Gunshot
sounds, smoking gun, and bullet holes, but no forensically matched
bullets...yet.
Last
year Trump very publicly called on "Russia, if you're listening" to
help him find Clinton's missing emails. Over the past week two major
stories have been reported that indicate there were more active, behind the
scenes, efforts on the part of the Trump campaign to get damaging information
on the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal and now the New York Times have reported active Trump
campaign contacts with Russian agents or intermediaries toward the goal of
obtaining negative information about Clinton. And Donald Trump Jr. has
now publicly confirmed that the campaign communicated directly with a Russia
foreign national connected with the Putin regime in the bid for that material
damaging to their election opponents. Why is this significant?
Simply, these are the first clear examples of the Trump team deliberately
"colluding" with Russians in the 2016 election.
American experts have pointed to the legal problems a presidential candidate
would face if they received “substantial assistance” from or were “aided and abetted” by a foreign national in an
effort to influence an election. Plenty of evidence has been accumulating
on the public record of this happening in “plain sight” -- including Mr.
Trump's own comments during the campaign. These have been brushed off as
rhetorical flourishes. Now there is the first evidence of the intent and
willingness to have direct Russian assistance, and the actions undertaken to
obtain it.
The Wall Street Journal story outlined the activities
of a Trump-campaign supporter, Peter W. Smith, who assembled a team dedicated
to locating Clinton's deleted emails, and who put out the word that they were
interested in what hackers could find. Smith's contact with the Trump
team was supposedly Mike Flynn. We don't know whether Flynn had direct
contact with Smith; Flynn isn't saying and Smith is now dead (note, not likely
a conspiracy, he was in his 80s). The Trump campaign has not, however, denied
Flynn's involvement, saying only that “if Flynn coordinated with [Smith] in any
way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual.” Yet,
Smith and one of his associates apparently indicated to others the
belief that Flynn was their connection to the Trump campaign. This is
all being investigated, no doubt.
Then
this weekend the New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr., along with Jared
Kushner and Paul Manafort (Trump Campaign Chair at the time), met last June
with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The latter is a person with
close ties to the Kremlin, who for years has been advocating for repeal of the
Magnitsky Act: an American law from 2012 that blacklists suspected Russian
human rights abusers. Putin was reportedly so angry at the law he
retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.
Veselnitskaya has been at the forefront of campaigning against the law ever
since, including, attempts to discredit its namesake, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a
lawyer and auditor who died in a Russian prison in 2009, in dubious and never
fully explained circumstances, after exposing one of the biggest corruption
scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule. We also learned in a second story based
on sources from within the Whitehouse itself that Trump Jr., took the
meeting because he was promised that he would receive damaging information
about Hillary Clinton.
Trump, Jr. has changed his story on this meeting at least twice (first denying
it, then saying it was about something else), but he now acknowledges it was
about getting dirt on Clinton but claims the meeting was disappointing because
“It quickly became clear that she [the Russia lawyer] had no meaningful
information.” He now says her claim to have had this material as mere
“pretext” for the meeting. And more evidence is emerging that Trump Jr.,
and others, knew that the Russians were willing to help them.
Moreover, the President’s son is admitting that the campaign arranged the
meeting solely to get information on Clinton.
Trump Jr claims in his defence that all campaigns look for dirt on their opponents
(true enough), and that he did not know of Veselnitskaya's Russian connection
(this should be treated as highly dubious - what campaign would send its top
people to such a sensitive meeting without first finding out who they were
meeting with?). Trump Jr. claims when he invited Kushner and Manafort to
join the meeting he did not know that Veselnitskaya was a Russian lawyer; nor
did any of them seem to care. That strains credulity, but if there is any truth
to it, ignorance of whom they were dealing with will likely be seen as “willful
blindness” by those investigating the Trump team -- that won't help their legal
position.
The
Times reports that they got the information from “three advisers to the
White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.” Those
sources apparently talked after the release of the first story. Advisors
to the White House are not in the business of taking highly damaging stories
and volunteering new information which makes them catastrophically more damaging.
The inference to be drawn here, it seems to me, is that the President’s allies
were trying to get ahead of something much more damaging or get a first crack
at shaping the public understanding of something much more damaging. We don’t
know yet what drove them to volunteer such highly damaging information, but
five of them did it, so it wasn’t a rogue whistleblower.
May, June and July 2016 are critical months in the Russia story. A
large amount of stuff of consequence happened just in July [see the timeline here]. There are already
suggestions, as yet unproven, that a top Trump associate was offered caches of
email in the months or weeks just prior to the first Wikileaks release on
July 22nd, 2016. This story sounds quite similar, or at least the opening
gambit to such an offer. We have a growing number of stories like
these, each seemingly damning but which we are told are mere coincidences and
misunderstandings with no connection to any of the other stories. As the
coincidences pile up, the credibility of claims they are just unconnected
coincidences wears thinner and thinner.
All this new information adds considerably to the potential criminal violation
of the federal law that prohibits “substantial assistance” to foreign nationals
seeking to influence a federal election. Donald Trump can’t very well
sustain his position that in calling for the Russians to find the missing
email, he was merely joking. His campaign was working behind
closed doors to fulfill the objective that the candidate was “jokingly”
about. If confirmed and further developed in the Mueller investigation,
these facts also bolster the campaign’s exposure to “aiding and abetting” liability for a campaign finance
violation.
A question clearly raised by the new information is whether the Trump
campaign’s public and private communications about the hacked emails
constituted a request or suggestion that funds be spent to acquire the stolen
emails. The candidate certainly requested this assistance in his public
remarks. Now, in a meeting scheduled with a Russian national with ties to the
Putin regime, the campaign made clear that it was actively interested in having
this kind of information. Press reporting suggests that a) the campaign
was interested in the emails, because the candidate had said so, and supporters
like Smith was engaged in a concerted effort to find them; and b) both the campaign
and Smith were dealing with Russian nationals in the search for negative
information on Clinton.
It would hardly be unreasonable for the Russians to infer that the campaign was
very much in the market for this information. By suggesting that she had
such information, Veselnitskaya was able obtain an audience with intimate
associates of the candidate. The Russians could not mistake the
intensity of the campaign’s interest. The very scheduling of the
meeting–and the status of the attendees–was sufficient to get the campaign’s
point across about what it highly valued and was prepared to take from a
foreign source. And if they had any doubt, it would have been resolved by
the President’s public call, six weeks later, for the
Russians, “if you’re listening,” to find the emails.
We still don't have the direct connections necessary to judge if Trump and his
campaign committed campaign finance violations in soliciting and receiving
support from Russia, and assisting the Russians in their plan to influence the
2016 presidential election. But there is now little doubt that there is such a
case to be investigated.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that Mr. Trump and his campaign were
open to whatever help the Russians would provide: they made that clear to the
Russians, and took specific actions to invite and receive this foreign national
assistance. In response to the latest disclosure of Russian contacts, the
campaign’s defense seems to be that it never checked whether the people from
whom they were soliciting stolen emails and other negative information were
Russians, much less connected to the Kremlin. That may beggar belief;
some may even find the claim perversely amusing. But under campaign
finance law, it is no joke, its a crime.
BUT, just as we seem to be getting somewhere...
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow has raised the alarm that credible news outlets may
be getting sent fake documents on the Russia investigation from sources trying
to scuttle media credibility on the issue. After being sent doctored “Top
Secret” NSA documents claiming coordination between a named member of the Trump
campaign and Russia, Maddow noted a possible link to recent sourcing problems
with stories at CNN and Vice both led to their retraction and in one
instance the resignation of several journalists.
Clearly there will be more smoke ahead.
