“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.” –
– Hunter S. Thompson –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – An image haunts me as I consume the news this morning, an image of a dog going around in circles chasing it’s own tail.

If you use a search engine to look that up, you find a definition of the metaphor: It refers to how a dog can exhaust itself by chasing its own tail. “To take action that is ineffectual and does not lead to progress.”

It might be helpful to keep that image in mind when watching this video on CNN, with Jim Sciutto debating Carl Bernstein on an anonymous report that Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen is allegedly ready to offer evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians and is guilty of a prosecutable crime.

The breaking news story is all over social media and being repeated by every news outlet and blog in the land in the hunt for traffic and ratings.

The lede?

“Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, claims that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in which Russians were expected to offer his campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, sources with knowledge tell CNN. Cohen is willing to make that assertion to special counsel Robert Mueller, the sources said.”

Link: Cohen claims Trump knew in advance of 2016 Trump Tower meeting

Yes:

Cohen’s claim would contradict repeated denials by Trump, Donald Trump Jr., their lawyers and other administration officials who have said that the President knew nothing about the Trump Tower meeting until he was approached about it by The New York Times in July 2017.

Cohen alleges that he was present, along with several others, when Trump was informed of the Russians’ offer by Trump Jr. By Cohen’s account, Trump approved going ahead with the meeting with the Russians, according to sources.

“To be clear, these sources said Cohen does not have evidence, such as audio recordings, to corroborate his claim, but he is willing to attest to his account.”

Trump denied knowledge of the meeting in a tweet Friday morning. But so what? He’s been caught lying so many times that if any of it was said under oath, he would be doomed to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell, or a padded room in a certifiable nuthouse.

“I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr. Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!” Trump tweeted.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s TV attorney, told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “Cuomo Prime Time” Thursday night that Cohen has “been lying all week, he’s been lying for years” and called him a “pathological liar.”

According to CNN, “people who have discussed the matter with Cohen,” say he has expressed hope that this claim about the Trump Tower meeting will help him reach out to Mueller and possibly lessen his legal troubles. He’s under scrutiny by federal prosecutors in Manhattan after Mueller referred Cohen’s case to them.

Why would he need to reach out to the FBI or Special Counsel Robert Mueller? They’ve already searched his office and seized the files and interviewed Cohen at length.

Going around in circles. Chasing their own tails.

To recap, the June 2016 meeting was arranged after a publicist who knew Trump Jr. told him in emails — in no uncertain terms — that a senior Russian official “offered to provide the Trump campaign” with damaging information about (candidate Hillary) Clinton, and that the outreach was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” At the time, the Russian operation to covertly boost Trump’s candidacy wasn’t publicly known. Trump. Jr. responded, “if it’s what you say, I love it,” and arranged the meeting.

Trump Jr. was joined in the meeting by his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman at the time. There were four Russians in the room, including a lawyer with Kremlin ties, a businessman who worked for an oligarch and a lobbyist with old KGB connections.

After news of the meeting broke in July 2017, the Trump team offered misleading explanations and changed their story several times. But one claim stayed consistent: that Trump had no knowledge of the meeting beforehand, wasn’t told about it afterward and first learned about it one year later. Those denials were repeatedly issued by Trump, his attorney Jay Sekulow, Trump Jr., Futerfas and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. Those people denied that Trump had contemporaneous knowledge of the meeting on more than 15 occasions, according to CNN’s analysis.

Trump said on July 12, 2017, that he “only heard about it two or three days ago.” One week later, Trump repeated that he “didn’t know anything about the meeting” because “nobody told me” about it.

Around that same time, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Sekulow to confirm Trump’s claims that he only recently learned about the controversial meeting. Sekulow’s response: “Yes, I swear.”

But perhaps the highest-stakes denial was given by Trump Jr. in his testimony last year to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“He wasn’t aware of it,” Trump Jr. told lawmakers, referring to his father’s knowledge of the meeting. “And, frankly, by the time anyone was aware of it, which was summer of this year, as I stated earlier, I wouldn’t have wanted to get him involved in it because it had nothing to do with him.”

Yes, Trump’s critics have long doubted these denials. They point to a series of phone calls Trump Jr. made to a blocked phone number before and after the meeting. They also note that two days before the meeting, Trump mysteriously announced plans to give a “major speech” about Clinton’s scandals. Trump Jr. says he didn’t get any dirt at the meeting — and the speech never happened.

Yet Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign adviser and White House strategist, said the meeting was “treasonous” and speculated that “the chance that Don Jr. did not walk these (Russians) up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.” Bannon’s comments, to author Michael Wolff for his book “Fire and Fury,” triggered the bitter public split between Bannon and Trump in early 2018.

But Bannon has been back in the president’s ear of late as the midterm elections loom, advising Trump and the Republicans to use the issue of illegal immigration to rile up the base on the political right to turn out and vote for Republicans in November.

Could the Outcome of the Midterm Elections Depend on Illegal Immigration Fight?

Going around in circles. Chasing their own tails.

Who is telling the truth?

According to more circles, the Washington Post reports that “if Trump’s direct approval of cooperation with Russians can be proven, it will be the biggest political scandal in American history. His presidency for all intents and purposes would be delegitimized. We are talking about a presidential candidate who sought and received help from a hostile foreign power, covered it up and “repaid” the favor by public obsequiousness to that power’s leader.

The paper quotes constitutional scholar and Supreme Court litigator Laurence Tribe, who said on Twitter, “If Cohen credibly testifies Trump knew in advance of the 6/9/16 meeting that Donald Jr, Jared, etc, had with Viselnitskaya & other Russians in Trump Tower to get dirt against Clinton in June 2016, that’s direct evidence of Trump/Putin collusion. Huge.”

In spite of all his denials, we have known for some time that Trump colluded with Russia in the campaign and still colludes with former KGB chief Valdimir Putin to pay off his huge debts and a massive blackmail bill to boot.

In the year of Trump’s election, 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose the “word of the year” as “post-truth.” This kind of sophistry may well have been going on since the time of Plato, Pericles and Socrates.

Truth Isn’t the Problem—We Are

But this is growing utterly ridiculous. How long do we have to keep chasing around in circles trying to catch Trump by the tail? It’s past time to act.

Will the F.B.I. and Congress Now Act to Remove Trump from Power?