Everyone does political muckraking, says Trump. He's right but....

In a remarkable new development in the Russia collusion affair, Donald Trump has admitted that his "wonderful" son, Donald Junior, did talk to a Russian lawyer during the presidential election campaign about potential dirt on Hillary Clinton. But there was nothing wrong or illegal about that, he said. Everyone sought dirt on their opponents in the political world. Strictly speaking he is right, politicians with much at stake in their careers will always dig deep for skeletons in their opponents' cupboards because there is nothing like a bit of scandal to liven up a campaign. With all the focus on the Trump campaign and whether the Russians played a crucial part in getting Trump into the White House, the "secret" deeds done on behalf of the Democratic Party to find dirt and filth on Trump - the infamous Christopher Steele dossier - have been largely pushed to one side. It has to be said, however, that even though allegedly Hillary knew nothing about the commissioning of Steele, the former Russian specialist MI6 intelligence officer, and even though the British ex-spy, allegedly, did not know where his research was going to end up, the fact is that the dossier which contained salacious stuff about Trump in a Moscow hotel room (the notorious and massively Trump-denied "golden shower moment")was explosive material. It was dirt, dirt, dirt, and the FBI was aware of it. The company that commissioned Steele, Fusion GPS, had been contracted by the Democratic Party to investigate Trump once he had won the Republican nomination. A natural thing to do, you would argue. But Fusion GPS chose Christopher Steele to do the dirt-digging, and his speciality was Russia. They chose him because they wanted a simple question answered: why did Trump as a businessman seek to do deals in Russia when others avoided the country judging it to be a bad and unwise investment? Fusion GPS and the Democratic Party and, therefore, the Clinton campaign, got more than it bargained for. The Steele dossier remains a highly controversial issue. If any of it is true - and General James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence, has claimed more and more of its contents have proven to be accurate - then it could still be deadly for Trump's continuing presence in the White House. Certainly, it provided juicy morsels for Robert Mueller, special counsel investigating the collusion affair. But Hillary claims she knew nothing about its contents until BuzzFeed published the 35-page document in full ten days before Trump's inauguration as president in January 2017. People seem to forget that it was actually the American magazine Mother Jones which broke the Steele story, publishing the details about Trump's links with Russia in a massive scoop article on October 31 2016 - a few days BEFORE the election date. David Corn, the driven and highly competent journalist who broke the story, revealed that the dossier had been drawn up by a British ex-spy. He did not name the intelligence officer who was clearly his source for the story, although the name emerged eventually. Nor did Corn include in his article the salacious Golden Shower stuff. That only came out in the BuzzFeed blockbuster. Despite all the above which supports Trump's statement that everyone digs dirt on their political opponents, there is still one distinct difference. Trump Jr met this vivacious-looking Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and had a chat about what she (and presumably her Kremlin friends) could provide to knock Hillary out of the race. Nothing came of it, says Trump Senior. But the mere fact that the son of the soon-to-be president of the United States was talking to a RUSSIAN about getting dirt on Hillary must surely go down in history as catastrophically stupid, unbelievably risky and potentially unlawful. Ok, so Steele's stuff was all Russian based. In other words, he got all his material from his sources in Russia. So he could easily have been unwittingly duped by his sources, although if Moscow wanted Trump in the White House this is difficult to square. But it was Steele digging dirt on behalf of his client. It was a hired ex-intelligence doing the bidding of his paymaster. In the Trump case, it was a Russian woman with highly dodgy links offering free gratis to provide the Trump campaign with deadly stuff on Hillary. There is definitely no like-for-like here. Trump's casual acknowledgment about his son's involvement and the president's dismissal of anything remotely untoward do not wash.