Let’s go out on long, thin, brittle limb for a moment and assume that no one associated with Trump’s campaign or his transition team was guilty of conspiring with the Russians as they attempted to undermine our electoral process.  Let’s further test the strength of that fragile limb by assuming that there was nothing treasonous in Trump’s embracement of the known adversary of our way of life who rules Russia with an iron fist.  Of course to do all of that we would have assume that everything we have learned about a myriad of connections and communications between Trump staffers and Russian agents while hacked emails were leaked, an anti-Russian plank of the Republican campaign platform was softened, and President Obama’s sanctions were being levied were simply unlikely coincidences.  However, if we go out on that long, thin, brittle limb, one question stands out like bright neon sign in the dark wilderness – why are Trump and his minions acting like they are guilty as hell?

If the Trump administration has nothing to hide, the correct political strategy would have been openness and transparency.  They should be proclaiming to the world, “If you want to investigate, bring it on.  We will cooperate fully with any investigation.  We will make any and every one of our people, including the President, available to testify under oath in any setting you choose.”  Instead they remind me of the Nixon administration when their cover up was starting to unravel.  If memory serves, the only exception being that back in early 1970’s, the Republicans in Congress appeared to be as determined as the Democrats to expose the cover up.  This time around; not so much.

The attempts by the White House to block former Assistant Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee and Chairman’s Nunes’ complicity in that effort are just their latest attempts to deflect and derail any investigation aimed at unearthing the truth.  From early efforts by the multiple Trump campaign spokesmen to minimize the campaign role of Carter Page to their denials that anyone on their staff had any contacts with Russians despite public statements by Russian officials to the contrary, the SOP of the Trump team has been to deny, deflect, and deny again.

Then consider that efforts of Trump himself to label each new disturbing revelation as “fake news” and his willingness to up stir controversy with outlandish statements to divert the news media’s attention from the coverage of those revelations.  Then we have Jeff Sessions lying under oath about two, now three meetings with the Russian ambassador when he could have just as easily told the truth and depicted the meetings as normal business. Also consider the frequent and repeated denials since the election by Trump and his top staffers, including Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, that anyone on the campaign or transition team had any dealings with Russian agents despite numerous reports to the contrary.  And let’s not leave out Spicer’s laughable attempt to describe Paul Manafort’s role in Trump’s campaign by saying that he was someone “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time”.

This is not how innocent people act; this is how people with a lot to hide behave.  While it is difficult to dismiss all of the circumstantial evidence of collusion as a set of highly improbable coincidences, in my view the biggest indication of their guilt is the Trump team’s willingness to go to improbable lengths to keep the truth from coming out.

Cajun      3/29/2017