From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' on GoLocal24.com:

President Trump has been an expert operator of smoke machines during his entire career as a crooked businessman, “reality TV’’ star and demagogic politician.

He and his accomplices have done much with the weapon of false equivalency. The latest is trying to make Hillary Clinton look like a crook regarding the purchase  in 2010 by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency, of  a piece of the Canadian company Uranium One, which held rights to some U.S. uranium deposits. The  Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States cleared the deal with a laborious process of vetting.

As has been widely reported, the Trump gang, including their spokespeople on Fox News, cooked up a conspiracy theory that because Uranium One had donated funds to the Clinton Foundation, mostly before the  2008 presidential election, that Mrs. Clinton somehow pushed the deal through. Fox & Friends, et al., alleged that this would mean that America would export a lot of uranium to a nation that even back then was  widely considered (though not by the Trump gang) more foe than friend.

No, she didn’t push through the deal, and she didn’t control the committee that approved it . And it was and is illegal to export the uranium anyway. And as secretary of state, she harshly criticized the regime of Russia’s cold and murderous dictator Vladimir Putin.

Her campaign also hired an opposition-research firm to do a dossier on the Trump gang’s collusion with Russia.   Sounds like a good idea, especially given the contacts between the Trump Organization and Russia going back more than two decades.

What seems clear is that the Trump mob collaborated very closely with Putin’s regime to wreak havoc in the Clinton campaign. It won Trump the Electoral College. (I myself wrote in Jim Webb’s name on the November ballot.)

For  a handy review of how the Kremlin’s folks used social media to sow division and help elect their boy Trump, please hit this link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/01/how-russian-trolls-got-into-your-facebook-feed/?utm_term=.cc58e6a5a910&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

Despite the fact that Trump’s, er, colorful, career leaves Hillary Clinton’s looking like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the Russians only pushed anti-Clinton stuff.

This quote from Donald Trump Jr. in 2008 may explain some of Trump’s affection for the Kremlin: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” (Contacts between the Trump mob and the Russians go back to about 1990.)

It’s too early to know how much of this involves out-and-out treason,  to be explained by Russian blackmail of Trump for his private behavior and/or by the Trump mafia's financial debts to Putin and other Russian oligarchs.  We do know that Trump likes dictators -- they  know how  to  take advantage of his  pathological narcissism and his astounding ignorance and intellectual sloth.