Well, I think the Washington Post editorial staff got this one right.

plaidadder:

Their headline:

Trump just colluded with Russia. Openly.

This paragraph is kind of buried at the end, but let me say one or two things about it:

“While Mr. Trump’s insistence on granting Mr. Putin that status was misguided, it paled beside his betrayal of the FBI and his own senior intelligence officials. Incredibly, Mr. Trump appeared to endorse a cynical suggestion by Mr. Putin that Mr. Mueller’s investigators be granted interviews with a dozen Russian intelligence officers indicted in the DNC hack in exchange for Russian access to associates of William Browder, a financier whose exposure of high-level corruption and human rights crimes in Moscow led to the adoption by Congress of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on those responsible. Mr. Putin’s citation of bogus Russian charges against Mr. Browder was matched by Mr. Trump’s garbled reference to “the Pakistani gentleman” who was falsely alleged by right-wing conspiracy theorists to be behind the leak of DNC emails.” 

All right now.

Putin is as obsessed with the Magnitsky Act as Buttercup is with his electoral college victory. You remember that meeting between Russian operatives and Don Jr. et al. at Trump Tower that was so shocking to everyone back in the day? Don Jr. made some noise about it having reference to “adoptions,” but it was really about the Magnitsky Act. 

In a conversation amongst GOP members of the House which was surreptitiously recorded in June 2016, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously said, “

There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” That would be Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican representative from California, and our own Buttercup. Here’s a nice long piece on Rohrabacher from The Atlantic, which basically does everything *but* just come out and say that Rohrabacher is a Russian asset. Anyway, Rohrabacher’s most embarrassing manuevers have also been around the Magnitsky Act. He was responsible for getting a Russian-made anti-Magnistky Act propaganda film screened at the Newseum in Rosslyn–he wanted to show it to Congress, but his colleagues wouldn’t let him–and has been lobbying for years to either eliminate or gut the Magnitsky Act.

Why does Putin care about the Magnitsky Act? Because it costs him money. The Magnitsky Act enables the US government to freeze the US assets of Russian oligarchs who are responsible for major human rights violations. Since many of these oligarchs launder a lot of their money in the US, this is a serious inconvenience not just for Putin but for many of the oligarchs who might one day band together to take Putin out if they got pissed off enough and thought he was vulnerable enough. 

I go on about the Magnitsky Act at some length in this post from waaaaaay back in the current catastrophe. I will just quote a little chunk of it:

“[William] Browder is one of a few sources I’ve seen recently trying to make the argument that none of this is really about destabilizing democracy around the globe or sowing chaos in the US; that we are giving Putin too much credit for caring about things other than himself, his money, and his continued political survival. If that’s true, it would explain why, despite having installed his puppet, he’s still responding in draconian style to the passage of this new Congressional act that makes it more difficult for said puppet to do what Putin obviously wants him to do–which is to return all the assets that were frozen when Obama imposed the sanctions. It is also worth noting that a lot of Russian money has already been laundered through Buttercup’s properties, and so in a lot of ways, Putin already owned him even before 2016.”

Why am I going over all this? Because I’m flabbergasted that Putin is now trying to leverage Buttercup into letting Putin start harassing the people who were responsible for the passage of the Magnitsky Act. It shows you that Putin, whatever else you may say about him, is capable of remaining on task even when interacting with Buttercup; it’s kind of mindboggling to reflect that just as Buttercup may have run for President purely to get back at Barack Obama, Putin may have helped Buttercup become president purely to get rid of the Magnitsky act; and that Buttercup is at this moment and probably for the rest of his presidency a tool of Vladimir Putin. Or, as the good people of the Washington Post editorial staff put it:

“In Helsinki, Mr. Trump again insisted “there was no collusion” with Russia. Yet in refusing to acknowledge the plain facts about Russia’s behavior, while trashing his own country’s justice system, Mr. Trump in fact was openly colluding with the criminal leader of a hostile power.”

Every single fucking Reagan Republican should be in the streets demanding impeachment right now. All that “soft on Communism” bullshit for all the 1980s when YOUR PARTY would turn out to be the one that delivered up the US government to a Russian dictator.