Wednesday, November 16, 2016

This Story Should Dominate the News Until Trump Is Sworn In

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50598/russian-talked-to-trump-campaign/
"Why aren't hundreds of national-security reporters all over it? We have elected a guy who may well have traded what little integrity he has to a vicious autocrat and his thieves-in-law. (Note to anyone who takes exception: This is not "red-baiting" because these crooks are not Red.) We know he can't get a loan from most American banks, so he has to go overseas for a lot of his financing. What banks is he tied into, and are any of those banks tied into the Russian government? Whom does he owe and how much does he owe them? And how do they plan to collect? This is a monumental story, and it deserves a full airing before we swear this guy in. And it's only part of the unprecedented tangle of shadowy business dealings that will follow him into office. The president-elect also is the defendant in 75 different lawsuits of assorted kinds. He plans to put his assets into a "blind trust" that will be overseen by…his children. I know a lot of people are charmed by his reluctance to abide by traditional political norms and customs, but this is far beyond that. This is a guy toting a huge amount of baggage into the Oval Office and each piece of it contains a ticking time-bomb. The Russian business is perilous beyond words. But you can sense even now that our Fourth Estate is pushing it ever so gently in the direction of the same memory hole down which went Nixon's treasonous behavior as regards the Paris Peace Talks and the possibility that the Reagan campaign monkeywrenched the release of the hostages in Iran in 1980. The way this works is that the elite political media decides something is so unthinkable that the children—that's the rest of us—are too delicate to handle it. Well, kids, the unthinkable already has happened. You might as well cover it as fully as possible."