The practice of maintaining back channel communications with adversarial nations goes back a long way, and a short way. These bridges serve as important and necessary tools of our nations diplomacy. The United States and the U.S.S.R. were on the brink of a nuclear holocaust in 1962 until cooler heads prevailed via back channels. (See photo above) If that crisis took place today with Trump as president, our media would have preferred a few hundred thousand crispy corpses.
President Obama’s administration negotiated the timing of a four hundred million dollar cash payment to Iran, in exchange for American prisoners. The deal was entirely concocted via a back channel. Iran does not have diplomatic relations with the U.S. and like most adversaries requires these alternate means of communiqué.
The generic response to this rebuttal of the back-channel-scandal, entails acquiescence to the need for communications such as these but an unwillingness to stretch that need to cover an incumbent President. This is not the original thesis of the critique but it is a more credible criticism. Unfortunately, it’s based on speculation. All agree there can only be one President at a time and only one policy. However, nothing indicates that Kushner violated this doctrine. No evidence exists to suggest he engaged in any direct negotiations or policy discussion with the Russians. It is plausible that the Trump team was establishing a relationship to deal with Syria and other pressing matters in preparation for when they took office.
The tragedy once again lies within our press corp that is oozing Trump-hate from their pores. Their continuing mission is to fool the public, on a daily basis, into believing something unprecedented is happening under this President. The reporters wrote these headlines with full knowledge of how back channels work. In fact, buried many paragraphs into the propaganda, the authors of the fairy tale inspired articles admit the truth about how communications with adversaries are conducted. But the goal is to hoodwink the public, and a headline is clearly enough to get the fake narrative across.