Well, just when we thought we were out of the bogus “Trump colluded with the Russian government” meme, the New York Times has pulled us back in.  The latest flap is over a June 9, 2016 meeting attended by Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, with a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya.  The Times reported this as bombshell evidence of Trump colluding with a Russian “with ties to the Kremlin.”  Based solely on the  Times article, a guest on CNN concluded, “This looks more and more like treason.” (Don’t you just love a fair trial?)  Then, a liberal Congressman passed judgment, “Working with a foreign adversary to beat your opponent?  If true, this is a betrayal of our country we have never seen before in politics.”  Actually, we have seen such a thing in politics.  In 1983, Democrat Ted Kennedy offered to work with the head of the KGB to prevent Ronald Reagan’s re-election.  But I digress.  Far from being a smoking gun, the Trump, Jr. meeting is, instead, a steaming cowpie.  Now for the facts.  The story is that Donald, Jr. got a message to the effect that a Russian lawyer had compromising information about Hillary Clinton, more specifically, Hillary’s dealings with Russia.  Junior agreed to see the unnamed lawyer.  When Veselnitskaya showed up, she had no information about Hillary, but wanted to talk about a law that resulted in prohibiting the adoption of Russian children.  The meeting ended.  End of story.  But not for the fake news media.  Veselnitskaya has “ties to the Kremlin.”  What are these ties, you might well ask, especially as Ms. Veselnitskaya has told NBC News no less (and there is no less), that she has no ties to the Russian government.  As best I can tell, the “Kremlin ties” consist of the claim that Ms. Veselnitskaya’s husband “once was a Deputy Transportation Minister for the Moscow region.”  That’s it.  Now, I once was a Deputy Attorney General of New Jersey, and that former job has not resulted in me or my wife having any ties to the State government, but that’s the story.  I guess if your husband once worked on the schedules for the trolley cars that pass by the Kremlin, that means you have ties to the Kremlin.  But exactly who is lawyer Veselnitskaya, and where did she come from?  Here’s where the plot thickens.  According to Reince Priebus, the meeting with the Russian lawyer may have been engineered by an associate of Fusion GPS, the strategic intelligence firm behind a completely false intelligence dossier, written by the KGB, (there’s that KGB again), that suggested Russian officials possess materials that could be used to blackmail President Trump.  After Trump was nominated, Democratic financial supporters of Hillary Clinton paid Fusion for its anti-Trump research.  In the summer of 2016, GPS hired former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, to help their work.  That led Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Fusion GPS.  Senator Grassley wrote, “Fusion GPS is the company behind the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging a conspiracy between President Trump and Russia.,”  “It is highly troubling that Fusion GPS appears to have been working with someone with ties to Russian intelligence – let alone someone alleged to have conducted political disinformation campaigns– as part of a pro-Russia lobbying effort while also simultaneously overseeing the creation of the Trump-Russia dossier.”  Lawyer  Veselnitskaya has an admitted connection to Fusion.  The time line is very important here, because the only way the Donald, Jr./ Russian lawyer meeting becomes suspicious is if you already have concluded that Trump is guilty of collusion,without seeing any evidence.  Remember the date of the meeting?  June 9, 2016.  Consider this.  In June of 2016, there was no indication that the Russians were making any efforts to interfere with our election.  Trump had no warning to beware of Russians bearing gifts.  Therefore, if the Trump campaign wasn’t colluding with Russia, there would be no reason to avoid meeting with anyone with a Russian surname in order to avoid the appearance of collusion which didn’t exist.  But what else was going on in June of 2016?  As reported in the March 17, 2017 edition of Frank on Friday, in June 2016, the Obama Administration sought, and was denied, a FISA Court warrant permitting wiretaps of Donald Trump.  They did get a warrant in October.  So try this one on for size.  Trump is nominated, and Hillary buys the Trump dossier information from Fusion.  Now that the Democrats have retained the services of Fusion, they send lawyer Veselnitskaya to meet with Donald, Jr., she tells Junior nothing of value, and then the fact of the meeting is leaked to create a false Trump/Russia collusion story, permitting the Democrats to wiretap the Trump campaign.  In this scenario, Hillary’s henchpersons created the original fake Russian collusion news, gave it to the Obama Justice Dept., which used it to spy on the Republicans, and fueled the continual fake news being peddled for truth by the fake news media.  That’s not so farfetched.  The truth is that there was massive collusion between American political figures and Russia.  The problem for the fake news media is that it all concerns Democrats.  Russian energy company Uranium One gave the Clinton Foundation $35 million, and got the rights to 20% of U.S. uranium reserves, courtesy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Hillary’s close campaign associate John Podesta served on the Board of Directors of, and held 75,000 shares of stock, in another Russian energy company, connected to Vladimir Putin.  That’s real evidence of ties to and collusion with Russia. And there is real evidence of collision with a foreign government during the campaign.  Hillary Clinton’s staffers met with Ukranian government officials to get derogatory material on Donald Trump.  The fake news media isn’t outraged by that.  Instead, they are outraged by a meeting with someone who had no proven tie to the Russian government, at a time when there was no reason to be wary of meeting with someone with a Russian name, who had no information relevant to the campaign.  Smoking gun?  No.  Steaming turd.