in-law, and Ivanka are consumed by filial devotion.
Their clout and success in the business and political worlds are
completely dependent on Donald Trump. The senior Trump was also Michael
Flynn’s ticket back to power after being fired by Obama. Not one of them
would have endangered their status with Donald Trump by engaging with
the Russians without his knowledge and approval.
This is particularly true of Kushner, whose more
tenuous ties are through marriage rather than blood. With his Harvard
background, smoother demeanor and broad White House portfolio, he does
seem properly cast in the role of Machievelle.
But having visited his own father in a federal
slammer, surely he knows better than the rest of the Trump clan the
awful consequences of breaking the law. At 36, still a young age, could
he have hatched and executed a complex plot of Russian political
collusion and risked his whole future? It’s doubtful.
It’s his father-in-law who has a history of striking
deals with all kinds of sketchy characters from the worlds of real
estate, reality television, professional wrestling and international
beauty pageants.
Certainly, Kushner’s security clearance should be
immediately revoked. His high-priced defense lawyers, Jamie Gorelick and
Abbe Lowell, have their work cut out for them in shielding Kushner from
prosecution for lying on federal forms or violating federal campaign
laws as a top member of the Trump campaign. Kushner has said he intends
to cooperate with congressional investigators probing the Russia affair.
We shall see.
In this scandal, there are inescapable comparisons to
Watergate. That investigation ended with a lingering mystery: it remains
unknown whether Richard Nixon ordered or knew beforehand about the
burglary of Democratic Party headquarters, the event that shattered his
presidency. Donald Trump’s direct role in polluting and subverting the
2016 election must not remain a mystery.
The relatives who fill the rooms in Donald Trump’s
House of Atreus may be culpable, too, but they distract from the real
person of interest, the president of the United States.
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