It's A Family Affair

It’s a Family Affair:  Donald Trump Jr started his weekend gleefully tweeting a doctored Top Gun clip of his father shooting a CNN plane out of the sky calling it one of the best videos he’d ever seen. By Sunday evening he was the guy shot from the sky as details of a curious meeting he, Kushner and former campaign manager Manafort had with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin affiliated lawyer, hit the news.  Kushner and Manafort recently amended their disclosure filings to include all the meetings with foreign officials that they had previously omitted.  While examining the amended filings, a NY Times reporter found the reference to the Natalia meeting sandwiched between an Arab Sheik and a Russian Oligarch.  Natalia has been waging a Kremlin supported campaign against the Magnitsky Act which punishes the Russian officials responsible for the jailing and subsequent death of a Russian lawyer who had been investigating Russian fraud. After Obama signed the Act into law, Putin had responded by freezing US adoptions of Russian children.  When asked about his meeting with Natalia, Don Jr  claimed that the meeting was about adoptions, setting up Chief of Staff Priebus to go with the adoption defense on the Sunday morning talk shows. By the end of the day, after a number of White House leakers threw shade on the adoption tale, Don Jr changed his story saying that they met with Natalia because she claimed to have information about Hillary Clinton and DNC ties to Russian money, adding that they had been set up by the Democrats and that daddy Trump knew nothing of the meeting.  The timing of the meeting between Natalia and the three Trump stooges is particularly suspicious because it took place right after it became apparent that Trump would win the Republican nomination and shortly before WikiLeaks released the DNC emails.  A quick Google search would have revealed Natalia’s connections so Don Jr’s claim that he didn’t know anything about her betrays stupidity, deceit or both; Manafort has too much experience in the Russian nether world to hide behind the stupidity defense; and it’s hard to believe that Kushner, who was in charge of data mining for the campaign, thought that a meeting that could lead to such “interesting” data was so insignificant that he “forgot” to include it in his first disclosure filing.  As Senator McCain likes to say another shoe has just dropped off the centipede and this one has landed in Special Counsel Mueller’s lap.        

It’s in The Blood:  Before the Don Jr story hit, daddy Trump spent the morning trying to dig himself out of Putin’s honey trap.  He started the day tweeting  “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election.  He vehemently denied it.  I’ve already given my opinion…”  Of course Trump’s opinion is the problem.  The day before he met with Putin, he again said that election meddling could have been done by that fat guy on the couch and threw his intelligence agencies under the bus. Trump then further damaged his credibility by failing to release a statement after the Putin meeting, letting Putin get away with the believable story that he was on board with Putin’s denials.  Trump, the reality star who considers himself to be his best spokesmen, is having a hard time tweeting himself out of this one.  He sent out a few other morning tweets, calling attention to the Syrian ceasefire and asserting that there would be no sanction relief until the Ukraine situation was resolved but then added to his credibility problem by bragging that “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.” That last one raised more than a few eyebrows with Senator Graham speaking for many when he said “if it’s not the dumbest idea I ever heard it’s pretty close” and is likely just one of the reasons that so few states are willing to send election data to Trump’s voter suppression commission, so later in the day he uncharacteristically backtracked, tweeting “the fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen…”  

You Can’t Cry:  While Trump was tweeting and Don Jr was twisting in the wind a few of Trump’s cabinet members were out in force trying to clean up after his European trip.  Even though she hadn’t attended the Putin meeting and couldn’t know for sure, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley insisted that Trump had pushed Putin hard because “everybody knows that Russia meddled in our elections.”  And Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was such a team player that he strained his own credibility by applauding the much ridiculed joint cyber security effort, the one that Trump questioned in his end of day tweet, as “a step forward.”  Mnuchin then went on to talk about tax reform, promising that reports that Steve Bannon wanted top rates to exceed 40% were false.  Since the tax reform plan, like the struggling Trumpcare plan, is being written behind closed doors, he couldn’t provide details but promised middle income tax cuts, tax simplification, and large corporate tax cuts, adding that with some really creative accounting the tax cuts would not raise the federal deficit.  With that the rest of his credibility went out the window.   Before tax cuts can move front and center, Trumpcare has to be resolved.  Over the weekend, more Republican Senators expressed their reservations about the pending bill.  The battle for the nation’s health continues this week.    

   

Blood’s Thicker Than the Mud:  Before leaving the Hamburg G 20 meetings, favorite daughter Ivanka raised a few eyebrows when she joined the adult’s table, taking Trump’s seat alongside Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors, as he stepped out for another meeting.  No security advisor McMaster at the Putin meeting, few staff from the State Department in attendance but daughter Ivanka front and center.  The G 19 plus 1 meeting then ended with the US on the sidelines, excluded from a new trade agreement with Japan, out of the Paris Climate Accords and under criticism for advocating tariffs.  Steve Bannon may be happy but America first and increasing isolation will have consequences for the rest of us.