Purloined State Secrets and Phone Calls to Putin
...what could go wrong?!
More than 50 years ago a young Bob Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein doggedly investigated and reported on a series of criminality and abuses of power by Richard Nixon and his cronies, collectively known as “Watergate,” named after the break-in to the offices of the Democratic National Committee that took place in that complex.
Woodward has yet another book about to be released. The advance copy yielded a number of political bombshells, perhaps none more shocking (but not surprising) than this, as reported by USA Today:
Former President Donald Trump has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving the White House, according to reporting from a new book by journalist Bob Woodward…
“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.
The conversations cover a period before and after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a NATO ally the Biden administration has spent billions of dollars to support.
…and,
While he was still president, Trump secretly shipped Putin COVID-19 testing machines when such testing was rare, Woodward reports in the book, a copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY in advance of an Oct. 15 release.
So, while he was lying to America about the severity and danger of COVID, he was shipping testing equipment to Putin — even as our nation was desperately short on these supplies.
But the COVID part of this tale is small potatoes compared to the call with the post-Presidency calls with Putin…We know that Putin helped Trump win by pushing disinformation in 2016, and Trump’s admiration and affinity for the dictator is well-documented.
What offers or promises were discussed between the dictator and the wannabe dictator? Worse yet, what secrets might Trump have shared with his buddy?
Unfortunately, the media market is far different today. Right wingers have followed Steve Bannon’s playbook to “Flood the zone with sh*t” so that people get confused and despair of being able to find the truth. And the right wingers have their own outlets to do it.
If Fox “news” and Newsmax and One America Network had existed in 1973, Nixon would have survived.
But the truth is knowable, it just takes a little effort.
I’m convinced that a vast majority of Trump defenders know their position is untenable, but they either want to believe him because he says what they have always believed; he hates who they hate; or they can’t bring themselves to admit he fooled them.