The Crime. I

I'll get to the crime (the crime Donald Trump is most anxious to conceal) presently, in an update on what I've been maintaining, since last October or so, but I'm going to take my time. Don't @ me, as the Twitter kids say.

So there's this thing floating around tweeted by Aleksandr Torshin, Russian gun enthusiast and oligarch and mentor to our newly indicted lady spy and graduate student Mariya (her preferred spelling, "Mariia", looks like a typo and I refuse to use it) Butina, from February 2016, looking almost like an announcement on Twitter that the secret cabal of Russian gun enthusiasts have finished recruiting their US presidential candidate:

Which I have to say does not seem exactly right to me. I mean, that is, if you are running this incredibly audacious conspiracy from within Russian criminal-governmental circles to take over the US elections and install your own candidate, don't you have some more secure method of communication? Twitter FFS?

What's not being noted adequately among the tweeps is what kind of tweet this is, a link to a Russian newspaper article, from the very popular Putinist Lenta.ru, reporting on the Republican debate of 13 February, where JEB! sternly proclaimed that the United States and Russia could never be allies and Trump said they could:

It gets worse

Via Erik Wemple, Washington Post, March 28.

Donald Trump, in the press conference (the only formal press conference he has held during his presidency, that's a rate so far of 0.25 press conferences per month, compared to 1.71 for Barack Obama, 2.18 for George W. Bush, and so on, cutting in half the previous record low set by Ronald Reagan at 0.48, I just had to mention that) of February 16, following up on the Times story of February 14 in which it was asserted that the FBI was examining a history of "repeated contacts" between some unknown number of Trump people and Russian intelligence other than General Flynn, including, according to the Times from other reporting, his old friend and fellow Roy Cohn disciple Roger Stone, and Carter Page, the only person Trump had been able to name as one of his foreign policy advisers—"Carter Page, PhD!"—in an interview of March 2016 with the Washington Post—after dismissing Page as "a very low-level member of I think a committee for a short period of time—I don't think I ever met him":