It's not even, as CNN‘s Jake Tapper described it, that Donald Trump, Jr. is guilty of "evidence of willingness to commit collusion.”
Tapper looked serious when he said that, but what does that even mean? As Greg Jarrett on Fox News says, there is no collusion statute except in antitrust.
That's what its come down to now with the Democrats. Obstruction of justice didn’t work, so they try this. Even if collusion were a term defining criminal behavior (which it's not), who has ever been prosecuted for evidence of willingness to rob a bank if the bank never got robbed, or evidence of willingness to murder someone who never gets murdered?
Perhaps Mr. Tapper is confusing reality with the movie Minority Report, where people got arrested before they committed crimes.
Here’s the actual story.
In July 2016 Donald Trump Jr. gets baited to meet with a foreign national who says she has the goods on Hillary. But she really doesn't. Turn out she’s a lobbyist for an issue that wouldn’t have warranted Trump scheduling a meeting with her.
No connection is established with government officials or intelligence agents coming out of the meeting. If that had happened, which it didn’t, we would be looking for, at worst, the beginning of a potential step to a pathway to war and charges of treason, and at best, what never happened either, receiving information from a non-citizen that exposes bad things their political opponents had done.
So we follow this fictional potential step to a pathway to treason, which didn't even exist in Trump Jrs.' case, and we still don't have an illegal, indictable offence.
Then, to take a step further what at best didn't happen, it leads to the establishment of an undercover ongoing correspondence with a foreign national which provides incriminating evidence on one's domestic political opponents. We still wouldn't have illegal activity, or, as the despicable Senator Tim Kaine implied, treasonous behaviour.
If we did, then we would have to require the investigation of Democrats who ACTUALLY WERE, to use the favorite word of Democrats, COLLUDING with Ukrainian to get the goods on candidate Donald J. Trump.
The news of Donald Trump Jrs.' meeting came out Monday and by Tuesday morning, Senator Tim Kaine, veteran DNC disinformation specialist that he is, was talking treason: “…this question of collusion, which essentially starts to transition this into potentially a treason investigation…”
If I was there to question Kaine, I would have asked, “How do you define treason, and just what specific acts are you calling potentially treasonous?”
This wasn't the first instance of Trump family members facing ridiculous accusations of treason.
At Slate, a liberal news site, an article entitled “No, Donald Trump Did Not Commit Treason When He Suggested Russia Hack Clinton’s Emails” from last July refers to what its author considered an example of candidate Trump seriously telling Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. And no, he wasn’t being serious, like the Democrats continue to assert. It was a joke!
But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and treat what candidate Trump said as serious communication with Russians, it still does not pass muster as treason:
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“ ‘Legally speaking, there’s no actual item here,’ says Mark Zaid, an attorney specializing in national security law. ‘It would have to be more than just words. It would be taking action against the United States in specific, actual situations.’
“The parameters of treason are explicitly outlined in the Constitution. It is defined clearly and narrowly. ‘Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort,’ Article III, Section 3 states. ‘No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.’
“The last convictions for treason in the United States happened during World War II and in the war’s immediate aftermath. In some high-profile cases, like that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, spies were prosecuted for separate but related offenses like espionage. John Walker Lindh, an American citizen captured while fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, was convicted on 10 counts. None of them were [prosecuted for] treason.
“Zaid says this is a case of a word having a very specific meaning in a legal context and a different, looser meaning in conversation. Zaid’s final word: ‘People don’t know what they’re talking about.’ ”
On the other hand, a case for treason could be made of then Secretary of State John Kerry’s release of $140 billion in cash money to Iran in February 2016 that eventually went to terrorist organizations they support, who have been waging war against the U.S. and its allies.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
