President Trump has been blistered, lampooned, reviled, and skewered over his performance in Helsinki, Finland. He has been raked over the proverbial coals by friend and foe alike for his supposed obsequious acquiescence to Vladimir Putin.
But he’s aware of something that everybody seems to be forgetting: the Russians are not our problem. Even Rod Rosenstein, when announcing the indictments of 12 Russian intelligence officers on Friday, made it absolutely clear they did not manage to affect even so much as a single vote in the presidential election of 2016. And further, no Americans - not one, including anybody from Trump’s campaign - was implicated in their chicanery.
So the Russians had precisely zero effect on the election. Mueller has been fumbling around with this for well over a year now and does not have one single, solitary scrap of evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and anybody from Russia.
To this point, Mueller has handed down 32 indictments in his probe. Of that 32, just six of the targets are Americans. Of those six Americans, not one has been implicated in any kind of collusion skullduggery.
Mueller intends to hand off the pursuit of the 26 Russians to prosecutors outside his office. In other words, he’s trying to bury these indictments in the deep blue sea in hopes that everyone will eventually forget his folly.
Of the 12 Russians who were indicted Friday, not one will ever see the inside of a courtroom in the U.S. They are all agents of Russian intelligence (the GRU), and the chance that Putin will extradite any of them is less than zero. They are show indictments, full of legalese and fury but signifying nothing.
So whether through sheer ineptitude or bad luck, the Russians we know about were completely unable to affect the outcome of the presidential election and couldn’t recruit even one member of the Trump campaign to collude with them in the effort. So they are not a major worry to President Trump, and neither should they be to us.
So who do we have to worry about? What is the focus of Trump’s ire? Well, it’s not Russians he’s worried about, it’s Americans. Americans in the United States government, Americans in the Department of Justice and the FBI, Americans who work for him.
In his testimony before two congressional committees last Thursday, the smarmy Peter Strozk tried in vain to deflect suspicions that he is an arrogant, elitist, Trump-hater on a mission of destruction. He headed up the so-called investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, and declared on day two of the investigation, and months before the election, that she ought to win “100 million to zero.”
Hillary Clinton is manifestly guilty of numerous federal crimes, not the least of which that due to maintaining a private, non-secure server, over 30,000 of her emails wound up in the hands of a foreign entity. This represents the felony crime of mishandling secret information to an epic and spectacular degree. But thanks to the diligent hacks in the FBI, she’ll never see the inside of a courtroom.
And then eight days after the Trump-Russia investigation began - of which Strozk inexplicably was also the head - Strozk promised his courtesan, Lisa Page, that Trump would never be elected because “we’ll stop it.” (Apparently Page, in her closed door testimony yesterday, ratted out Strozk and admitted that the “we” was not the American people but she and her cronies at the FBI).
Trump, meanwhile, who has yet to be credibly accused of a single crime, is pilloried day after day by people calling for him to be impeached and tried for treason.
So I ask you: whom should we worry about? The inept and feckless GRU, or the venal and utterly corrupt agents of the FBI, many of whom are holdovers from the Obama administration, and have the resources of the entire federal government at their disposal? The question answers itself.
As Trump said in the press conference after his summit with Putin, the “Democrats...want to do nothing but resist and obstruct,” the unconstitutional and illegal Mueller probe has been “a disaster for our country” which has “kept us apart” (from Russia), and to make things even worse, there has been “no collusion at all.”
He came back to the probe later: “But the main thing, and we discussed this also, is zero collusion and it has had a negative impact upon the relationship of the two largest nuclear powers in the world...it’s ridiculous what’s going on with the probe.”
Bottom line: Donald Trump is the only one in America who is keeping his eye on the ball. Russian meddling was swatted away and made no impact. But the FBI agents who allowed Hillary Clinton to get away with felony after felony, allowed 30,000 of her confidential and secret emails to wind up in the hands of a foreign entity, and who refused to take possession of the DNC server that had been compromised by the Russians, are people to worry about.
In other words, if we are looking for those who worked to undermine our election process, we don’t need to look to Russia. They are right here in our own backyard, working for the leading law enforcement agency in America.
