Im-Politic: Flynn-Flamm

Tags

Barack Obama, collusion, election 2016, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Im-Politic, James Comey, Justice Department, Logan Act, Michael T. Flynn, Mueller investigation, Russia, Sally B. Yates, Sergey Kislyak, Susan E. Rice, Trump, William P. Barr

So let’s wade right into the (latest) Michael T. Flynn uproar.

Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock for the past few weeks, you know that Flynn is the former Army Lieutenant General and head of the Pentagon’s intelligence chief (during the Obama administration) who served briefly as President Trump’s national security adviser. He resigned in February, 2017 after stating that he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he held during the transition period with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. That December, he was indicted by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump Russia collusion investigators for lying to the FBI during interviews in January with Bureau agents in the course of their investigation into his activities, and also pled guilty to the charges.

More recently, after Flynn sought to withdraw this plea, Attorney General William P. Barr appointed a career federal prosecutor to review the case, and in light of newly released FBI documents indicating serious irregularities in the Bureau’s handling of the case, Barr agreed to the prosecutor’s recommendation that the case be dismissed altogether. A federal judge will make the final decision.

This summary, though, scarcely begins to do justice to all the ins and outs and other complexities of the Flynn case. Dealing with them would require a  post even longer than this one will be! But one dimension of the case with unusual importance concerns former President Obama’s actions, specifically because of the recent declassification of an email written by his own former national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, about a meeting held among Obama, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, and the former heads of the FBI and Justice Department.

The Obama angle has of course generated claims that his administration’s handling of Flynn and other aspects of its investigation of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia amount to a major scandal – which Mr. Trump himself calls “Obamagate” and which others portray as nothing less than an effort to overthrow his presidency. To me, these charges should be looked into, but remain to be proved. (In fact, the Justice Department is probing the entire investigation into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign that took place during the Obama years, and the long-awaited report seems likely to be released before Election Day.)

In the absence of this report, what interests me right now is the question of why Obama didn’t quash the FBI investigation of Flynn during that January 5 meeting – which took place just over two weeks before his presidency officially ended. And the Rice email makes clear just how fishy his decision was.

According to this communication, which Rice sent to herself on Inauguration Day, the January 5 White House meeting was “a brief follow-on conversation” that took place right after Obama, Biden, Acting Attorney General Sally B. Yates, FBI Director James Comey, and Rice were briefed by the leaders of the intelligence community “on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election.” And Flynn was a major subject of the conversation.

Flynn was highlighted due to the former President’s professed determination to (in Rice’s words) “be sure that as we engage with the incoming [Trump] team [during the transition], we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

Comey responded (in Rice’s words again), “that he does have some concerns that incoming NSA [national security adviser] Flynn is speaking frequently with Russian Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak. Comey said that could be an issue as it relates to sharing sensitive information.”

Now comes something really important. Rice continued:

“President Obama asked if Comey was saying that the NSC [National Security Council] should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn. Comey replied ‘potentially.’ He added that he has no indication thus far that Flynn has passed classified information to Kislyak, but he noted that ‘the level of communication is unusual.’

“The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.”

This Obama response is what raises so many questions. First, back in late January, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the FBI “in late December reviewed intercepts of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn — national security adviser to then-President-elect Trump….”

This report was confirmed in the exhibits accompanying the Justice Department’s May 7, 2020 motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn. So apparently, Comey was privy to the Flynn-Kislyak conversations more than two weeks before the January 5 meeting with Obama. During that time, the Rice email states, he reported finding no evidence, or even any “indication,” that Flynn had passed sensitive information to Russia. All he said he uncovered information that he interpreted “potentially” meant that Flynn was untrustworthy.

At least as important, there’s compelling evidence that Obama himself knew the content of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations.  It comes in the form of testimony given by Yates to the Mueller investigators in September, 2017 and described in a September 7 FBI description contained in Exhibit 4 (page 2) of the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss.  She stated that during the January 5 meeting, Obama revealed he had “learned of the information about Flynn,” including not only about the fact that the conversations took place, but about their key subject.

Yates added that Obama at that point specified that he didn’t want “any additional information on the matter” (the FBI’s phrasing) but wanted enough provided (presumably to his aides) to guide the outgoing administration as to whether Flynn could be trusted. In other words, not only does Yates’ testimony add a crucial detail. It also supports the essentials of Rice’s account.

Of course, if the former President was aware of what Flynn and Kislyak discussed, he also must have known that no classified information had been passed to the Russian. Nor according to Rice did he express any other concerns. 

And this episode doesn’t mark the first time that Obama was surely made aware that an FBI investigation of Flynn had turned up nothing legitimately troubling.  For on August 16, 2016, as documented in Exhibit 2 of the motion to disniss, the Bureau began probing whether Flynn, who it identified as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign,

“is being directed and controlled by and/or coordinating activities with the Russian Federation in a manner which may be a threat to the national security and/or possibly a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act [which requires any Americans working for foreign government, political parties, individuals, or other principals – though not U.S. affiliates of foreign-owned companies – to register with the Justice Department and report the nature of the relationship].”

Sounds pretty serious, right? Except in a January 4, 2017 memo – presented as Exhibit 1 of the motion to dismiss – the Bureau’s Washington field office reported its decision to close this investigation because the probe could identify “no derogatory information.”  Is it remotely conceivable that no one told the former President?

The story of this particular investigation, however, doesn’t stop there.  The memo not only wasn’t approved.  As the motion to dismiss recounts (page 4), ostensibly because the FBI’s top leaders (including Comey) had learned of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations, they kept the Flynn probe alive – even though, presumably, they knew they contained no incriminating or otherwise disturbing material, or certainly never reported such to Obama, including up to and including the January 5 meeting.    

The transcripts, though, suggested another possibility for nailing Flynn – a possible violation of the the Logan Act.  But this course of action was pretty problematic, too.  This law, dating from 1798 aimed at preventing private American citizens or other legal residents from interfering with the conduct of U.S. diplomacy.

That’s an entirely legitimate purpose. But throughout the entirety of American history, only two individals have even been indicted for violating the act (most recently, in 1853) and neither was convicted.

The FBI’s interest in such possible Flynn transgressions seems to have originated in purported Obama administration worries that before Inauguration Day, Flynn was engaged in such interference on two different fronts – an upcoming United Nations vote to condemn Israel, and a December 29 Obama decision to sanction Russia on the grounds of election interference.

Yet Flynn ultimately wasn’t indicted (and convicted) for anything having to do with the Logan Act, or anything having to do with his Russia conversations or with the UN business. His only alleged crime (to which he pled guilty) was making materially false statements and omissions” to the FBI about these subjects.

At this point, an obvious choice must have confronted Obama – who must have known that the transcripts absolved Flynn of the most serious offense he was suspected of committing – handing major official secrets to the Russians. He could have told Comey that further investigation of Flynn was pointless and to drop the matter – either because more than two recent weeks of surveillance had turned up nothing alarming; or because Flynn would begin serving in the new Trump administration only two weeks down the road, and would then have been entitled to view all the U.S government’s classified information; or because Obama realized that the Logan Act concerns were excuses for further surveillance of Flynn. Or he could have told Comey to continue (because he didn’t care why Flynn was pursued as long as the effort succeeded), along with directing Rice and all other U.S. officials to suspend sharing intelligence concerning Russia (or any other subject) with the Trump team (more out of some motive other than because of any genuine security concerns).

Instead, he told Comey to “inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks” – but also permitted Rice to continue intelligence sharing as normal. We know this because a May 19 statement by Rice’s lawyer on her behalf said that the former Obama aide “did not alter the way she briefed Michael Flynn on Russia as a result of Director Comey’s response.” This outcome, it must be noted, also supports the claim that Obama had no important security concerns about Flynn. All the same, Comey’s pursuit of Flynn remained ongoing.  

Unless Rice defied the President’s instructions despite her lawyer’s claim?  If not, and they were followed, then why didn’t Obama at any point between January 5 and the end of his administration halt the Comey investigation? Unless he did and Comey continued anyway? Possibly because the FBI chief wished to follow the former President’s instructions even after Obama had left office?  Whatever Comey’s motives, his pursuit of Flynn didn’t stop, and led to the January 24 FBI interview with the new national security adviser.      

Interestingly, that session also undercuts the idea that the Obama administration’s beef against Flynn had anything to do with national security.  For a partly declassified version of the FBI’s report on the January 24 meeting shows that neither of the agents who spoke with Flynn even brought up the matter of illegally passing classified or any sensitive information to Kislyak. Their exclusive concerns were Logan Act-related issues.

A final (for now) weird item: In its indictment, the Justice Department contended that “FLYNN’s false statements and omissions impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the Campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

But of course, Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak took place after the election, not during the campaign. The only way they could have been related to the Trump campaign collusion allegations would be if they were the result of some secret deals concerning Russia policy made by Flynn or anyone else in the campaign with Moscow. Yet the exhaustive Mueller investigation of these matters found insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with the crime of conspiring “with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 20q6 election.” And Flynn’s activities were included.

As mentioned above, the above analysis by no means exhausts all the questions raised by the Flynn uproar – including about Flynn’s dealings with foreign clients; about whether the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn concluded he was lying, or simply believed that his memory was faulty at time (and whether Comey himself was certain of Flynn’s dishonesty, as per the motion to dismiss, Exhibit 13, pages 3 and 4, and Exhibit 5, page 10, respectively); and about why, if the Obama administration viewed Flynn as a major threat to national security, no one ever told President-elect Trump promptly of their concerns, and instead chose a prosecution route that permitted Flynn to occupy an extremely crucial position for three weeks – and that risked his continuing in that post had he performed more skillfully during his session with the FBI.

Former Obama Acting Attorney General Yates has testified to Congress that she did tell then Trump White House Counsel Donald McGahn that Flynn’s false statements were known by the Russians, and therefore made him vulnerable to blackmail. But this warning wasn’t given until January 26 – six days after Mr. Trump assumed office, and Flynn became national security adviser. 

And then there’s perhaps the biggest Flynn-related mystery of all: whether the next few weeks will see more questions, or more answers.

Im-Politic: A Media Watchdog Lets Chuck Todd Off the Hook

Tags

Chuck Todd, Erik Wemple, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, Meet the Press, Michael T. Flynn, MSM, NBC News CBS News, Trump, Washington Post, William P. Barr

If you heard two significantly different explanations for the same big mistake (and possible instance of wrongdoing) from the same organization, wouldn’t you at least think of investigating further, rather than simply leave the matter hanging? If so, congratulations. You have infinitely better journalistic instincts than Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple – who’s supposed to earn a living trying to resolve such discrepancies, and who failed miserably in his coverage of a major recent journalism controversy.

The mistake and possible misdeed entail the treatment by NBC News’ Chuck Todd of an interview on another network with Attorney General William P. Barr. The film clip of that session – first broadcast on CBS News – used by Todd to kick off a panel discussion on the weekly Meet the Press program he hosts was missing a key passage. What Todd showed last Sunday morning depicted Barr answering in an apparently cynical way a question about his hotly debated decision to drop the Justice Department’s case against then senior Trump administration foreign policy appointee Michael T. Flynn.

Specifically, Barr was asked how he believed history would view his handling of the Flynn case. In the excerpt seen by Todd’s panelists and Meet the Press viewers, Barr’s answer stopped with the flip remark, “History is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

As Todd noted, those words created the impression of Barr as a completely unscrupulous hack lacking any regard for his most solemn responsibility: “I was struck…by the cynicism of the answer. It’s a correct answer. But he’s the attorney general. He didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.”

The problem is that Barr’s answer didn’t stop there. Wemple reported that he continued with the following points: “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.  It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.” In other words, Todd’s comment, anel discussion, was utterly inaccurate.

And here’s where the conflicting explanations come in. That same evening, following a protest by the Justice Department’s chief press spokesperson (included in Wemple’s article), NBC responded with the following (also presented by Wemple):

“You’re correct. Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis. The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error.”

That is, before sending the material to Todd and whoever helps him with these tasks, someone at NBC just happened to cut off a recording of the interview at exactly the point at which Barr transitioned from wisecrack mode to serious mode. I’m personally struggling to believe that this action was an innocent mistake, as NBC’s use of the word “inadvertently” clearly claims. After all, the deleted portion represented essential context. But maybe the scissor (or the digital  editing tool) slipped. So maybe the network’s expression of regret is totally sincere.

But Todd himself appears to disagree. Tuesday, in an on-the-air appearance, he gave viewers an entirely different version of events. According to Todd (and reported by Wemple),

“Now, we did not edit that [Barr material] out. That was not our edit. We didn’t include it because we only saw the shorter of two clips that CBS did air. We should have looked at both and checked for a full transcript. A mistake that I wish we hadn’t made and one I wish I hadn’t made. The second part of the attorney general’s answer would have put it in the proper context.”

He continued: “Had we seen that part of the CBS interview, I would not have framed the conversation the way I did, and I obviously am very sorry for that mistake. We strive to do better going forward.”

To his credit, Wemple raised disturbing questions about Todd’s account:

“The scope of these oversights bears some explanation. ‘Meet the Press’ aired on Sunday. CBS News published the transcript of the Barr interview in its entirety on Thursday, allowing ‘Meet the Press’ several days to evaluate it. A longer version of the interview video was available by Friday morning. The show’s mistake amounts to a stunning breakdown.”

But this partly helpful explanation was only partly helpful. For it missed the glaring contradiction between the two explanations. As I mentioned, it’s conceivable (despite Todd’s denial) that the crucial Barr passage was accidently snipped. It’s also possible that the Meet the Press staff was just lazy and incompetent, and failed to do the most elementary journalistic double-checking.

It is flatly impossible, however, for both explanations of the same set of events to be true. And yet Wemple not only overlooked this whopping inconsistency. He actually praised Todd’s apology for having “struck a tone consistent with the screw-up.”

Of course, that can’t simply be “end of story,” as Wemple clearly believes. Absent further investigation (“Wemple? Wemple?”) no one outside NBC News can know which of these versions of the Barr episode is true, or whether there’s still another explanation. So in the absence of definitive evidence, here are two alternatives that mustn’t be ruled out:

>If the snipping version is the more accurate, it wasn’t accidental at all. Instead, it may well have resulted from some zealous staffer who thought he or she could get away with an outright deception – largely because NBC has become a den of Never Trumpers, and because the other leading mainstream news organizations aren’t interested in seriously policing themselves even when unmistakable scams are uncovered, – as Wemple’s own performance has made clear. Sure Fox News might pick it up. But so what? Its findings usually get dismissed (by most outside ‘Fox Nation”) as raw partisanship anyway.

>If the lazy, incompetent version comes closest to the truth, it’s all too easy to imagine that everyone at Meet the Press is so devoted to the Resistance that as soon as someone spotted a Barr statement that made this also-loathed Attorney General look bad, no one saw no reason not to run with it.

And unless one of Wemple’s peers rises to the challenge, speculation is all that’s left. Because in this case, a so-called “media watchdog” lacked both bark and bite.

Im-Politic: Initial Thoughts on the Trump Wars

Tags

2016 election, Andrew McCabe, Director of National Intelligence, FBI, hacking, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, impeachment, intelligence community, James Clapper, James Comey, John McCain, Justice Department, Lindsey Graham, Loretta Lynch, Michael T. Flynn, Richard M. Nixon, Russia, Russiagate, Sally Yates, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump, Wategate

Since I’m not a Trump or intelligence community insider, I’ve refrained from posting any items on the last crisis that began surrounding the administration starting with the president’s firing of James Comey as FBI Director. (I have commented on some aspects briefly on Twitter.) But since I’m a strong supporter of many positions championed by Mr. Trump both during the campaign and – to a lesser extent – in the White House, I thought that RealityChek readers would be interested in some observations about aspects of the uproar that deserve more consideration.

First and most important: Both current and former officials in the federal bureaucracy and even the intelligence community clearly hope to end the Trump presidency, and have decided to leak to the equally anti-Trump Mainstream Media even the most highly classified material if it’s judged to be potentially harmful to the president. Yet no leaks have revealed any evidence supporting the central allegation against the president: the charge that he or close aides colluded in any way with Russian efforts to fix the presidential election in his favor.

Given that the president’s foes long viewed the prospect of his victory with alarm, and given that they have sought to de-legitimize this victory since it unfolded the evening of last November 8, the absence of such a smoking gun after so many months is absolutely startling. If this evidence exists, what are President Trump’s adversaries waiting for?

P.S. – this argument pertains to retired General Michael T. Flynn, who advised candidate Trump and briefly became his White House national security adviser. Flynn has certainly acted in several instances like he’s had something (or things) to hide. But he’s been tracked for months by intelligence officials who – again – have been anything but reluctant to make troubling findings public. And nothing has emerged pointing to working with Russia to undermine the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

One possible explanation? Many anti-Trump-ers are waiting for the 2018 mid-term elections to get closer and closer, in order to boost the chances of a Democratic landslide before the administration had a chance to rebut the charges conclusively – and before Congressional Republicans have a chance to dissociate themselves from Mr. Trump. And maybe they’re being joined by some establishment Republicans, who hope to recapture their party from the Trump-ist forces. And maybe both factions are motivated mainly by the belief that Mr. Trump is such an unprecedented danger to the republic that any means are warranted to remove him from the Oval Office.

If so, however, some big legal issues pop up.  For instance:  Are individuals privy to information about crimes – and in fact major crimes – withholding them from law enforcement authorities? 

Second: Not only has no evidence of collusion been leaked. The former head of the entire intelligence community has just made clear that, during his own prolonged probe of Russia’s efforts to interfere with the election (a related but clearly separate issue, for which strong evidence exists), he saw none.

In March, James Clapper, who resigned as Director of National Intelligence soon after the election, had tantalizingly hinted at the existence of such material by telling a reporter that the intelligence community “did not include any evidence” in its January report on the Russian campaign “that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.”

But when pressed by “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd to confirm whether such evidence existed, Clapper responded, “Not to my knowledge.” And when asked under oath in Senate testimony on three months later whether that statement was still accurate, Clapper stated, “It is.” In other words, Clapper’s probe, which reflected the work of 16 intelligence agencies including his own Director’s office uncovered no collusion evidence.

The issue was briefly muddied during that same hearing by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Like Clapper, an Obama administration appointee to her latest position, Yates initially answered the question about collusion by demurring. She explained that her “answer to that question would require me to reveal classified information. And so, I — I can’t answer that.”

As noted by questioner Senator Lindsey Graham – no admirer of President Trump – the FBI that Yates helped supervise as the second-in-command at the Justice Department was part of Clapper’s Russia investigation. After Yates indicated that the FBI was conducting its own separate counter-intelligence inquiry into Russia’s activities, Graham asked Clapper if the evidence found by the Bureau at that time “was not mature enough” to justify including in the broader intelligence community report.

Responded Clapper: “[T]he evidence, if there was any, didn’t reach the evidentiary bar in terms of the level of confidence that we were striving for in that intelligence community assessment.”

So again, a protracted look into Russia’s Election 2016 hacking produced no evidence of collusion that the intelligence community as a whole believed was solid enough to justify even hinting at in its publicly stated conclusions.

Third: One highly damaging allegation that’s been made over the last week was the Washington Post‘s claim that Comey requested more resources from the Justice Department for his investigation just before he was fired. The clear implication: The president became convinced that Comey was ramping up his investigation – which began in July – and decided to fire him in order to deny him the funds needed to do the job adequately. Such an action, of course, would at least strongly resemble obstruction of justice.

This article, however, too, looks fishy. Post reporter Ashley Parker did include an on-the-record flat Justice Department denial, but needless to say, government spokespersons lie or dissemble all the time. Much more difficult to dismiss: Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe – who had been Comey’s former top deputy – stated in his own sworn testimony to Congress that he was unaware of any such request.

Yes, it’s true that Comey might have made the request without telling McCabe. But how much sense does that make? Nor can anyone accuse McCabe of being a Trump toady. His wife, Jill, had run for office in 2015 as a Democrat and had accepted $500,000 in campaign contributions from the political organization of a long-time Clinton family ally, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

Finally (for now!), comes the subject, as reported in The New York Times, of Comey’s alleged memo claiming that President Trump asked him to drop his Russia investigation in a February meeting. The former FBI Director will surely have the chance to confirm, deny, or otherwise elaborate on this story and the conversation in his own testimony under oath to Congress.

As suggested by prominent Trump critic Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, if this request was made, we’re talking about a genuinely Nixonian case of obstruction of justice. (The “smoking gun” tape that played such a decisive role in Richard Nixon’s impeachment and removal in 1974 centered precisely on a decision by the former President to order the FBI to stop its Watergate investigation.)

As Mr. Trump’s critics like to say, however, the Times article “raises questions” – indeed, big ones. First, it’s crucial to note that, as Nixon himself admitted, his actions were intended to cover up criminal activity. As noted above, there’s no evidence yet of a Russia-related crime committed by the Trump administration.

More immediately, Comey has not exactly been shy about loudly expressing, acting on, and widely sharing his concerns about obstacles to official inquests and other behavior he considered improper. In 2004, he threatened to resign as Deputy Attorney General over post-September 11 domestic surveillance programs he viewed as illegal. Last July, he famously held a press conference in which he took the extraordinary step of moving beyond his position’s investigative role to explain extensively his decision to recommend against indicting Hillary Clinton for using a personal email system as Secretary of State. And earlier this month, Comey said – again, under oath – that he took this step because he unilaterally decided that his superior, Attorney General Loretta Lynch had lost credibility as a Clinton investigator because of her meeting with the candidate’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, in June.

It’s certainly possible that Comey has decided to keep firsthand evidence of clear Trump criminality under wraps for going on three months now. But it sure looks out of character.

All of the above notwithstanding, there’s no question that the President’s undisciplined and often contradictory statements understandably have created major suspicions – which are by no means confined to his enemies’ ranks. The consequently confused efforts by his surrogates to clean up these messes have only compounded the problem. And even if the administration had its communications act together, one indisputable lesson of Washington and other scandals is that shoes keep dropping. Moreover, numerous continuing global business ties and burgeoning official responsibilities of the President’s children, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his family keep failing valid smell tests.

At the same time, the clearly organized Dump Trump effort by numerous persons with detailed knowledge of seemingly the full range of the federal government’s most sensitive activities suggests that “RussiaGate,” at least, could be different. Not in the sense that damaging claims won’t continue to be made, but in the sense that the anti-Trump-ers might have already leaked their worst.

The only certainty at this point appears to be that the various Trump Wars will rage on for months at a minimum – which means that the valid policy grievances of the president’s supporters and so many other Americans will continue to be neglected by their government.

Im-Politic: The Trump-ers and the Russians

Tags

2016 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Jeff Sessions, Logan Act, Michael T. Flynn, Russia, Sergey Kislyak, Trump, U.S. intelligence, Vladimir Putin

The more I read about the firestorm that has erupted over possible contacts between officials of and advisers to President Trump’s campaign for the White House, his transition team, and members of his new administration on the one hand, and the Russian government and/or its agents on the other, the less sense any of it makes to me.

That goes double – at least – for the charge that is only rarely made explicit but that is central to this entire uproar: that Trump’s outsider nature and supposedly authoritarian, anti-democratic instincts opened the door to an alliance with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that aided his November victory. More specifically, insinuations have been made that figures either officially or unofficially associated with Mr. Trump “colluded” with the Russians in their efforts to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Of course, the fire keeps getting fueled by the failure of the supposed Trump-ist conspirators to provide forthright answers to questions about their recent contacts with Putin’s aides and surrogates. By their own belated admissions now, the president’s briefly serving White House national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and his Attorney General, former Senator Jeff Sessions, held either meetings or communications with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the transition and campaign, respectively, that they did not originally acknowledge.

Nothing could have been easier, the entirely reasonable argument goes, than for them to have been up front right away. Flynn, for example, is alleged to have broken with an important American tradition that only one person serves as president at a time when he spoke with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about America’s anti-Russia sanctions. It’s true that former President Obama’s second term ran through midday, January 20, and that he and his officials alone possessed the authority to conduct the nation’s foreign relations. In addition, Flynn might have violated a law preventing private citizens from interfering with official American diplomacy – though it’s unclear whether the Logan Act applies to transition team officials like Flynn at the time.

But wouldn’t the former general have been much better off – let alone Mr. Trump – had he simply stated that he broached the subject of sanctions (as opposed to simply introducing himself and starting to get acquainted) because Russia is an important country and he wanted to help the administration hit the ground running?

And Sessions has now stated that his original answers at his Senate confirmation regarding such meetings assumed that the questions were focused on meetings dealing with his position in the Trump campaign and that concerned campaign matters. But why engage in such Clintonian parsing if everything was on the up and up?

After all, his first such contact with Kislyak took place at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, at a meeting co-sponsored by the Obama State Department. The second – also with Kislyak – took place in his Senate office, in September. As a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, what could be more natural than a lawmaker meeting with a representative of a major power? The answer? “Nothing.” Such events have become routine – and should be, if Congress is to play the important role in foreign policymaking assigned it by the Constitution. How difficult would it have been for Sessions to make these points in the first place?

One obvious retort is that the president’s enemies are so loaded for bear that even such reasonable explanations wouldn’t have satisfied them – and were likeliest to egg them on further. But it should be equally obvious that the real political prize here is the American middle, which historically has a knack for distinguishing the truth-tellers from the fear-mongers.

Even more bizarre, however (and that’s a high bar!), is the more fundamental notion that the Russians thought a concerted effort to fix the U.S. election was a stroke of genius. That may indeed have been the case – I sure don’t have any inside info on the Kremlin. But let me count the biggest reasons why Putin should have laughed out of his office anyone who made this proposal.

First, with his KGB background, Putin of all people should know that it’s almost impossible to keep any significant secrets in the American political world, let alone one this big. One major reason, of course – this plan would have had to have been kept from any number of foreign intelligence services as well, if only because so many other national governments have big stakes in American presidential elections, too.

Second, precisely because of these excellent chances of discovery, the upside of any successful election rigging would have been severely limited. Had Clinton won, after all, at least for the medium term, Moscow would have guaranteed that Barack Obama’s successor would have taken much harder-line anti-Russian positions across the board in American foreign policy. But even had the alleged plot succeeded, every word or action taken by Mr. Trump suggesting a more conciliatory policy would – as has been clear already – have come under the harshest suspicion. Indeed, the new administration has faced continuing heavy pressure to demonstrate what might be called some anti-Russia street cred – on top of already having named some prominent Russia hawks to key posts.

Third, the cost-benefit calculus of a political interference campaign looks even worse upon recalling the conventional wisdom that Mr. Trump was heading toward an historic defeat at the polls. Why take major chances on behalf of such a likely and big loser? In this vein, it’s fascinating to note that the January American intelligence community report on the Russian influence campaign suggested that the Kremlin (as with so many others) anticipated a Clinton win as late as election night.

Fourth, if Russian intelligence was even minimally competent, it would have known that a Trump presidency would have been more favorable to Moscow even without actively cooperation with his presidential campaign. For Mr. Trump had long criticized U.S. foreign policymaking for picking needless overseas fights that too often turned into bloody and hideously expensive quagmires (like the second Iraq war). And for even longer he had insisted that America’s military actions abroad be restricted to crises where the nation’s security was directly threatened.

But as indicated above, the American intelligence community has stated that Putin – although concerned about a “backfire” effect from direct Putin praise of candidate Trump – did in fact order precisely this kind of anti-Clinton, pro-Trump “influence campaign”. Given all the claims from every quarter of American politics that the Russian leader is a diabolically dangerous mastermind, this decision simply adds to my list of “Russia-gate” developments that I find completely mystifying.

Not that my own befuddlement means that there’s no fire behind any of this smoke, or that Russian interference in U.S. elections should be accepted simply because it might have been ineptly conceived or carried out. (What if Moscow or others one day get the hang of this?) Until and unless much more serious disclosures emerge, however, it could well mean that Trump-haters and the Mainstream Media need to hold their hysteria about the Trump-Russia connection. And the president and his team stop needlessly shooting themselves in their feet.