Tangling the Web

Left Paris for U.S.A. Will be heading to New Jersey and attending the#USWomensOpen, their most important tournament, this afternoon.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2017

Bastille Day celebration in the rear-view mirror, gotta keep that excited-by-military-parade feeling alive and get back to Jersey to ogle some more women who are in great shape!  Yow-zah!!!

Honestly, I almost wish I still had cable, so I could watch FoxNews:

“Jared Kushner failed to report more than 100 foreign contacts on his security clearance form,” she pointed out. “If I had done that when I worked at the CIA or the State Department, I would have been fired. So this story isn’t just bad because there’s not another side out there, their story keeps changing.”

Meghan McCain, meanwhile, pointed out that her own brothers would have been court martialed if they had taken a meeting with a Russian government lawyer during her father’s 2008 presidential campaign. She also said it’s time for the Trump White House to really come clean about its interactions with the Russians.

“If there is a God in Heaven, I beg the White House to come out with everything,” she said. “Every shot of vodka you’ve taken for any Russians.”

“Why is that so hard?” Faulkner responded.

It's pretty damned clear by now that being in the Trump criminal clan means never having to say "I'm guilty."  Anyone not married to the President's daughter would not get a do-over to add 100 foreign contacts to your security form and a GOP House committee to stand behind you.  And the answer to the question Faulkner asked is pretty clear, too:  because if they really came clean, "innocent" would no longer be a term anyone could use about this White House.  Even Chris Wallace is throwing out the benefit of the doubt:

“It’s one more case where there is a new revelation from the White House and Donald Trump Jr., and other people don’t put out themselves and it ends up coming out from the news media,” Wallace explained.

“I think this is the biggest problem here,” Wallace stated. “I think there is very little legal jeopardy for Donald Trump, Jr., but there’s a huge problem with the credibility of the White House because they kept saying there is no collusion, there have been no contacts, this is all a hoax, it is all fake news.”

I think there is a great deal of legal jeopardy myself, else why be so deliberately stupid?  What, the Watergate coverup was because Nixon knew he'd done nothing criminally wrong?  And I'm beginning to think Shep Smith is going to lose his job soon:

“Who else was in the meeting?” Smith asked. “The meeting with the lawyer reported to have Russian information on Hillary Clinton? The first son, the first son-in-law, the Russian lawyer, the campaign manager, an interpreter and brand new today, a Russian-American lobbyist that served in a spy unit of the Soviet military. He was there, too. Nobody mentioned that.”

“Emails this week showed Donald Trump Jr. met with the lawyer after a middleman told him that she was a Russian government official who had information that was part of Russia’s support for Donald Trump,” Smith continued. “Trump Jr.’s lawyers confirmed another person was at the meeting and now we know the person is a former counterintelligence officer.”

“President Trump this week praised his son for being open and for being transparent,” Smith said, playing a clip of Trump Jr. telling Fox News host Sean Hannity there’s nothing else to the meeting.

“There isn’t anything else there,” a sarcastic Smith said.

“Trump Jr. did release the emails between himself and that middle man,” Smith said, referencing Trump Jr.’s claim of transparency. “The president’s son posted them to Twitter just minutes before the New York Times was going to publish details from that same message. The New York Times had told him so, that’s when he released him. When the Times first broke the story, Trump Jr. called it a ‘short introductory meeting’ … That was the first statement.”

“The next day, Donald Trump admitted acquaintance told him the individual he was meeting might have information helpful to the campaign,” he continued. “Those emails show he actually told the middle man, ‘I love it!’ When the British publicist told him the Russian lawyer was a Russian government attorney who had dirt on Hillary Clinton.”

“Oh what a tangled web we weave,” Smith said.

“Jared Kushner filled out his form … very important stuff,” Smith said. “You can go to prison for messing it up intentionally. He went back and added 100 names and places. None of these people made it. Still not, we’re still not clean on this, Chris. If there’s nothing there and that’s what they tell us, they tell us there’s nothing to this and nothing came of it, a nothing burger, it wasn’t memorable. Didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t anything, so I didn’t even remember it with a Russian interpreter in the room at Trump Tower. If all of that, why all of these lies? Why is it lie after lie after lie?”

Back to JK again; and yes, "Chris" is Chris Wallace, and Shep is right:  we're still not clean on this.  There's not even an appearance of propriety on that issue:  JK gets a do-over because he's JK.  And lie after lie after lie after lie...it finally takes its toll.

*Turns out the U.S. Women's Open is at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ.  Which, oddly enough, Trump has time to attend all weekend:

“I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump, 69, tells ITK. "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.”

I guess JK is sitting in the Big Chair for the next few days.