Politics

Trump Jr. may have been set up.

"There is Don Junior, the fresh-faced and rather obtuse presidential progeny, who walks straight into the arms of the clownish Bob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and events promoter, who set up the fateful meeting. There is Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who previously worked with Fusion GPS, the dirty tricks firm employed by the Never Trump crowd that came up with the salacious “dirty dossier,” claiming that Trump had been compromised by Russian intelligence.
As Ernest Cuneo put it in The Golden Age, he had to play “both sides of the fence” in order to pull off the hijacking his British paymasters required, and this old ploy may well have played out in this instance."

This is an excellent observation.

"As for the incriminating email itself, which – in a burst of novelistic drama worthy of Vidal – was posted along with a statement by Don Junior, its explicitness renders it laughably suspicious. Goldstone informs Junior that he has some juicy information on Hillary’s canoodling with the Russians and that the Russian Crown Prosecutor – their Attorney General – is prepared to release “some official documents” attesting to this. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information,”says Goldstone, “but it’s part of Russia’s and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Do I detect a note mockery it Goldstone’s missive? You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to miss it. Yes, he says, this material is “sensitive,” but I’m going to reveal the identity and motivations of the source in writing, for the record, so that it can exist in cyberspace forever, a message to posterity saying: There’s one born every minute!" 

Wow.

"The narrative goes like this: evil Trump populists plot with our “adversary,” Russia, to steal the election from the rightful winner, as a White House inhabited by traitors hands the country over to Putin the All-Powerful. Whatever comes out later – the Fusion-Veselnitskaya connection, the real motives of the deliberately stupid Goldstone, the original source of the Goldstone-Junior correspondence – will get lost in the general impression that Trump is some kind of Manchurian candidate, or at least a “useful idiot,” as the old cold warriors used to say. Indeed, Michael Hayden, the former chief of both the CIA and the National Security Agency – which is the probable source of the Goldstone-Junior emails – called Trump exactly that. The script was written months ago, when it became apparent that Trump would be the nominee – and that he had a real chance of becoming President. Now it is being played out, it all its melodramatic vulgarity." 

I knew it had been set up before the election.

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