RussiaGate Has Become a Catastrophic Failure of Leadership , and a Debacle ...

http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-scandal-investigation/

‘RussiaGate’ Has Become a Catastrophic Failure of Leadership — and a Debacle From Which the Trump Presidency Will Not Recover

The Trump-Russia scandal has metastasized quickly and destructively.

By Douglas Blackmon | May 23, 2017

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To understand why this is so serious, it’s important first to realize what is truly important to the inquiry — and to escape some of the distractions of the past six months. Why Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in November, or exactly how Russian interests attempted to disrupt and influence our electoral process, is important, but ultimately not what matters most. Whether former Trump campaign officials and advisers failed to disclose past business dealings with interests in Ukraine, Russia and Turkey is a question that will be answered, but not a defining one. That President Trump and his family have had past business dealings or allegedly engaged in personal hijinks in Russia is hardly important at all.

No, this is an investigation about one thing: the now-undeniable fact that a Russian espionage conspiracy accomplished an objective that has never previously occurred in American history — compromising the highest levels of US government, penetrating the White House, establishing influence and leverage over the president’s national security adviser and planting false information with the vice president of the United States — who then, wittingly or unwittingly, repeated those fictions to the American people.

In our current toxic political atmosphere, filled with charges and countercharges, and ruthless accusations against and among media, it is sometimes easy to lose perspective and fail to see what is significant or insignificant. So let me be clear: What Russia accomplished in this operation represents a breathtaking danger to all Americans and an immeasurable humiliation to our global prestige. Russian spy agencies successfully reached inside the walls of the White House, the confines of the National Security Council and the thinking of, at least, the second-highest ranking elected official of our country. If the most powerful figures in our government can be duped into self-destruction as easily as this, none of our secrets are safe, the words of our leaders are unreliable and the most basic sense of judgment by our president is in doubt.