The part that brings down Donald Trump
Quick, try to think of the one alleged aspect of the Trump-Russia scandal that could single handedly bring Donald Trump down, simply by being confirmed. It’s not necessarily the Pee Pee Tape, salacious as it may be, unless it depicts something nonconsensual. Instead, it’s about the money trail. The real crime in the Trump-Russia plot was the Russian hacking of Trump’s opponents. That brings us back to a long-ago accusation that’s now much closer to being proven.
Yesterday we learned that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen really did travel to Prague in 2016, as the Trump-Russia dossier alleged, after he spent more than a year denying it. This is the piece of the puzzle where we can finally go ahead and assume, in an investigative sense if not a legal sense, that every word of that dossier is probably true. If it was this precisely correct about a detail this crucial, it stands to reason that the dossier’s secret sources were rock solid. Consider that the dossier’s author Christopher Steele has already given his sources to Robert Mueller. That brings us to one passage in particular.
The Trump-Russia dossier states that the Trump-Russia hackers “had been paid by both Trump’s team and the Kremlin.” If Mueller can follow the money trail and prove that Trump’s team really did pay the hackers, that’s the ballgame. Trump paying foreigners to rig the election in his favor would be the end of him. That’s straight up treason. The Republicans in Congress have shown that they’re willing to put themselves at enormous political risk by ignoring the increasingly damning evidence against Trump, but there’s a point at which the laws of politics kick in and force everyone’s hand.
For all we know, Robert Mueller may have already proven that Donald Trump and his team paid the Trump-Russia election hackers, by following up with Steele’s sources. If he’s not there yet, then based on the fact that we now know the dossier is rock solid with its detailed sourcing, he’ll get there before much longer. Tick Tock. Donald Trump for Prison!
