#RevThread # 161
Treason?

1/ It took a full day for Trump and his administration to deny, weakly, the story reported in the NYT about the administration’s briefing of the President on Putin paying generous bounty money to any Afghan soldier killing an American or UK Soldier.

2/ The administration doesn’t deny that Putin is doing this, merely that the President hadn’t heard about it, in spite of the reporting about a briefing.

3/ So, before I address the issue itself – that if he knew, Trump should be immediately impeached, removed and then tried for treason – let me address his denial that he knew about it.

4/ It’s remotely possible that Trump is telling the truth. Still, having been caught in over 50,000 lies & misstatements, his denial does not convince. If others were in the room when the briefing was given to the president, they need to speak out now. We cannot have this.

5/ Suppose Trump was told that Russia is paying bounty money to any Afghan who kills American soldiers. If he did nothing about it, if our Commander in Chief kept currying the favor of Putin, while knowing that Putin is paying people to kill our soldiers, ...

6/... then our Commander in Chief is sanctioning a foreign leader’s assassination of our soldiers. That is a treasonous betrayal of the men and women in uniform.

7/ Imagine being a soldier in Afghanistan, and discovering that your friend was shot and killed for a bounty provided by Vladimir Putin with the knowledge and consent of Donald Trump....

8/... Imagine the realization that you could be killed because Putin is paying someone to kill you with the knowledge and consent of your own President.

9/ You may remember that in the impeachment proceedings last year, Trump was impeached in the house but not removed by the senate...

10/.. Though he was caught red-handed in his corruption of our country’s foreign policy for his own political advantage, the boot-licking Republican senators said they wouldn’t vote to remove him because the offense wasn’t serious enough.

11/ No, for removal from office, they said, a president would have to be guilty of “bribery, treason, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason, we were told by the Repubs, was imagined in the Constitution as an act betraying the country in wartime.

12/ Acknowledging and allowing Putin to pay Afghani soldiers big bounties to kill our troops is Treason.

13/ If this is just slides by as one more outrageous, stupid, corrupt act, an act we cannot bestir ourselves to oppose, then our Constitution just doesn’t matter.

14/ It’s time for an investigation. The briefers referred to in the Times article need to lay aside their careers and their personal safety and testify.

15/ We cannot allow treason in the White House to be unchallenged.

16/ If their testimony is that the President is telling the truth, then we can wait until the election and remove him that way.

17/ But if their testimony is that they informed the president of Putin’s bounty hunters and Trump did nothing to protect our troops while continuing to flatter their killer and while withholding this criminal activity from us,...

18/... then in the name of God and for the sake of our form of government, Donald J Trump needs to be removed from office and tried for treason.