NO COLLUSION

Collude (v): come to a secret understanding for a harmful purpose; conspire.

As we know, "collusion" is the noun form of the verb "collude." We also know that our president has insisted repeatedly that there was NO COLLUSION (he always seems to go all-caps for that assertion).

Because I can't get the tweet to properly embed, I will just quote it:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!

OK. Let's back up a bit.

I thought the first line was "the meeting never happened." Let's just take a look at the timeline and the shifting company storyline:

• July 8, 2017 -  The meeting was about adopting Russian Children
• July 9, 2017 - OK, so they suggested to us that maybe they had some information implying that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party were being funded by Russia; nothing came of it and the suggestion was vague all along
• July 12, 2017 - Jay Sekulow (one of the most despicable people in America, he also happens to be one of Trump's lawyers), responding to a story from the day before that President Trump had signed off on the July 8 statement, categorically denies that President Trump had anything to do with the original statement. Sekulow repeats this claim on July 16, 2017, on Meet the Press.
• July 31, 2017 - Washington Post reports that President Trump personally dictated the July 8 statement
• August 1, 2017 - President Trump (via his Press Secretary) concedes that President Trump "weighed in" on the statement but did not dictate it
• January 29, 2018 - Jay Sekulow admits in a letter to Special Counsel Robert Mueller that President Trump did dictate Don Jr.'s statement
• June 2, 2018 - The NY Times publishes the January 29 letter
• June 3, 2018 - Rudy Giuliani (a walking disaster of a "lawyer" if ever there was one) claims that Sekulow was uninformed in June 2017 when he claimed that the President was uninvolved in Don Jr.'s initial statement
• June 4, 2018 - President Trump's Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refuses to answer questions as to whether he dictated the letter
• July 26, 2018 - Michael Cohen (President Trump's longtime personal attorney and notorious liar) claims that the President had foreknowledge of the meeting and signed off on it
• August 5, 2018 - "My son went to this meeting to receive intelligence on Hillary Clinton."

So, in sum, we know the following about the infamous Russia Meeting:

1. They knew they would be meeting with representatives of the Russian state
2. They knew they were being offered Russian state intelligence
3. They intended to use Russian intelligence offered by Russian agents against an American opponent
4. They did not alert the FBI to any of this

Look, I'm not an expert in national security law by any means and I'm trying really hard not to just be a partisan liberal here. However, I think that maybe we just need to step back and ask ourselves whether we've gone through the looking glass here. I mean, do we really have to ask whether aiding and abetting foreign meddling in American elections is OK?