A High-Quality Person With Tons of Transparency

“My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency,” Trump wrote yesterday and induced his deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to read it aloud to the White House press, some of whom were risking serious medical consequences by suppressing their huge guffaws.

Reminds me of the sorts of recommendations we were once expected to produce for distinctly unpromising job applicants: "When you know Don Junior the way I have come to know him, I'm sure you'll think of him as I do."

But ... "transparency"? Really, Donald? Junior rushed to publish those emails about his meeting with a Russian government lawyer because the New York Times was minutes away from pressing the publish button itself. That's "transparency" the same way this is: "Okay, coppers, I'm coming out with my hands up!" Plus we remember all that "transparency" from the past year -- total and complete denial about any contact with Russians, some of it coming straight out of the mouth of Junior.

Apparently, inside that snow globe of a brain, Trump believes that if he says it, we'll just accept it.

The Trump opposition has gotten awfully excited over the Junior revelations this week, but I find myself looking past this noise for the substance to come. The Russian spy operation "dangle" directed at Junior seems like a fairly minor sideshow to me, though it was a clear indication that the Trump campaign was more than willing to collude with some of the worst people in the universe. And without any doubt they did collude. They did plot. They did benefit from the colluding and plotting.

Robert Mueller will have to sort it all out, very patiently and thoroughly.

In the meantime, we get the almost daily leak from rival factions in the Trump White House. They're entertaining but not the full story.