Trump Meets with Putin in Finland and then all Helsinki Breaks Loose
President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, July 16th and, as a result of the press conference which took place immediately afterward, all Helsinki broke loose.
It wasn’t as if the stern reaction by the media, Democrats and anti-Trump/NeverTrump Republicans to Trump’s words wasn’t planned in advance. In fact, given the curious timing of Robert Mueller’s indictments of twelve Russian generals delivered by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on the Friday before, one might say all of the tempests in a veritable teapot were already set to boil over well in advance.
For instance, following Rosenstein’s announcement at the end of last week, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) once again proved to be the south end of a northbound horse when he stated that the President “should not be allowed to meet with Putin in private, without three of four Americans in the room to witness the conversation.” In other words, the Virginia Democrat basically indicated that a duly-elected U.S. President (namely, one Donald Trump) cannot and should not be trusted to meet privately with a Russian President, and therefore such a meeting should not be allowed to take place.
Then, following the press conference, it was none other than Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN)- the same Steve Cohen who said that disgraced FBI Agent Peter Strzok merited a Purple Heart for the supposed grilling he underwent by House Judiciary and Oversight Committees earlier last week- called for a military coup d’état to take place prior to Trump’s return to the White House, because “the Commander-in-Chief is in the hands of our enemy.”
Not to be outdone, the former CIA Director under President Barack Obama, John O. Brennan, had the temerity to accuse the current President of “high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of impeachment,” calling on House Republicans to initiate impeachment proceedings, upon the President’s return to Washington, D.C. Once a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA who voted for communist party nominees for President in the 1970s, and a born and raised Catholic son of Irish immigrants who renounced his Christian faith and changed his religion to Islam, long before he was tapped by Obama to head the CIA, Brennan was the one who went around Washington peddling copies of dossiers, paid for by Hillary Clinton, that were used to obtain FISA warrants against Carter Page and others associated with the Trump campaign.
Speaking of dossiers, it was Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who first delivered the Clinton-funded dossier to FBI Director James Comey, which prompted the illegally obtained FISA warrants against Trump and his campaign, and ultimately led to the Mueller probe. The supposedly ailing senator had enough chutzpah to release a statement excoriating the Republican President, saying that Trump’s comments made at the Helsinki press conference were “the most disgraceful comments ever made by a U.S. President before a Russian,” basically charging the president with treason- a sentiment shared by former President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, Joe Lockhart.
Despite universal Democrat condemnation, there were enough anti-Trump/NeverTrump Republicans, including the usual cast of Trump-haters like Senators Ben Sasse (R-NE), Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Bob Corker (R-TN) and others who routinely bash the President, to jump on the pile of disdainful reaction to the press conference and make the outrage a truly bi-partisan affair, leaving the President to fend for himself, yet again.
With help from most all of the mainstream media, Trump’s enemies immediately twisted the President’s comments into taking Putin’s denials as undeniable fact in the face of U.S. intelligence findings that Russian government attempted to disrupt the 2016 presidential election when Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, her server and the DNC servers were hacked in the winter and spring prior to that year’s election. Notably absent from the reporting was the fact that the RNC servers were also attacked, but yet not compromised due to better protection. Also missing from the reporting was the seldom-stated fact that the Clinton server, and the DNC servers remain “missing,” an important point which is only and repeatedly mentioned by the President, as Trump did during the press conference. Trump stressed that he had “great confidence” in the U.S. intelligence services, but also noted that “…Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial…” This discrepancy was quickly turned by the media into a supposed repudiation of our own intelligence services at the behest of Putin, as if both claims cannot possibly be true.
The fact is that both statements by the president are most likely true. After all, it can be true that the President has great confidence in our intelligence, while at the same moment saying that Putin was strong and powerful in his denial- not that an extremely biased media, along with his own political adversaries are going to give our President any such degree of slack. No, they were looking for a reason to pounce on Trump in advance, and the President apparently gave them ample space to do so.
Most egregiously, the post-conference reporting by the media has universally ignored the fact that it was Putin himself who stated that Russian interests provided over $400 million to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign (an obvious reference to pay-for-play contributions to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for the transfer of 20% of the domestic uranium stockpiles to Russian control in 2010). Once again, leave it to the media to give Hillary Clinton a pass for her own very real criminal activity, while at the same time creating yet another brouhaha as a supposed justification for a possible Trump impeachment.
It is an undeniable certainty that Trump was going to incur the wrath of his political opponents across the spectrum, regardless of the degree to which he presented the findings of domestic intelligence to Putin- something the President quite rightly said should be done in person- that the Russians attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections. Considering the fact that Russians have been doing this to the United States and other countries since the late 1920s and considering the fact that President Barack Obama used taxpayers’ money ($349,276.00) to interfere with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection in 2015, it is curious and altogether telling that Putin’s alleged “tampering” is all of the sudden being termed as “an act of war” perpetrated against the United States… an act of war between the two countries who hold 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons… and they seek to blame Trump for being irresponsible, all the while accusing him of being treasonous?!?
Ironically, avoiding thermo-nuclear war between Russia and the United States, at a time when Russian/U.S. relations are at an all-time-low, was the very reason why President Trump sat down with Putin, in order to begin a dialogue aimed at reducing the risk of such a war. To listen to Trump’s political enemies and detractors, it was accusing Putin of interference in our elections that really mattered, when all Helsinki broke loose on Monday, July 16th.
-Drew Nickell, 17 July 2018
© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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