His hands tied tightly, President Trump has grudgingly signed legislation passed overwhelmingly by Congress last week imposing further sanctions against Russia and more importantly preventing the president from being able to unilaterally remove any specific entities from a sanctions list.

Trump howled and protested the bill, and signed it with no fanfare, but he had no choice. It was truly veto-proof, so that if he’d vetoed it, it would have been enacted anyway and he’d only further drawn suspicion on himself for his role as a veritable Russian agent in the White House.

You see, through a series of classified briefings in recent months, all of Congress is now privy to the treasonous quid pro quo deal that Trump agreed to with Putin that was the subject of the infamous July 6, 2016 meeting at the Trump Towers in Manhattan.

In that deal, Trump’s son and others in his inner circle signaled their willingness to trade a commitment to delist key Putin entities from the U.S.’ 2012 Magnitsky Act sanctions in exchange for the Russians deploying their battery of resources to help get Trump elected.

That was the deal, and while the Russians kept their part of the bargain, an aroused U.S. intelligence community and patriotic elements in Congress moved quickly to prevent the quid pro quo from being accomplished by blocking Trump from being able to keep his part of the arrangement.

Both Trump and Putin are chewing rugs today as the passage of the act protecting the sanctions from Trump have foiled the plot. It’s the biggest news since the illegitimate election of Trump last November, and of course it’s not going to stop here.

The context for this was provided last week by the explosive public testimony given by William Browder to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Browder asserted Putin’s main interest in colluding with Trump was the removal of Putin-linked financial entities from the sanctions list so he could resume laundering billions in ill-gotten gains through banking and investment systems in the West, especially in the U.S.

This, according to the explosive testimony of William Browder, an American businessman and former major investor in Russia, to the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, is Putin’s Number One interest.

With an estimated worth of over $200 billion, Putin has all his money planted in the West, thus potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation under the Magnitsky Act provisions. Browder’s testimony last week was called by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) “one of the most important” brought before the committee.

Insofar as Putin’s original retaliation for imposition of Magnitsky Act sanctions was to ban adoptions of ill Russian children by families in the West, the adoption issue became the well-known code language for lifting Magnitsky sanctions.

That was the context for the June 2016 meeting at the Trump Tower in New York that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort attended with top Putin intelligence operatives Natalia Veselnitskaya, the chief lobbyist in the U.S. working to address the “adoption issue,” Rinat Akhmetshin, Ike Kaveladze, translator Anatoli Samochornov and middle-man Rob Goldstone.

It is publicly established that the Trump team was enticed to the meeting with promises of highly-compromising information about Trump’s presidential campaign opponent Hillary Clinton.

There can be no doubt that the quid pro quo offered was to elicit Trump interest in going along with its terms, namely, the anti-Clinton materials in exchange for the removal of key Putin entities from the sanctions list.

The minute any evidence arises showing that the Trump team responded favorably to the nefarious scheme, then grounds for charging treasonous collusion with the adversarial Putin regime are firmly established. It is rumored that the Robert Mueller investigative team is already in possession of such hard evidence.

(The Trump team spent all last Thursday in a successful array of wild smoke screen activities to keep the Browder testimony out of the news. It fabricated a fantastically absurd argument read at the White House briefing by Sarah Sanders that Browder’s testimony exonerated Trump because it was noted that Fusion GPS, who provides “opposition research” to anyone who pays, commissioned the shocking anti-Trump Steele Dossier.)

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.