As the Trump-Russia scandal explodes, Donald Trump panics and calls up Vladimir Putin
The White House has announced that Donald Trump had an hour-plus long phone call today with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is a remarkable development, considering that the two men just finished meeting privately in Vietnam a mere ten days ago, and should have reasonably been able to discuss any above-board business they needed to discuss. That tells us that today’s phone call was entirely about trying to find a way to survive the Trump-Russia scandal.
The official White House press release is titled “Readout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia” but it contains no readout or transcript of anything that either man said during the phone call. Instead it consists of nothing more than three paragraphs generically claiming that Trump and Putin discussed the same world issues that they already discussed ten days ago (link). In other words, Trump’s people don’t want us knowing what was really discussed. However, it’s not difficult to figure out.
In the ten days since Trump and Putin last spoke, several new bombshells have landed in the Trump-Russia scandal. Last week it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr had been coordinating with Russian controlled cyberterrorist site WikiLeaks throughout the general election – a leak that seemed to have come from Putin himself, as a warning shot to Trump over his failure to get Russian sanctions lifted. Then another leak surfaced over the weekend which revealed that Donald Trump Jr had met with a suspected Russian mobster during the election.
Our best guess is that Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin today to beg him to stop going after his son. We have no way of knowing how that phone call went. However, we do know that Trump has absolutely no ability to get those sanctions lifted. That’s a problem for Trump, because sanctions have been Putin’s number one priority all along. Look for the ugly leaks about Donald Trump Jr to continue.
