Latest Washington Post Trump-Russia bombshell is just a warmup act for the avalanche
There’s a reason Donald Trump has been trying to dump out his most unpopular news – from the enactment of his transgender military ban to his pardon of racist criminal Joe Arpaio – during the Hurricane Harvey crisis. He’s hoping no one will pay any attention to it. Even Trump knows that during a catastrophic hurricane, less attention is paid to other news. That leads us to Sunday night’s Washington Post bombshell about Trump and Russia.
This latest story, which has Donald Trump and convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater secretly conspiring to build Trump Tower in Moscow during the election, is a fairly major bombshell in its own right. It proves that Trump was seeking favor with Vladimir Putin during the election for financial reasons. It also confirms Trump knows Sater well, despite his denials. And it points to Trump’s recent business developments being tied to Russian mafia money. But this story is just a warmup act. It’s Part I of a multi-part series.
How do we know this? It’s partly because there’s clearly a lot more to this story. How far did the deal get? What was Putin’s involvement? Where exactly was the money to have come from? Why involve a criminal like Sater? Has Sater flipped yet? And so on. But it’s also partly because the Washington Post wouldn’t have wasted this story (link) by dumping it out in the middle of a major hurricane aftermath unless it was just a teaser. We’ve seen this before.
This summer the New York Times released its story on the Donald Trump Jr meeting with Russia in piecemeal fashion. It set things up so the Trump camp would issue partial denials each time that were subsequently disproven by the next segment of the story. And it’s a safe bet that the WaPo is using the same rope-a-dope with this Trump Tower Moscow story. Now watch the rest of it fall into place.
