We have said the exact same thing here and have pounded it and pounded it, now we find a story in Salon that fully agrees; The Russian bounty story has changed everything with respect to Trump. No doubt, he was in a free fall in the polls over handling COVID and the yearning for better race relations already, the “bounty story” will not be the root of Trump’s political demise. But it will be the cause of Trump’s personal demise.

Never, ever, before has a president betrayed his own troops so brazenly, shamelessly, and unapologetically. To this day, over a week later, the White House’s official position is that there is “no consensus” on the intelligence. In a normal world, it would leave everyone mystified as to why there isn’t a huge sense of urgency to come to a “consensus” as to whether our nation is being attacked – except no one is mystified because we all know! Trump is beholden to Putin’s Russia with tragic totality, and his reaction to this story is all the proof one needs. Either the MAGA heads don’t care or are so held in his hypnosis that they don’t see it.

Salon is all over it:

By Monday, the New York Times was reporting that Trump had been given a “written briefing” in February that concluded the Russians had paid bounties on dead Americans. Then suddenly, the dates that the Trump administration had known about the bounties began to be pushed back. There was a report Trump had been briefed in December of 2019. Then the AP reported that intelligence about the bounties had been given to the White House in “early 2019” and that “national security adviser John Bolton also told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.”

As Salon notes, when the intelligence community won’t speak on the record, you know who is doing the speaking off the record. The intelligence community is done playing and are now just telling the nation straight-up, Trump is a traitor. Proof? Someone leaked that Trump had spoken to Putin three times in secret, in late March, phone calls not reported to the media. Someone wants the public to know – this man is “close” to Putin, in a bad way, or why keep it secret?

More leaks came in concerning bank accounts and an Afghan citizen who facilitated payments – these are very very specific leaks.

By Wednesday morning, Trump couldn’t take it anymore. At 7:09 a.m., he reverted to type and called the whole thing … wait for it … a “hoax.” “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” he tweeted. “The secret source probably does not even exist, just like the story itself. If the discredited @nytimes has a source, reveal it. Just another HOAX!”

As Salon notes, the walls are closing in around Trump:

It’s getting serious out there, folks. The word “treason,” as in giving aid and comfort to the enemy, is being thrown around not only on op-ed pages but in Congress. This may turn into yet another Ukraine aid scandal, in which Trump commits impeachable offenses and simply gets away with it because Republicans refuse to confront his treachery, let alone  do anything about it. But he’s surrounded by people in important, powerful positions who are privy to big, important secrets, and they want him out of office. With their leaks about the Russian bounties, they have in effect put a bounty on Trump’s head.

Salon’s final paragraph seals it, with a bullet of a sentence that leaves no doubt that there is “no doubt” what is happening here: “Trump is not a president, he is a co-conspirator with a dictator trying to weaken the United States. He is a traitor and he needs to go.”

Trump is now facing “the rest of his life” knowing that he must navigate the fact that American intelligence knows his secrets and it wants to ensure that an American leads the American government. It won’t let him go, in or out of office.

Our troops deserve at least that much.

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Peace, y’all
jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom