It’s understandable that the old guard Republicans are distrustful of backroom deals with the Russians. You don’t have to have much of a history lesson to know that the Russians won’t follow through on deals that can’t be enforced, and are wiling to go to extremes to ensure that benefits are very one-sided.
The Russian government is not healthy enough for us to deal with them. And striking unofficial bargains with operatives or citizens of Russia is extremely risky, and almost guaranteed to backfire. We should suspect the judgement of anyone involved with high level Russian officials and oligarchs. (A closer translation for oligarch is a “robber baron” in American English)
The American people made their choice in 2016, according to the current rules of our system. But anyone who backs the Trump administration going forward must fall with them. I say must because we can no longer trust a person who thinks this is OK, both from an ethical standpoint and from a personal judgement standpoint.
A serious Russian agent isn’t going to screw up a good thing, that meeting may have been more of a ‘feeler’, to see how far they could get with Don Jr., to introduce a line of communication with some plausible deniability if it blew up. They didn’t have to bring a manila folder full of dirt, or even a thumb drive, all they had to do was promise to release stuff to wikileaks when the time came. And surprise surprise, within hours of the Access Hollywood tape surfacing, wikileaks was showing off Podesta’s emails.
It has been well established that a professional, donating services as part of their profession, has to report their donation as a campaign donation.
In this case, we’re talking about an agency of a foreign government, doing what they do (hacking), and providing as a service or good to a campaign. The agency has a budget. Their agents did work, consistent with their profession (gathering intelligence) that had value. The value of the services matters as to the seriousness of the offense. Given how many hackers were involved, hundreds of thousands of dollars? Well above the threshold for felony campaign finance violation.
Let’s please keep things respectful. Differing opinions are fine, even ones vociferously defended - but be respectful to your fellow poster while making them.
This is what it comes down to. The concept of professional services as an in-kind campaign donation with some material value (which can be ascertained roughly via expert opinion about time contributed and market rates) has been established in case law and applies just as much to oppo research provided by the Russians as it does to attack ads provided by a corrupt PAC.
