The Collusion Continues to Be Right Out in the Open

As I have observed on a number of previous occasions, the collusion between the Trump campaign, and now Trump administration, has always happened right out in the open. It's been "hidden" in plain sight — from the moment that Donald Trump stood at a podium on the campaign trail and invited Russia to hack State Department emails.

And so it remains. One day after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced on CBS' Face the Nation that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin would be imposing new sanctions on Russian companies behind the latest presumed chemical attack in Syria, Trump rolled them back.

Trump on Monday put the brakes on a preliminary plan to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia, walking back a Sunday announcement by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley that the Kremlin had swiftly denounced as "international economic raiding."

...Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar with the plan.

Administration officials said the economic sanctions were under serious consideration, along with other measures that could be taken against Russia, but said Trump had not given final authorization to implement them.

So, to be clear: Haley disclosed imminent sanctions; the Kremlin complained; and Trump backed off. Those dots are not difficult to connect. And yet, we continue to pretend that collusion must be carefully proven, despite the fact that it's happening right out in the open.

Even if these sanctions had been announced, they would not have been enforced, just like the sanctions before them. This was just 10 days ago:

These sanctions are nothing, because they will not be enforced in any meaningful way. The point was to get headlines from media outlets inexplicably willing to indulge the pretense that Trump is getting serious on Russia. He got his headlines. https://t.co/bi7Q6FMkpF

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 6, 2018

And let me be perfectly clear: The reason that none of this matters is because the Republican Party, who hold the majority in both Houses of Congress, refuse to make it matter. They are abetting this collusion, because they are disloyal wrecks whose patriotism extends only as far as its usefulness in consolidating power — and almost certainly because many of them are compromised by Russia, too.