TAKE WHAT YOU HAVE GATHERED FROM COINCIDENCE

The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush has noted that Donald Trump “insists on dealing with crises by creating new ones.” During the campaign, that tactic was often effective, as the press seemed bewildered by his audacity. As president, though, the tactic often backfires, as it did yesterday during the first day of hearings by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform on Russian interference in our recent election.

Yesterday was a bad day for Team Trump, and you can feel the panic setting in. Trump committed an unforced error by tweeting an obvious lie about FBI Director James Comey’s testimony, claiming that Comey said that, “The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence the electoral process.” But Democrats at the hearing were operating on internet time for once, and quickly asked Comey about Trump’s tweet. Comey, under oath, denied that he said any such thing.

Comey also testified that the FBI was investigating whether there had been “coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the American election. Not whether there had been Russian interference in the election – all of our intelligence agencies have seen the evidence and say it definitely happened. Not whether the Russian interference was aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump – all of our intelligence agencies have seen the evidence and say the Russians were definitely trying to help Trump. No, the only matter currently unresolved is whether or not people in the Trump campaign were working with the Russians.

If Trump’s people were not working with the Russians, there were certainly a lot of inexplicable coincidences during the campaign. In Goldfinger, Ian Fleming wrote, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Let us, therefore, count the members of Donald Trump’s inner circle who are known to have been in contact with Russia during Trump’s presidential campaign. 1) His former campaign manager Paul Manafort. 2) His longtime advisor Roger Stone. 3) His original National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. And we have bingo! Enemy action!

But of course there’s more. Among Trump’s inner circle, Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner also had Kremlin connections, as did more minor players Carter Page and J.D. Gordon. That makes at least seven Trump operatives with known Russian contacts – not counting Trump himself and Donald Jr., who have longstanding business ties in Russia. And let us not forget Trump’s famous “Russia, if you’re listening” plea for help in hacking Hillary Clinton’s email back in July. There’s an awful lot of smoke for there to be no fire burning somewhere nearby.

It was also a tough day for Congressional Republicans, who view their job as scuttling investigations into Donald Trump’s misbehavior. They’re trying hard, but the only diversionary tactic they’ve thought of so far is to threaten a new investigation of Hillary Clinton. Because of course. Investigating Hillary Clinton is what they do.

Oh, they’d be perfectly happy to go after President Obama, but as luck would have it Comey also testified that there was no evidence to support Donald Trump’s tweeted accusations that President Obama ordered the illegal wiretapping Trump Tower. That confirms what British intelligence said over the weekend.

Back in the Watergate days, the prosecutorial question was, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Donald Trump is so profoundly ignorant that it’s hard to be confident that he knows anything at all. But the story is bigger than just Donald Trump, although White House strategists would love to keep the focus of the investigation that narrow.

A couple of weeks ago, Trump spokesperson Sarah Sanders tried to deflect questions about Russian connections in Trump’s inner circle by saying, “The big point here is the president himself knows what his involvement was and that’s zero. And I think that he’s the primary person that should be held responsible and he had no interaction and I think that’s what the story should be focused on.”

Yesterday, Sean Spicer added a new wrinkle to this defense, asserting that Trump barely knew some of his closest advisors. He claimed that Paul Manafort had “a very limited role” in the campaign. Right, Manafort was only Trump’s campaign manager. It’s not like campaign managers have much of a role in campaigns.

The White House is trying to frame the issue this way: Donald Trump had no direct contact with Russia during the campaign, and he’s not responsible for the actions of his subordinates, most of whom he barely knows anyway. Unless Democrats can prove otherwise (while Republicans do everything in their power to obstruct the investigation), that’s the end of the story. Russiaghazigate is over. (I’m going to call it Russiaghazigate until the press comes to a consensus on some other generic term for the scandal.)

Fortunately for American democracy, neither the press nor the Democrats will agree to restrict the investigation of Russiaghazigate simply to the question of Trump’s personal involvement. They want to know how the Russians interfered in our electoral process. The answer has to cover all of journalism’s 5 W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. Trump’s lawyers know that, even if he doesn’t.

In that context, Spicer’s and Sanders’ comments make me wonder if Team Trump is getting ready to throw some of his people under the bus. I assume that the seven Trump advisors I listed earlier are lawyering up.

I’ve read speculation that Trump will fire FBI Director Comey in the near future. That would be really stupid, but really stupid is always in play where Donald Trump is concerned. It’s hard to imagine a more counterproductive course of action, though. It would trigger comparisons to Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre; it would be read as a tacit admission that Trump was afraid of what an investigation might reveal; and perhaps most seriously, it would really piss off the FBI.

Very early in the Watergate investigation, when the official Republican position was that the whole thing was simply a “third rate burglary,” one of those third rate burglars, former CIA agent James McCord, wrote a chilling letter to an associate of President Nixon. If you try to make the CIA your scapegoat for Watergate, McCord wrote, “Every tree in the forest will fall.”

Not that Donald Trump knows much about Watergate. But for those of you who are too young to remember, here are a few relevant lessons from that landmark scandal. First, no secret is safe. Too many people on both sides of the law know too much about Russiaghazigate. Sooner or later, one of them will have an incentive to reveal what he knows.

A corollary lesson is that there’s no honor among thieves. Several of Trump’s staff appear to have broken laws – maybe in connection with this particular scandal, or maybe in some unrelated area. When they’re faced with prosecution, the odds are good that at least one of them will take a plea bargain and start naming names. That will trigger more plea bargains from increasingly prominent people, until the investigators conclude that the biggest fish have been caught.

A third lesson is, don’t needlessly antagonize people who can make trouble for you. Trump has insulted every branch of the American (not to mention British) intelligence community, as well as the press corps. He can cry “fake news” all he wants, but when there’s blood in the water, the enemies he’s made will keep coming.

There’s an awful lot of smoke around Russiaghazigate for there to be no fire burning somewhere nearby. I certainly don’t know who did what in this whole mess. Trump and his people were rank amateurs at politics. They had Russian connections long before the campaign, and were used to bending rules in their business operations. It probably never occurred to them that colluding with Russia to influence the election was any different than running a scam like Trump University – they’d either get away with it, or pay some sort of fine and still wind up ahead.

Conventional wisdom has it that there’s a fourth lesson of Watergate, which is that the cover up is worse than the original mistake. Pushback simply signals to the press that they’re on to something important. Admit you’re wrong, they say, apologize, and move on. The attention span of the press is limited, and they’ll change the subject soon enough. It’s the resistance – anger, dishonesty, and defensiveness – that confirms the press’s suspicions and keeps them digging into the story.

Luckily for American democracy, Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of admitting error. He always doubles down on his mistakes. It’s a strategy he's used for 70 years. It’s the only one he knows. It will probably continue to be effective with his base. But it’s a recipe for disaster in legal proceedings.