Money Doesn't Change Everything

Ah but everybody's only

Looking out for themselves

And you say well who can you trust

I'll tell you it's just

Nobody else's money

Money changes everything

--Cyndi Lauper, "Money Changes Everything"

I'll say it: Trump Jr.'s emails prove collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Young Beavis (or is Junior "Butthead?" Hard to tell.) revealed in his emails that he knew that the Russian government was trying to help his father's campaign. Junior exposed the fact that his brother-in-law and now "Special Advisor to the President" Jared Kushner, along with then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, knew the Russians were trying to tilt the election in their favor, and that they not only accepted, but sought out help from an adversarial foreign power. The emails - released only because the New York Times informed Little Trump that they were going to publish them - show clear evidence of an ongoing effort to solicit, accept, and utilize allegedly damaging information about another American from an unfriendly nation.

The Trump Crime Family has been corrupt for a very long time. From father Fred Trump's racist leasing policies, Agent Orange's own history of refusing to pay contractors, connections to organized crime, and cons like Trump University; Charles Kushner's (Jared's father) imprisonment for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering ( in a famously sordid episode involving Kushner's brother-in-law, hookers, and videotape); to Jared Kushner, whom former employee Harleen Kahlon described in a Politico article thusly:

“We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything, has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father), who is deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the NYO, marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’), and who is basically a shithead.”

There is a clear-cut history and pattern in the Trump family of avarice, arrogance, lawlessness, racism, narcissism, and ignorance. This is the family that has occupied the White House and turned our democracy into an autocratic banana republic. They know nothing, they value nothing except money and power, they have no ethics or moral center. Steal from your employees? So what? Refuse to pay for honest work? Business as usual. Deceive thousands trying to improve themselves, just to steal some more money? Great idea! Treat with our nuclear adversary in an effort to gain political power? Why not?

Why not, indeed? Because it's a crime, that's why. Because it's treasonous. Because it's dishonorable. Because it's a betrayal of everything that the Presidency represents.

Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, has said that the emails “borders on treason."

“This was an effort to get opposition research on an opponent in an American political campaign from the Russians, who were known to be engaged in spying inside the United States “We do not get our opposition research from spies, we do not collaborate with Russian spies, unless we want to be accused of treason.”

The person who has the most to be worried about is Jared the Boy Wonder. Butthead Jr. is probably guilty of violating campaign finance laws, but those laws have been notoriously unable to actually put anyone behind bars. Brother-in-law Kushner, however, is a federal employee and White House staffer with a security clearance. To get that clearance, Boy Wonder had to list all his contacts with foreign nationals, but somehow he forgot about this meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. He later added the meeting in a supplemental filing, but his initial omission opens him to charges of lying on a federal form, obstruction, and collusion. The penalty for which is a maximum of five years in federal prison. And not Club Fed, either, but "Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison."

Now, maybe in New York real estate circles, meeting someone named "Natalia Veselnitskaya" is a commonplace occurance, and maybe a person could forget about meeting said individual. Maybe you believe that, and maybe my ass farts perfumed clouds of golden mist, too. Either way, Jared's security clearance is something that could and should go up in smoke as a result of these revelations. Connecticut’s Chris Murphy (D-CT), a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, said: 

“I don’t know why Jared Kushner still has a job. He allowed the president of the United States, the vice-president, every spokesperson in the White House to openly lie about his contacts with the Russian government.
“You don’t think the Republicans would be calling for the resignation of an Obama official who allowed the president and the vice-president to openly lie about a major national security issue? He watched his father-in-law go on TV and say, ‘No one in my campaign talked to the Russian government.’
“He knew that was false. Either he didn’t alert the president or the vice-president, or there’s a much bigger problem, and the president and the vice-president knew that they were lying.”

Did they know, and were they lying? I think that they did. I believe that the president certainly, and possibly the vice-president too, knew about the Russian contacts, knew about the Russian government's efforts to aid the Trump campaign, and actively worked with them to steal the election. Agent Orange is well-known for his inability to delegate authority, and his statements during and after the campaign, seen in the light of these newest revelations, seem to indicate that he knew of, approved, and may even have been directly involved in the conspiracy with Russian intelligence services under the direction of Vladimir Putin to "rig" the election--a charge he loudly and repeatedly leveled at Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. For Trump, the opposite of what he says is often the real truth, and this is perhaps the foremost example of that pattern. He knew.

I believe that this is the tip of the iceberg, that we'll see more revelations and further proof of collusion and treason as events develop. I also want to state now, in writing, that some of us are not so easily deceived, some of us are not fooled by this orange-haired bully and his family of dimwits, shitheels, and buffoons. We only need wait; their own words and deeds will reveal and condemn them. They aren't smart enough to avoid causing their own destruction, as The Rude Pundit notes:

You can be corrupt. You can be stupid. You can't be stupid and corrupt. Otherwise, you don't know when to shut the fuck up. You don't know when to keep your head down. You don't know when to not fucking tweet out the evidence that, at the very least, reveals the very thing everyone has been trying to pin on you.

They're corrupt, but they're also idiots. It's going to be a rough ride, but the truth will out.