David Axelrod, President Obama's former political strategist, is stroking his chin about President Trump's supposed "second" conversation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, coming at the G-20 in Berlin a while back.

Even if the darkening cloud of Russia's incursion on the 2016 election were not hanging over Trump, such a scenario would have set off alarm bells.

The specter of an inexperienced president, engaged alone in a lengthy, private exchange with the cunning and seasoned leader of an adversarial nation defies every rule of diplomacy and good sense. Such scenarios play to the advantage of the other side – leaving ours prone to manipulation.

Treason, collusion, and national security breaches are central to Axelrod's vigilant mind.  He writes:

Another possibility, darker and far more disturbing, is that America's interests were mortgaged in a stealthy political deal cut some time ago.

Would that be the same David Axelrod whose family was found by journalist Paul Kengor to be full-blown, card-carrying communists when young David was growing up in Stuyvesant Town on Manhattan's Lower East Side?  The same ones who were Soviet dupes, as Kengor found, and in tight with now revealed KGB agent I.F. Stone?  Communists so tight in the inner circle of communists that they were buddies with Obama's Communist Party mentor, Frank Marshall Davis?

Seems associations of this sort with Russians to undermine U.S. national security were OK when leftists out to destroy America did them, but not so OK when a Republican wrapped in the flag and ramping up the U.S. defense budget tries to make nice with the Russians.  You can't pick your relatives, but you sure as heck can speak out if one of them is a real colluder with Russian agents, as Axelrod's relatives seemed to have been.

Trump himself has said the meeting was an incidental nothingburger, and there is no reason to doubt him.  But just the idea that he can't talk with the Russian leader unless there is some "barbarian handler" or court eunuch to watch him is obnoxious in the extreme.  A president should be able to talk with whomever he wants to talk to, and the more Trump can tame Putin and make him friendly to our interests, the better.

Axelrod, however, sees that as reason for clutching his pearls.  It just shows he's playing one of the Democrats' "Swamp Thing" games, appealing to the Deep Staters out at the CIA and in the intelligence community for political benefit – as well as to take down Trump – and never mind the silence he's shown on his parents' truly questionable Soviet pasts.