WHEN WORDS COLLUDE
Once again, I quote Winston Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
I don’t know how much longer Robert Mueller’s team will need to finish their work, assuming they’re allowed to do so. But I agree with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (link below): There is no longer any question that the Trump campaign worked with Russia in 2016 to defeat Hillary Clinton. Even Steve Bannon says so.
The shorthand term most often used to describe the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia is collusion. “Collusion” is an accurate description of what happened, but its use is also unfortunate, because it gives Republicans the opportunity to say that there’s no law against collusion. They’re technically correct, but it’s a straw man argument.
It’s illegal for presidential campaigns to accept assistance, either in the form of money or services, from foreign governments. It was illegal for Russia and its surrogate, WikiLeaks, to hack DNC email servers. Money laundering (definitely including foreign campaign contributions) is illegal. Failing to register as an agent of a foreign government when you’re taking their money and doing their work is illegal. Lying to the FBI about your involvement in any of those crimes is itself a crime. Conspiring with others to commit those crimes is also a crime.
How can we be sure there’s no innocent explanation of all those Trump/Russia interactions? First, because everyone involved took great pains to keep them secret. Second, every time one of these crimes became public, Trump and his people lie about it. Third, in some cases (e.g., Don Jr.’s meeting with Russian spies) Trump’s people collaborated on an attempted coverup. (That particular coverup, the White House has admitted, was led by Donald Trump himself.) And fourth, their “trump card” (pun definitely intended) has been obstruction of justice, which has include firing people who were investigating their crimes (e.g. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and FBI Director James Comey) and trying to intimidate others (e.g. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller).
Trump supporters can play semantic games all they want, but they’re whistling past the graveyard. Laws were broken, and indictments are coming.
Speaking of collusion, excerpts from Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire And Fury, have made quite a splash. Wolff claims to have taped his interviews, but given his track record, it’s prudent to wonder whether his sources have been quoted verbatim or whether he’s created a docudrama with dialogue based on real interviews but massaged by Wolff for maximum impact.
The excerpts I’ve read (the book itself comes out on January 9) don’t so much break new ground as add colorful details to a story that has been clear to most of us for several months. That story includes:
· Trump and his people didn’t expect to win. Instead, their plan was to come close enough that Trump and could get a ton of mileage out of being the leader of a “Crooked Hillary” resistance movement.
· Some members of Trump’s entourage, and particularly Mike Flynn, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner, took foolish risks during the campaign on the theory that President Hillary Clinton would be inclined just to move on, and no one would look too closely at the losing campaign.
· When they won, they had no idea what to do. Trump simply kept on making campaign speeches, and various cronies moved into the power vacuum. Dysfunction set in from the very beginning.
· Trump, contrary to his reality show persona, lacks the skill and the motivation to run a business, much less a government. He’s a brand, and what he enjoys is being famous – that, and having people kowtow to him.
· Those closest to him have figured out that treating Trump like a child is the best way to manage his mood swings and cognitive decline.
· Members of Trump’s inner circle hate each other. “Rivalry” doesn’t begin to describe it. As they jockeyed for power, they’d stab each other in the back in a heartbeat. What’s more, Trump enjoys the spectacle.
Steve Bannon, of course, was at the center of many of those rivalries, and it has been Bannon’s takes that have provided the headlines in the early coverage of Wolff’s book. But even those comments are simply colorful statements of things that have been obvious for months. For instance:
· Don Jr. and Jared were incredibly stupid to have met with Russians during the campaign.
· It’s hard to believe, given that the meeting took place in Trump Tower, that Don Jr. didn’t introduce his Russian guests to Trump himself after the meeting broke up.
· This meeting was “treasonous.”
· Trump is frightened of what Mueller will find when his team looks at Trump’s financial records in the run up to the campaign. Spoiler alert: what they’ll find is that Trump ran a Russian money laundering operation for years.
If you can’t wait until January 9, Wolff himself summarized his book in the Hollywood Reporter (second link below). It’s worth a read. I’ll use his conclusion to finish this post.
“Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”
“At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.”
“Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-end-of-the-beginning