A grifter demagogue is in the White House — and we're still sorting out his motives
Peter W Smith:
5/4/17 - spoke to WSJ about his efforts to obtain Hillary's missing emails, including talking to Russian hackers.
5/9/17 - Trump fires Comey
5/14/17 - Smith dies suddenly.
Cause of death???? Let's hope its not polonium poisoning, accidental stabbing, falling out a high window ....
 President Trump’s tweet about the “hoax” Russia-Trump collusion is not aging well. (EVAN VUCCI/AP)
BY GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, July 2, 2017, 2:57 PM
"The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?" — went a recent Trump tweet. That tweet is not aging well.
The first evidence of collusion is now beginning to surface in the strange saga of Peter W. Smith, the now deceased Republican donor-operative, whose efforts to obtain Hillary Clinton emails led him to collaborate with Russian agents.
We have arrived at an appropriate moment to sort out motives. Why would Trump and/or his associates have taken risks that might destroy the very prize they sought to gain — the presidency — while also possibly landing them in jail?
Some obvious points bear stating. To begin with, there is the magnitude of the prize: possession of the White House. If Trump and/or members of the campaign took a major gamble in pursuit of the most powerful office in the world, they would not be the first. The burglary of Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and subsequent cover-up is Exhibit A. Blatant criminality in American electoral politics is rare but not unheard of.
House Russia probe zeroes in on Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller
 Peter W. Smith, the now deceased Republican donor-operative, whose efforts to obtain Hillary Clinton emails led him to collaborate with Russian agents.(LEGACY.COM)
Second, and closely related, is the highly imbalanced risk-reward ratio Trump and his campaign were confronting. Throughout the entire contest, from its very beginning to its final day, the Trump candidacy was considered the longest of longshots. The astonishing fact we must keep in mind as we watch this bizarre individual deface the White House is that his primary objective in entering the race was to secure a better contract with NBC for his television show, The Apprentice. Trump himself never expected to win. Neither did those from whom he now distances himself by calling them "satellites."
With defeat virtually certain, no one working on the campaign was expecting much if any post-election scrutiny. If corners were cut-or sawed off, and assistance was sought in unlikely corners, like from WikiLeaks and friendly Russian hackers like Guccifer 2.0, who would ever know? And in the highly improbable event of victory, if victory was ever given more than a glancing thought, any investigations could presumably be killed: whatever skeletons crawled out of their graves could be re-interred by a Justice Department and an FBI under the control of Trump himself.
A third motive is plain old greed. For Trump and his associates, making unsavory deals with Russians was not exactly a novelty. As an unregistered foreign agent, Flynn was grabbing cash hand over fist from Russia and Turkey. Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman during the primary season, spent a lifetime as a consultant to vicious dictators, making a good living off of what his own daughter called "blood money."
Jared Kushner, Trump's principal adviser throughout, was suffering from severe financial worries thanks to a sour billion-dollar real estate deal at 666 Fifth Ave. If he turned to Russian investors to avoid ruin, that would be a leaf from his father-in-law's playbook. Kushner's omission of his meetings with Russian bankers on his security clearance application suggests he had something significant to hide.
But cupidity is not the end of the story for Manafort, Kushner, Flynn or anyone else in the Trump network. Ideas also may have played a role.
Consider that, in addition to wanting to get rich quick, Flynn is a longtime foreign-policy professional with fiercely held views. One of the salient points in "The Field of Fight," his 2016 book, is that the Obama administration not only failed to understand the threat posed by radical Islam, but actively "concealed the actions of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and groups like ISIS and al Qaeda." In this view, defeating former Secretary of State Clinton was no mere political goal but something necessary for national survival.
This, after all, was "The Flight 93 Election" — the title of a pseudonymous essay widely read in conservative circles by (as later revealed) Michael Anton, now serving as deputy assistant to President Trump for strategic communications. "Charge the cockpit or you die," is its major theme. "If you don't try, death is certain."
A Hillary presidency would bring about, argued Anton, "the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty," not to mention a "million more Syrians." It would also unleash the IRS on conservatives, while ushering in an extraordinary era "of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent."
Of course, if the stakes were this cosmic-nothing less than life or death for the American project — a singular corollary necessarily followed: anything goes. Anton's febrile essay, with its thinly veiled racism and the persecution fantasy at its heart, provided an ideological backdrop for collusion with Russia. Even the most avaricious and criminally oriented among Trump's associates may have persuaded themselves that by helping Trump, and perhaps making a bit of money along the way, they were also doing right.
Unfortunately for the President and all his men, things have not gone according to plan. Thanks to a perfect storm, a grifter demagogue won the presidency. The Trump campaign is being subjected to scrutiny by multiple investigations and an energized press. Trump and his campaign aides have all found it necessary to hire criminal defense lawyers. Some of those aides may be singing to the FBI. The investigative vise is tightening around the President and he is lashing out on Twitter in ever more demented ways. Sad.
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