Three Separate Threads Of The Russia Investigation That Threaten Trump
Things move so fast with Trump administration disasters these days it is really hard to keep up. Sometimes, I’ll be halfway through a post and it will be meaningless because of some huge new development that had just broken.
But I do want to try to take a quick overview of where we stand with the Trump-Russia connections and the ongoing cover-up, because there can be no doubt that’s what it is at this point.
Right now there are really three threads to the story. The first is more historical and goes back to the early 2000s when Trump started to rely on money from Russia and the former Soviet Republics to rebuild his business after yet another bankruptcy. Maddow and others have shown clear evidence of oligarchs significantly overpaying for Trump properties and TPM has detailed other rather shady business deals Trump has been associated with. Whether there is enough evidence there to eventually implicate Trump in abetting money laundering is unknown as is whether there is a real will to investigate that far in the past.
The second thread is the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in influencing the election. And the number of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials or state actors makes the case for this simply compelling. Roger Stone, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Jeff Sessions are meeting with or “talking” to Russian officials on a pretty regular basis when you combine them all together. Stone seems to think that he is legally OK with being in contact with Guccifer 2.0 and promoting WikiLeaks’s upcoming material as long as he didn’t ask them to do anything. And he may be correct. But I’m not sure that a lot of Americans would be happy with the idea that he was promoting the attempts of a foreign government to interefere in our election.
Based on his interview with Chris Hayes, I can’t imagine who would trust Carter Page to do anything, but he managed to kind of hang on in the campaign far longer than he was seemingly worth. Why that might be and whether he was a conduit to the Russians in still anyone’s guess. And, while we all may wonder about what Jeff Sessions talked about with the Russian ambassador in his Senate office, I doubt he was stupid enough to be colluding with them himself. He may have been dropping hints about certain quid-pro-quos but probably in diplomatic language that Kislyak understood but legally protected himself.
Michael Flynn had gone totally dark for a few weeks and he post-registered as a foreign agent, getting on the right side of the law, admittedly belatedly. Then the story came out that Flynn had essentially conspired to kidnap Gulen and spirit him out of the country to Turkey. It also looks like Flynn lied to the FBI. I took his disappearance and those stories as a sign that he had already made a deal with the FBI, but his lawyer’s letter yesterday essentially begging anyone to give him immunity sank that theory. The problem for Flynn is that the only guy higher up that he can implicate is Trump and he either is unwilling to do that yet or he doesn’t really have anything to bring Trump down. He may be willing to implicate Manafort in collusion but, at this point, Manafort is in so much trouble the neither the FBI nor the committees need Flynn yet. Of course, Trump is tweeting that Flynn should testify in return for immunity, possible sending a strong signal to Sessions in the Justice Department and again tainting the investigation.
Manafort has clearly been laundering money for Russian oligarchs for years. In addition, many of the techniques that the Russians used in this campaign were also used by Manafort when he worked for the Russians in Ukraine. While the selection of Manafort as campaign manager initially seemed unfathomable to Washington insiders, it seems pretty clear that Manafort and Trump matched up quite easily due to their familiarity with using oligarchs’ money, either legally or illegally. If anyone was driving the collusion with the Russians, it was Manafort. Once that ball got rolling, the campaign kept it going after he “left”. Right now, it looks like Manafort is the one in the most serious legal jeopardy and he may well be the key to the whole collusion story. Whether he will flip or not may take a while to find out.
Mark Warner took an interesting path with some of his questioning in the Senate hearing yesterday, implying that the Russians were able to target their active measures down to the precinct level. That kind of detail would almost definitely have to come from either a party organization or a campaign. The question that Warner leaves hanging out there is whether that data came from the DNC hacks or was somehow provided by the Trump campaign. If it was the Trump campaign, you would have to assume Manafort and perhaps even Trump authorized it.
Whether Trump knowingly colluded with the Russians or merely regurgitated talking points provided by Manafort from the Russians and their propaganda outlets will probably be hard to prove without explicit testimony from someone like Manafort. But as Clint Watts so aptly put it yesterday, Trump was clearly enabling Russia’s active measures, knowingly or not. Says Watts, “[P]art of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is because the Commander-in-Chief [Trump] has used Russian active measures at times, against his opponents.” I’m sure there is a pretty lengthy list of Russian propaganda items that went straight back out through the mouth of Trump. That list may have already been compiled (send me the link if you know it), but it would look pretty damning when presented as evidence of Trump as an abettor of Russia’s active measures. And, of course, there is always the unknown of Trump’s taxes hanging out there. Who knows what they may show if he is ever forced to turn them over?
In addition, there may also be others that haven’t been directly linked to the Russians, such as Bannon. Breitbart was continually recycling Russian active measures and false stories. How much Bannon was driving that coverage, if at all, is another open question. In addition, Bannon’s position on the National Security Council brings into question whether he was the driver behind the whole Nunes debacle.
The final thread is the ongoing cover-up. The members of the Trump team, from Flynn to Manafort to Sessions, have continually lied about their contacts with the Russians. The White House has continually come close, if not crossed the line, into obstruction of justice. It enlisted the Republican heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to debunk the collusion stories early on. And now, in order to prove Trump’s tweet that Obama wiretapped him, the White House attempted to use normal intelligence intercepts as evidence supporting that claim, laundering them through the House Intelligence Committee in the person of Devin Nunes.
The staffers who “found” this information now face questions about why they were looking at raw intelligence and whether they handled that material correctly. And, as Barton Gellman surmises, their “research” may have been attempts to use NSA resources to “spy” on the ongoing FBI investigation. Regarding the staffers in question, one has close ties to Nunes and the other was specially protected by Bannon and Trump. Eventually, these staffers will be required to explain why and how they did what they did. Trump had predicted that information supporting his wiretap claim would be forthcoming and, lo and behold, a week later, Nunes announces his important new information. If this is proven to be just a scam by the White House, which all the evidence supports, it once again skates close, if not over, the line of obstruction of justice. And this time it is clear that Trump was aware what was going to happen. As the mantra always goes, it’s the cover-up, not the crime.
Any one of these three prongs, so to speak, could wound the President mortally. The shocking thing is how much information has already come out about each of these three pieces. And we are only 70 days into the Trump administration. The Palmer Report is already reporting a source that says the President is considering resigning. With his approval numbers in the 30s and low 40s and a GOP in Congress that has no fear of him anymore, Trump must be wondering how long before the GOP wants to shove him aside, especially if his approval ratings with Republicans also begins to nosedive.
If it becomes clear that the any or all of these investigations are closing in on Trump or that the GOP is looking to throw him overboard, it will be a true test for Trump and his family. The Trump brand means everything to him and his family. Will the threat of impeachment so damage the brand it will be hard to move on? On the other hand, Trump hates to lose. Would he resign under pressure but continue to maintain his innocence and how would that effect the brand? Or will he fight to the bitter end? One thing we can say for sure is that it is going to be a long year.