Putin listens closely as Trump speaks... Why ? Read on

Russia's President Vladimir Putin listens while US President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at Finland's Presidential Palace July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. - The US and Russian leaders opened an historic summit in Helsinki, with Donald Trump promising an "extraordinary relationship" and Vladimir Putin saying it was high time to thrash out disputes around the world. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP)        (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
And there's really only one idiot in America stupid enough to fall for it.
 One of the few semi-concrete proposals to come out of the Trump-Putin Summit and Annual Performance Review was an ostensibly new willingness by the Putin regime to “help” the U.S. government further investigate the allegations against a dozen Russian military officers now under indictment for concrete acts of election tampering in the United States. Trump, again daring onlookers to suss out whether he was operating from staggering ignorance or active complicity, willingly agreed.

To make things clear, the Russian proposal is part of an ongoing effort by the Putin government to expose and murder U.S. sources. And they're not making much of an attempt to hide it.

The Russian government's primary response so far to the myriad indictments of Russian nationals to so far come out of the Mueller probe has been consistent; they have used the court proceedings to try to force the U.S. government to divulge just how much they know about Russian activities and—more critically—how they know it. This is the legal risk, for the Mueller team, in bringing charges against Russians implicated in the espionage efforts; our court system allows, and in fact largely insists on, the sharing of such information.

Mueller's indictment of Russian figures who that nation will never, ever allow to be extradited to stand trial is therefore seen by some critics as an error, if not pointless. His actions also, however, may largely be placeholders, incrementally fleshing out both the shocking scope and some of the key specifics of the Russian espionage and propaganda efforts aimed at altering the outcome of the U.S. elections. None of the most recently indicted Russians will likely ever stand trial—but those that they worked with in the United States might, and the indictments filed so far make it abundantly clear that there were almost certainly such U.S. co-conspirators.

The outrageous Putin "offer" to help Mueller's team sift through the evidence they've gathered against the Russian government’s own agents so that Russian intelligence officers can offer their own two cents on what the U.S. has learned is so obviously an effort to pry loose top-secret information on what the U.S. knows, what they don't know, and which specific Russian or American sources learned it that it's amazing even Donald Trump, a known idiot, so eagerly fell for it.

And when the other shoe dropped, it became even more transparent what Russia was after.

Glossed over by Trump in his own remarks, Putin's actual "offer" was, apparently, that they would provide this very generous support helping the FBI interpret their findings against Russian military hackers in exchange for another wee favor from Trump: giving Russian investigators access to those in the United States and Europe who exposed the massive Putin-linked campaign of embezzlement, money laundering and murder that led to the Magnitsky Act, a set of U.S. sanctions that targets the oligarchs surrounding Putin and severely curtails their ability to funnel their cash overseas.

Chief among those that Putin's government is demanding access to: the man responsible for the Magnitsky Act sanctions, Bill Browder.

Putin offered to allow American investigators to interview the 12 Russian intelligence agents just indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for allowing Russians to have access to me and those close to me. This is no idle threat. For the last ten years, I’ve been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin’s regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead. Amazingly, Trump stood next to him, appearing to nod approvingly. He even later said that he considered it “an incredible offer.”
Browder is, as he says, an apparent top enemy of the Putin regime. His lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was the one who exposed the corruption scheme that reached well into the circle of Putin loyalists; for this, he was murdered in a Russian jail cell. The Russian government has been furious about the resulting Magnitsky Act, penned in specific response to this murder, since the moment it passed. Lifting the sanctions was a subject of the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting between top Trump campaign officials and a team sent by the Russian government for the openly stated purpose of assisting the Trump campaign; it is likely to be one of the top reasons the Putin government preferred Trump, long accused of turning a blind eye to Russian money laundering in his own real estate holdings, to the hated Hillary Clinton.

The Putin government wants "access" to Browder and others who learned of the Russian corruption scandal for multiple reasons, none of them good. First, to ask them pointed questions about how they learned the things they learned about the Russian government and the specific sanctioned oligarchs—for example, to determine whether there are any leakers within the country that the Russian government hasn't yet identified.

Second, because many if not most of those individuals are now considered "security threats" by Russia; Browder has been the target of relentless Russia-promoted conspiracy theories of escalating degrees of lunacy since the sanctions were passed, all in a (again, transparent) effort to discredit the oligarchy's critics and, therefore, the tough international sanctions against them.

But third, because the Putin government has at this point a history of murdering its critics—and suspected leakers—outright. The Magnitsky Act came about precisely because of this. We should not be so gullible as to think that Putin's government, so soon after the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy using a nerve agent developed and used exclusively by the Russian government, is demanding to know the precise whereabouts of a list of top Putin enemies for mere bookkeeping reasons.

It is possible, barely, that Donald Trump is genuinely so stupid that he does not see a Russian proposal that they be allowed to both see the evidence gathered against their own spy operations and be granted access to meet with and grill those that uncovered rank corruption in the Putin government as an obvious effort to uncover the identity of the Russian sources who may have leaked such things—but none of the rest of us could possibly be.

Though Trump leapt eagerly at the proposal, an order to actually implement it, assisting the Putin government in identifying (and, afterward, murdering) sources responsible for telling the FBI and other law enforcement agencies what they know about the Putin government's actions and allies would be treason. It would be point-blank treason, and there seems little debate to be had over that.

If Trump does indeed order it, one imagines that it would be met both with widespread resignations and widespread fury. But if his staff cannot talk him down from committing that act of open treason, mere fury as he works his way through member of his party until he finds ones willing to assist him in such an act would be insufficient. His staff should themselves declare him unfit for office, and Congress should boot him before he can do such damage, rather than merely whining pitifully about it afterward.