Ten-Penny Nails

When I was 12 I got a .22 rifle for Christmas.  (It’s a Su’th’n thang, y’all wuldn’t unnastand.)

About six months later, my parents decided I was old enough to leave at home while they took my two younger brothers shopping.

So here I am, in the middle of the day, in a house atop a hill in the middle of a wide, wide field, at least a half mile from the nearest road or habitation…

…and I’m convinced somebody has broken in.

Well, being a resourceful 12 year old (12 ½, actually), I got my trusty single shot .22 rifle, loaded a .22 LR in it, and cautiously went down the stairs to confront the burglar.

I check the living room…

I check the kitchen…

I check the dining room…

-- and I see a guy with a gun!

And even as my finger tightens on my rifle’s trigger, I realize what I’m looking at is my own reflection in the china cabinet.

Luckily I miss the china cabinet but I do put a bullet in the wall just slightly below one of my mom’s pictures.

And I instantly realize I’m I deep deep DEEP trouble because being reckless with a firearm is as dumb a thing as I can do.

And as I look at the bullet hole and the picture slightly above and to the left of it, I realize: If I move this painting down and over about 18 inches, the corner of the frame will hide the bullet hole.

So I immediately open all the windows and turn on al the fans to get the smell of cordite out of the house.  I grab my father’s tool chest and carefully measure exactly how far I have to move the picture hook to cover up the bullet hole.

I get all this done, the picture moved, the house aired out, the tools returned, the rifle cleaned and tucked away in my closet just before my parents and brothers return home.

And at first it looked like I got away with it.  A couple of days or weeks after the incident my father looked at the picture and said, “Betty, wasn’t this picture up higher?” but that was it.

I skated.

Or so I thought.

Jump ahead another couple of months.

We’re getting ready to move (again!).

My brothers and I are upstairs packing our stuff when suddenly we hear my father call: “Buzz!  Rick!  Robert! Come down here!”

We go down to the dining room.  My father has taken down the picture and found the bullet hole it was covering.

Pointing to it, he asks: “Who drove the ten-penny nail in the wall?”

“Oh, that was me,” I said. Yessir, I’ll confess to driving ten-penny nails in the wall all day long.

I tell you this story to explain why Donald Trump is guilty of treason.

. . .

Let’s back track a bit.

The moment my father said, “Who drove the ten-penny nail in the wall?” I knew he didn’t know what really happened!

And that meant I could lie and stood a good chance of getting away with it.

My brothers sure didn’t know what happened.

My mom didn’t know what happened (but she would have never ratted me out, so I would have been safe there regardless).

If my father chose to interpret a .22 bullet hole as a ten-penny nail, hey, who am I to disagree.

But the scenario would have been different if instead he had asked:  “Who put this hole in the wall?”

Because in that scenario, while I knew what I did, I wouldn’t know if my father knew.

And if I lied, and he did know, I’d be up the proverbial creek.

But if I told the truth and he didn’t know, I’d be exposing myself needlessly.

Hobson’ choice indeed.

And that’s where Donald Trump has been for the last two years.

. . .

It’s flat out illegal to for foreign nationals to contribute anything to a US election at any level.

No, no, no, NO!  

Wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Donald Trump and his campaign and his staff knew this.

How do we know they knew this?

Because they lied about it.

It would have been one thing if they had straight up admitted to it when it happened -- then they could have used the fig leaf of “whoops!  Didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do that” and hope nobody would want to delve into that political rat nest and would let them off with a Finger Wagging.

It would have been another if immediately after the election was over they admitted they did it.  The dodge becomes a little dicier -- “Whoops! Didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do that and when we found out we weren’t we kept our mouths shut because we didn’t want to hurt our chances but we’re telling you about it now” -- but with any luck you can ride out the storm and chalk off Democratic complaints as sore losers.

But they didn’t do those things.

They lied about the meeting…

They lied about who attended…

They lied about who knew what when…

And they lied about what they got out of it…

Which, if nobody else knew, would be okay because how are you going to prove it?

Well, the thing is we have any number of US law and intelligence agencies who are charged with fighting crime and / or investigating possible spies against the US.

And everybody -- and boy, howdy! do I mean everybody -- on the Russian side of the equation was being investigated up the proverbial wazoo by the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and a whole bunch of other acronyms.  (For simplicity’s sake, we’re just going to focus on the FBI.)

And while the FBI is not allowed to wiretap US citizens without a warrant, they aren’t restricted when it comes to wiretapping foreign nationals.

And if a US citizen is talking by phone to a foreign national who’s line is tapped, the US citizen can be recorded without a warrant because they are incidental to the tap, not the focus.

Trump and his chumps knew what they had said and done, but they had no idea what Mueller knew.

Could be a little, could be a lot.

So they tried brazening it out, figuring if Mueller didn’t know all that much, they could walk away without any charges sticking.

They figured wrong.

. . .

Article III; Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

As Mueller has demonstrated in his indictments, the Russians involved in the hacking of the 2016 election were members of two different units within the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye (GRU).

Translated into English, the GRU’s official title is Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.

This was a military action against the United States of America.

That makes it an act of war.

For the past two years, Trump has been denying charges made first in the press then later in court by Mueller that he and his staff knew the Russians wanted to offer dirt on Hillary Clinton, and that the dirt in question was hacked e-mails.

First the meeting was about orphans, not e-mails.

Then nobody important was in it.

Then nothing came of it.

Now, in a single typically brainless Tweet, Trump admits what he and his staff had done.

He has walked back from a firm denial to an open admission the charges of collusion were indeed true.

This has been his method of getting through unpleasant legal problems in the past:  Deny, deny, deny; obfuscate, obfuscate, obfuscate, throw up smokescreen after smokescreen until finally your opponents are so worn and deep in the money hole that they either abandon their claim or settle for pennies on the dollar.

That’s not going to happen this time.

Donald Trump is a traitor.

His confession has proved this.

© Buzz Dixon