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The dueling scoops about Jared Kushner’s plan for secret communications with Russia, explained

Actual policy is the elephant in the room.

Updated by Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] May 26, 2017, 11:31pm EDT

On Friday night two versions of an incredible story emerged.

They both start like this: In early December, Jared Kushner and future former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn met with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in Trump Tower to see about setting up a secret communication channel between the transition team and Moscow.

One version — from Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous, and Greg Miller of the Washington Post — is full of ominous portent, suggesting Kushner was embarked on a kind of amateur hour cloak and dagger scheme whose purpose was to allow Trump to conceal communications with Russia from America’s own intelligence services. The Post version posted first, and immediately set Washington ablaze with former officials remarking on the staggering mix of stupidity and near-treasonous behavior implied by the Post’s reporting.

Then a couple of hours later, Maggie Haberman, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo filed a report for the New York Times citing “three people with knowledge of the discussion” as explaining that the whole thing was perfectly innocent and simply reflected a desire “to discuss strategy in Syria and other policy issues.”

Both the Times and the Post did, however, offhandedly mention a possible connection to a separate meeting Kushner later had with an executive of a sanctioned Russian bank. And while the investigation into Trump-Russia links necessarily focuses largely on actual or potential breaking of the law, the elephant in the room continues to be the policy aspects of Donald Trump’s curious affection for Vladimir Putin — on display this week as Trump took on occasion intended to mark his reaffirmation of America’s commitment to European defense and instead used it to undermine that commitment.

A tale of two scoops .. https://www.vox.com/2017/5/26/15703668/kushner-secret-russia-communication


December 2016, Kushner was a private citizen .. yep, the whole context makes Kushner's move unacceptable ..

Oh .. just ooi, fwiw technically Trump is the 44th, as Grover did the jig twice ..
https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2017/01/20/technically-donald-trump-is-not-the-45th-president-hes-the-44th