Why won’t Trump hear a word against Putin?

In Washington DC we’ve become accustomed to the craziness volume being turned up high during the Donald Trump presidency. However, over the past week the needle has flickered into the dial’s red zone.

Trump has become increasingly anxious about the special investigation into his possible ties with Moscow now that it is homing in on his business’s transactions with Russia.

The special investigation team, led by Robert Mueller, has subpoenaed Trump business empire documents related to Russia and elsewhere.  The chatter in DC is what Reaction predicted more than a year ago – that any investigation would eventually examine whether Trump’s business had effectively functioned to launder dirty Russian money.

Scores of Russian individuals and entities, many linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, have bought Trump properties in the US enabling them to transform large sums of questionable cash into legal assets in America.

A furious Trump poured out a torrent of Tweets in which he  floated the idea of  firing Mueller and closing down the investigation which he calls a “witch hunt”.

He seemed to be testing the water for reactions – particularly among his own Republican Party – to the possibility of firing Mueller.

His tweets repeated lies that had previously been exposed as just that, but the generally tame Republican response encouraged him and he may feel confident enough to try to remove Mueller.

That is not a simple process and Trump might first have to fire both the Attorney General and his deputy, further adding to the sense of chaos at the White House.

As the time approaches when Trump himself is to be called in for questioning by Mueller, the president’s determination to quash the investigation has led him to hire a new member for his legal team – a lawyer who has appeared on Trump’s favorite Fox News television channel to say that the FBI and Justice Department officials framed the president.

As Mueller broadened the Russia investigation and Trump’s rage acquired almost hysterical proportions, curiosity increased about why Trump, so cavalier in criticizing or insulting many world leaders, has been so reticent to chide Putin.

Indeed Trump has dismissed and belittled conclusions by the FBI and US intelligence agencies that the Kremlin ordered widespread meddling in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump and undermine his rival, Hilary Clinton.

Trump has tried to ignore Russia’s actions in Syria, invasion of Ukraine, continuous attempts to undermine western institutions, and infection of the Internet with lies and distortions.

He only imposed sanctions on Moscow for its election meddling and for cyberattacks because he was forced to do so by a US Congress which, abandoning the usual partisan divisions, overwhelmingly voted to instruct the White House to penalize Russia. Even so he delayed the measures by a couple of months

While US politicians of both parties and senior members of his own administration have supported the UK in unequivocally blaming the Kremlin and Putin for the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, Trump has been reluctant to back that conclusion.

And yesterday (Tuesday) Trump telephoned Putin to congratulate him on winning a fourth term as president in last Sunday’s deeply flawed election where his only real opponent was prevented from running, anti-regime candidates had almost no media exposure, and observers reported many irregularities including ballot-stuffing.

Trump’s security advisers wanted him to raise concerns about Kremlin misbehaviour such as election meddling and the UK poisoning. But true to form he refused to touch on anything that might upset Putin. After the conversation Trump said: “We had a very good call. We will probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future.”

Trump has consistently signalled to Russia in every way he can that he is not enthusiastic about any reprimands by the US or its allies against Putin’s regime.

But that reticence to challenge Putin suggests to many that Moscow holds damning evidence against Trump and will be one of the core issues Mueller will ask the president about.