I think it’s important to lay down a marker on the Russia stuff as Trump’s first term fades into history. It was a disgrace and turning it into a crazy leftwing conspiracy theory was Trump’s greatest triumph.
David Corn reminds us what actually happened:
To the dying days of his presidency, Trump has insisted Russiagate was all a hoax. And in a cult-like fashion, the Republican Party has loudly and fervently echoed his denials and phony counter-accusations. When Trump, in one of his last acts as president, awarded Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Trump’s pit-bull defender, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the White House cited Jordan’s effort to “unmask the Russia hoax.” But the facts are quite clear—this was no hoax—and they are worth reviewing and remembering, as the first president who helped a foreign power attack the United States leaves office.
Here are the indisputable basics. Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered a covert assault, employing information warfare, on the 2016 US election. A 2017 report of the intelligence community, the 2019 report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a 2018 House Intelligence Committee report, and a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report all stated that. The attack was real. Each of these reports—with the exception of the one from the House Intelligence Committee, which was written by highly partisan GOP allies of Trump—note that one critical aim of the Russian operation was to elect Trump. And it is certainly obvious that Moscow’s hack-and-leak covert action, which released stolen Democratic emails and documents, hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and boosted Trump, particularly when it started disseminating pilfered material hours after the emergence of the Access Hollywood video that showed Trump boasting that he grabbed women “by the pussy.” (The weaponized leaking of these Democratic records continued through the final four weeks of the campaign.)
So there’s one big incontrovertible fact: Trump won the presidency with Russian assistance. Ands another: Trump and his lieutenants aided and abetted Putin’s attack on the United States.
For years, Trump and his minions have strived to define the main issue of the scandal as collusion: was there evidence that he or his campaign directly conspired with Moscow’s clandestine project to torpedo the American election? Trump contended there was no joint plotting and, thus, the whole scandal was a scam perpetuated by his diabolical political enemies, including the Deep State, the Democratic Party, and the media. His defenders in the conservative world, the rightwing press, and Congress pushed this point hard. And they (falsely) claimed as slam-dunk evidence the Mueller probe’s conclusion that it had not uncovered evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and the Russians, misrepresenting this finding as a declaration there had been no collusion.
Trump largely succeeded with his no-collusion defense. Indeed, no smoking gun evidence showing him scheming directly with Russians materialized. But even so, there was, at a minimum, overwhelming evidence of attempted collusion. On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, then the Trump campaign chief, and Jared Kushner held a secret meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian emissary, whom they were told was bringing them Clinton dirt as part of a secret Kremlin effort to help Trump. Ultimately, the information she shared wasn’t of much use, and there is no indication much came of this meeting. But this get-together—which didn’t become known to the public until after the election—showed that the Trump gang was made aware of Moscow’s desire to covertly assist Trump and that it was willing to conspire with Putin. At the time, the meeting signaled to Moscow that the Trump campaign would look kindly upon covert Kremlin intervention in the 2016 election. This was encouragement.
Moreover, as multiple reports have pointed out, Manafort, throughout the election, was in secret contact with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former business colleague, and shared with him inside polling data from the Trump campaign. Mueller characterized Kilimnik as an “associate” of Russian intelligence. And the Senate Intelligence Committee report—which was approved by the Republican members of the committee—described Kilimnik as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” It also noted that Manafort had directly and indirectly communicated with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.
This is a headline that has not gotten the attention it deserved: Trump’s top campaign aide was in touch with a Russian intelligence officer, while Moscow was attacking the United States. It gets worse. The Senate report stated, “The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” Yes, according to this GOP-endorsed report, Trump’s campaign manager was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer possibly tied to Putin’s clandestine assault on the 2016 campaign to help elect Trump. That’s a tremendous scandal in of itself. The report also revealed that the committee found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.”
The report’s discussion of that particular information, though, was redacted. The report additionally noted that Manafort explored using his access to Trump to help advance Russian interests by promoting a pro-Russia “peace plan” for Ukraine that would allow Russia to control eastern Ukraine. This Senate investigation—which took years to complete—strongly suggested attempted, if not actual, collusion beyond the Trump Tower meeting. It indicated that the full Russia story still remains unknown.
After the election, the public also learned that Trump had engaged in his own direct act of attempted Russian collaboration: During the campaign, Trump—though he publicly asserted he had nothing to do with Russia—had been secretly negotiating a tower deal in Moscow that could have earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, and his company had sought help for this project from Putin’s office. Trump had covered-up his private Russian dealings while running for president.
But there was much more to the Trump-Russia scandal than the question of collusion. Whether or not Trump and his crew worked directly with Russian operatives, they assisted the operation by denying its existence. This is where Trump betrayed the nation in full public light. Throughout the campaign, he and his aides publicly declared that the Russian attack was not happening. Manafort, Trump Jr., and others dismissed talk of Moscow’s interference as poppycock. In his debates with Clinton, Trump mocked accusations of Russian intervention. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump lieutenant, repeatedly asserted Russia had nothing to do with the hack-and-leak operation targeting the Democrats, and he amplified the cover story created by Putin’s operatives that the hack had been orchestrated by a Romanian hacker.
Yet at the same time, Trump was trying to use Stone as a conduit to get inside information from WikiLeaks on what Russia-swiped goods it had on Clinton and when they would be released—an action that Trump, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, essentially lied about to Mueller. (Stone was subsequently found guilty of lying to investigators about his interactions with WikiLeaks—apparently covering up Trump’s role in this—and was sentenced to 40 months. In December, Trump pardoned Stone, Manafort, and other Russiagate figures.)
Trump and his henchmen were providing cover for Putin’s operation. Here was how the Senate report summed it up: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort… The Campaign was aware of the extensive media reporting and other private sector attribution of the hack to Russian actors prior to that point.” The GOP-led committee concluded that Trump, Manafort, and others aided the Russian assault by dismissing its existence. And there was that famous moment in July 2016 when Trump encouraged Russia to hack Clinton’s email. According to Mueller, Russian hackers hours later tried to do just that.
Lost in the shouting over collusion has been the fundamental point that Trump helped an enemy of the United States pull off an attack because that assault was beneficial for him. Call it treason, call it treachery, it was a foul deed. And Trump’s skulduggery worked. The Russian operation continued through the campaign, and Trump gained from it.
Trump’s denials of this attack were perhaps the first sign of how he would lead the Republicans into the perilous territory of alternative reality. Because Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, was insisting there was no Kremlin operation, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got in line. He refused President Barack Obama’s request to join the White House in issuing a bipartisan response to Putin’s assault. McConnell sided with party—that is, Trump—over country.
Consequently, the Russia attack became a highly partisan matter, and the United States response was undermined. In this hyper-politicized environment, the Clinton campaign’s warnings about Russian intervention were largely disregarded. Trump was able reap the reward of Putin’s operation without paying a price for assisting an enemy.
With Putin’s operatives on Trump’s side—and Trump echoing Putin’s we-didn’t-do-it cover story—Trump won the election. Afterward, he continued to have Putin’s back. He ceaselessly railed about the Russia “hoax” and the investigations underway. Enraged about the FBI’s ongoing probe, he fired its director, James Comey. In a May 2017 Oval Office meeting, Trump yukked it up with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and told them he was not concerned about Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election. In other words, thanks and carry on! (In that meeting, Trump also disclosed highly classified information to the Russians.)
The following year, during a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump shockingly said he accepted Putin’s denials of Russian intervention in the election over the conclusions of his own intelligence community. Trying to escape the Russian taint on his electoral victory, Trump never once said he would hold Moscow accountable for its brazen assault on American democracy. Meanwhile, he took numerous steps that Mueller considered possible criminal acts of obstruction of justice to thwart the Russia investigations. And as the 2020 election approached, Trump refused to address the possibility of another Russian attack and smothered discussion of this threat.
Through all of this, he and his GOP handmaids devised distractions and outlandish conspiracy theories to deflect attention from the bottom line of the Russia scandal: Moscow covertly influenced the 2016 election, and Trump abetted that attack.
Trump, the Republicans, Fox, and other rightwing disinformation pushers claimed that the Obama administration had unlawfully spied on the Trump campaign and insisted that the Russia investigation was a baseless probe concocted to block Trump from the presidency. (The Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that Manafort “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” that the FBI and CIA were right to be alarmed by contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign, and that the bureau was justified in opening up an investigation in mid-summer 2016). Trump and his disciples obsessed over the Steele memos, which the FBI had indeed improperly used to justify a surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser.
But the surveillance of Page, who had made a suspicious trip to Moscow in 2016, was but one thin slice of the investigation, and, contrary to the Trumpers’ conspiracy theories, the Steele memos were not used to open the Russia investigation. And though the Steele memos’ sensational allegation about Trump and a “pee tape” was likely inaccurate, the Senate report revealed other episodes in which Russian intelligence possibly had developed kompromat—blackmail material—on Trump based on his personal conduct during trips to Russia.
During Trump’s first impeachment, House Republicans relied on the false notion that Ukraine, not Russia, had intervened in the 2016 election to defend their Dear Leader. (Trump’s effort to pressure the Ukrainian president to manufacture a phony investigation to show this—which would clear Russia—had led to that initial impeachment.) For years, Trump’s Republican loyalists, following his lead, lied about the Russia scandal and took whatever desperate measures they could cook up to miscast it as nothing but a partisan crusade to destroy Trump.
The story was complicated and that worked to Trump’s advantage. But the fact is that the Russian government intervened in the 2016 election to sabotage Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. At the very least, Trump and his minions welcomed the interference and were too stupid and corrupt to care about the consequences. And then Trump did everything in his considerable power to obstruct any investigation into what they did.
And then, inexplicably, over and over again as president, Trump treated Vladimir Putin like his long lost best friend, making it impossible to believe he wasn’t somehow in his debt. We may never know if Trump was just as stupid as he appeared to be or was an amoral, ambitious traitor. But there was something way, way off in his behavior that can’t be adequately explained in any other way.
These are facts and the braying from the right about “the Russia hoax” (and the left about “Russia Derangement”) are nothing but propaganda and excuses for failing to give a damn about the fact that the president had gleefully accepted the help of an autocratic adversary of the United States to defeat a Democratic Party politician they did not like.