Tuesday 21 August 2018

Non-truth and nothing but non-truth

Truth is a very marketable product in Washington these days. As Rudy Giuliani, Trump's one of many lawyers, has helpfully pointed out, truth isn't necessarily the truth. Truth is what one person sees as against the truth that someone else sees and the two truths could be very different. In fact they could be contradictory. On that basis, how on earth are humble mortals like ourselves going to establish whether Trump is telling the truth about the Russian collusion affair or whether, say, Mike Flynn is telling the truth or James Comey or Donald Trump Jr or Jared Kushner? (where is Jared these days?). So, with potentially so many different versions of The Truth, how is it going to be possible for Robert Mueller, special counsel (please note, Mr President, it's counsel, not council as per your tweet yesterday), to figure out whether Trump or any of his accolytes have actually lied or have just come out with what they believe is the truth. We're not talking about murder here, or robbery or bag-snatching. This is about what may or may not have happened prior to, during and after the meeting in Trump Tower with the exotic Russian lawyer with Putin-type connections. Even if Ms Natalia Veselnitskaya appeared before Mueller for interrogation and stated categorically that she was blameless and innocent and only interested in Russia/US adoption cases, we wouldn't believe her because she has "Kremlin links". Giuliani. anyway, has already admitted that the meetng with Ms Veselnitskaya was all about acquiring dirt on Hillary Clinton. So is that a truth, a non-truth or just Giuliani's version of the truth? He wasn't there. But it's the sort of truth which is music to Mueller's ears. He, I'm sure, believes it. Trump, by all accounts, is scared that if he agrees to be questioned by Mueller, he might perjure himself!! Why?! Because of course, his truth could be different from everyone else's truth. If Mueller doesn't believe his version, does that give him the right to accuse the president of perjury? Well, no. Because he can't accuse Trump of perjury unless he has absolute proof that Trump's version of the collusion fiasco is intentionally false. There is no hidden tape of Trump telling his elder son to go see this Ruskie woman and come back with dirt to destroy Hillary's campaign. That would be collusion with a foreign power full stop. That would be criminal. But if Mueller had that sort of evidence he wouldn't still be coming into the office every day and asking his team: "Where the hell are we going with this?" Trump says everything Mueller has got is fake news, rubbish, witchhunt stuff. The truth may never be known, and thus, Trump will carry on as president, and Mueller will eventually give up, or be fired.

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