'Concrete Evidence of Collusion Between Trump Team and Russia'

Those are the words used to describe the newest information the British intelligence agency GCHQ has given to American investigators.

It was an interesting opening segment on Rachel Maddow last night. All about Russia/Trump connections.

Let’s recount the Trump people now revealed as in private/secret contact with Russian agents: AG Sessions, President-in-all-but-name Jared Kushner, Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page (whose Russia links justified a FISA warrant), National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (since fired for his Russia connections), and now Erik Prince, founder and head of Blackwater, the global security firm in the vanguard of privatizing warfare and spy craft. This doesn’t even count the more shadowy figures in the White House team who have a trail of breadcrumbs leading from them back to Russian outposts in Eastern Europe, people like Sebastian Gorka. And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the hero of Putin’s big plan to supercharge Russia’s oil industry…which really is Putin’s oil industry.

And, in my thinking, Tillerson might explain a lot. Russia lives off oil revenue. Oil prices have dropped in recent years, which has caused a major drop in Russia’s GDP. The Russian GDP per person dropped from around $16 per person to around $9. Low to begin with, even lower now, about half. Tillerson received that medal from Putin for something. Maybe he saved Putin’s bottom line, the way Putin’s mobster friends saved Trump’s bottom line over the years. They rescued Trump in the 90s and a recent story reported they saved him again in 2008 when the economy began to fall apart. These people are desperately trying to keep each other afloat. In a world where quid pro quo used to be a huge black mark on a politician, the Trump administration seems to be a Jackson Pollock fresco of huge black marks, big quid pro quos all over the place, with Turkey, with Russia, with China. Tillerson was saving Putin’s bacon, Putin had saved Trump’s. And over the past year we’ve seen many Trump people scurrying back and forth between Moscow and Trump Tower. Notably Jared Kushner, who has a deep personal interest in his father-in-law’s solvency.

This symbiotic relationship between Trump Tower and the Kremlin appears to explain why Putin’s personal think tanks masterminded the result of the 2016 presidential election. Can we interpret these events any other way? The Putin Think Tank role is reported here by Reuters.

In the past week, while the news has been mostly silent about the Kremlingate story, while we’ve all been shocked and awed by a rocket show set off by Trump, “concrete evidence” of Trump/Putin collusion during the election has been turned over to the investigators. Reported in the Independent from London.

And another line of stories is emerging out of Hungary, Russia’s intelligence network’s station in western Europe, reported by a prominent expert on Russian interference in the democratic process in various western countries, Dr. András Göllner, reporting in the Hungarian Free Press, naming several other Trump allies and proxies and advisors have been acting hand-in-glove with the Russians. He mentions Steve Bannon and Bannon’s predecessor Paul Manafort, and a longtime Trump advisor, Arthur J. Finkelstein (who first introduced Manafort to Putin), and J.D. Gordon, a close advisor to Jeff Sessions, and Sebastian Gorka, the White House "terrorism advisor” who wears the pin of a Hungarian fascist organization in his lapel. Göllner calls this network that worked via Hungary “The Budapest Bridge”.

Here is the first of a two part series by Göllner in the Hungarian Free Press.

Ask yourself: does this seem more worrying or less worrying than Hillary Clinton’s private email server?

The constant focus on Hillary’s email server and various other bogus obsessions of the past year manufactured to derail Hillary Clinton’s campaign were engineered out of Moscow and Budapest and Macedonia and various other outposts of the Russian spy network, and the Republican Party took their instructions and collaborated with them.

Americans were told to distrust the previous president because he was black and the probable next president because she was a woman and persuaded to choose instead a deranged and comical puppet of the Russian government.

And presto! Trump became our first Russian puppet president.

But it wasn’t entirely the Russians who accomplished this. They had massive and well-funded help from American right-wing billionaires like the Prince family and the Mercer family and the Murdoch family, and from the huge right wing media world of talk radio and FoxNews and Breitbart and InfoWars and the Wall Street Journal.

They also had the willing and eager collaboration of the Republican Party. The GOP has spent the past few months demanding extreme vetting of child refugees but they haven’t bothered to vet their own president or his staff or his partners or his finances. Maybe they’ve not bothered because they already know their party is in the bag for Putin and Russia.

We used to call this kind of thing treason. A year ago the Republicans in Congress defined treason as any Democrat using a private email server.