Plausible deniability. Those of us old enough to remember Watergate, remember this talismanic phrase. Whether a President had it determined whether he could avoid being engulfed in a scandal that ensnared top members of his administration. The answer to the question, “What did he know and when did he know it?” determined whether a presidency survived or ended in disgrace. The lack of plausible deniability brought down Richard Nixon during Watergate. The presence of it saved Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. With the revelation that Kushner, Manafort and Donald, Jr. met, not only with Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, but with Russian lobbyist and “former” counter intelligence officer and hacker, Rinat Akhmetshin, there can be no credible claim that Trump and his campaign did not actively attempt to (and perhaps actually did) collude with the Russian government to impact our election.
For months now, we have witnessed revelation after revelation of dubious dealings with scores of Russian nationals from everyone in the top echelon of Trump’s orbit, like some serialized version of a Tom Clancy thriller, while Trump’s administration and his Congressional enablers enact a hateful policy agenda fueled by vicious racism, homophobia and xenophobia.
In the last week alone, serial perjurer and committed racist, Jeff Sessions gave a speech in front of the anti-gay Alliance Defending Freedom, asserting that the rights of members of this hate group were being infringed. The ADF, which is funded in part by the DeVos Foundation, opposes marriage equality and adoption rights for same sex couples in the United States and seeks to criminalize LGBT status in countries around the world.
Yesterday, we learned that the DHS was considering dramatically expanding its ability to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. Current DHS policy allows expedited deportation of immigrants detained within 100 miles of the border who have been in the country for less than two weeks. DHS would like to have expedited deportation powers on a nationwide basis for people who have been in this country less than 90 days!
Lastly, on Friday, the Department of (in)Justice appealed District Court Judge Derrick Watson’s ruling narrowing Trump’s travel ban to hold that grandparents fit within the definition of “close family ties.”
This administration has a single-minded obsession with pursuing the futile and backwards aim of re-making America as a country of white, straight, wealthy Christians, the Constitution be damned. Americans who are LGBT, Muslim, Black or Latino live each day with the omnipresent dread of what else this administration (or those emboldened by it) will do to make our lives less free and less safe.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are hell-bent on passing legislation that will decimate Medicaid. They don’t want to jeopardize their chance to plunge one third of senior citizens into poverty and consign thousands of disabled adults and children to miserable, circumscribed and shortened lives by demanding accountability or even criticizing Trump.
Every principal actor in this American tragedy is a person who has demonstrated that they have no allegiance to the American people. The question, for those of you fortunate enough not to have a target on your back is, when the people in power achieve their desired goals, resulting in a vast increase in human misery and rendering our country unrecognizable, will you have plausible deniability?
#Russiancollusion