Some Thoughts on Having Survived Reading the Senate Intelligence Committee Report
An exhaustive examination of the relationship between Russian actors and the Trump team during the 2016 campaign, this 950-plus-page document is essentially the Mueller Report on steroids. I read it over several weeks without taking notes, so I’m surely forgetting some salient points, but for better or worse, here’s my takeaway.
It’s clear that both sides-those defending President Trump and those criticizing him-have shaded the truth to fit their preferred narrative.
On the central question that preoccupied the public during the Mueller investigation, the Trump campaign absolutely colluded-informally, not criminally-with multiple shady Russian operatives. They understood that the uppermost levels of the Russian government, meaning Vladimir Putin himself, were working to tip the scales in Trump’s favor. And they disclosed none of this to our intelligence community.
Anyone who followed events remembers Don Junior’s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and knows that he later lied about it, claiming it involved adoption policy when in fact he was hoping to receive the dirt on Hillary Clinton she had promised. But the Veselnitskaya meeting was only the best-known instance. The report includes dozens of emails and communications revealing a surprising level of coordination between Russian intermediaries and various Trump team members. Case closed on that point.
On the other hand, Democrats often tried to portray the operation as a well-organized conspiracy, when in fact it resembled a ragtag series of improvisations unfolding during a campaign moving at warp speed. Much of the activity involved individuals jockeying for personal advantage, overstating their access, and trying to make side deals whether Trump won or lost.
Paul Manafort was the most notoriously guilty. Spiraling into a financial abyss, he sought to peddle access to Trump—particularly to Konstantin Kilimnik-without apparent concern for legality or national interest. Mike Flynn was Icarus: a former military hero who had morphed into a greedy, power-hungry caricature of his former self, violating rules governing contact with foreign adversaries and then lying about it.
Trump’s greatest personal vulnerability may lie in his dealings with the comically inept Roger Stone. They clearly discussed the WikiLeaks operation in detail. I’m not a lawyer and can’t speak to Trump’s legal exposure, but he was unquestionably tracking developments closely as the plan to dump HRC’s emails unfolded.
And then there were the sideshows. Cambridge Analytica-a bit player whose actual influence fell far short of the dramatic coverage it received. The FISA missteps that turned Carter Page into a character from a John le Carré novel-a genuine miscarriage of justice. The Steele dossier? Nonsense. These things were wildly-and falsely-hyped by Trump hating members of the media.
Both sides made mistakes, and neither has fully owned up to them. Instead, partisans on left and right continue to fire at each other, pretending the blame lies exclusively with the opposition.
The deeper problem is structural: the line separating legitimate private business from matters of national security is blurry. It is perfectly legal for businessmen like Donald Trump to interact with counterparts in Russia, and we lack a framework that cleanly distinguishes private commercial discussions from potential foreign-policy entanglements. Before Trump’s candidacy, no one had seriously considered the need for such guidance.
Trump avoided most direct contact with Russian individuals (aside from the Agalarovs), giving him plausible deniability. Yet one seemingly small lie helped ignite the Mueller investigation: his insistence that he had no business interests in Russia. In fact, Michael Cohen was simultaneously attempting to secure a Trump Tower Moscow project that ultimately failed to materialize.
That lie-told by a potential president-raised reasonable concerns that other undisclosed information might exist, information that could compromise him if elected. The matter had to be investigated. Trump was, in that sense, a partial author of this entire unhappy chapter, and-in a Shakespearean twist-the actor who cast himself into purgatory.
I would respectfully suggest that we stop viewing the Trump–Russia investigation through a black-and-white lens. After reading both the Senate report and the Mueller report, my conclusion is that the political impasse we now face was created by failures on both sides. If we commit to tearing down the barrier between us, we may yet find a path out of the morass we currently inhabit.
10/8/2020
