Passive collusion
“Previously, the FBI had opened an investigation of Flynn based on his relationship with the Russian government.”
– The Mueller Report
First of all, I want to apologize for taking so long to publish this. I’m not going to lie: this material is a nightmare. I’ve been holding out for reasons I hope will become clear soon.
A few notes about how Russiagate has evolved as a news story in the last weeks:
Humorously, Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple is publishing a two-part series about the performance of the press in covering Russiagate. In a shocker, he’s not finding problems with the coverage.
“Hindsight makes it easy to trash the journalistic frenzy to plumb collusion,” he says. Noting that investigators didn’t find evidence of a plot, he adds, “the end result, however, doesn’t vacate the righteousness of the quest.”
There was a lot of “smoke in the collusion room,” he says, going on to quote New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt:
“Not only was there a lot of curious behavior, but on top of that, they lied about it over and over and over again. . . . There was no way we were going to sit back and not go after that story as hard as we could.”
There are a lot of things that are infuriating about this, but a big one is that even hindsight hasn’t slackened the frenzy at all – if anything, it’s been redoubled.
The speed with which Russiagate hype morphs is and has been dizzying. Two months after Special Counsel Robert Mueller finished his work, the public is roughly back to where it was for most of the prior two years: convinced of a conspiracy they believe exists, but is merely not proven (or proven, but not to a level sufficient for prosecution).
Even immediately after the release of the Mueller report, with its detailed, station-to-station review of each of the potential “Russian government links to and contact with the Trump campaign” – none of which were found to have been related either to each other or to a Russian election interference plot – the papers were back to publishing “connect the dots” charts, urging the public to read between Mueller’s lines.
The New York Times first published its grand “connect the dots” graphic in January, 2019. After the Mueller report was published, ostensibly blowing up the conspiracy angle, the paper didn’t terminate the project. Instead, it expanded and updated its Manchurian Candidate-style infidel-counting exercise, under a new headline: “Mueller Report Shows Depth of Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russians.”
The updated version counted 18 card-carrying Trump associates (it was 17 originally) who along with Trump had at least “140 contacts with Russian nationals and Wikileaks, or their intermediaries.”
Many features like this have been quietly updated over time to fit new developments, in what is an interesting and innovative (let’s call it that) new form of factually-agile publishing. The original Times chart contained a line about Michael Cohen: “His partner in the effort was Felix Sater, a Trump business associate with deep contacts in Russia.”
That line is yanked from the current version, presumably because Sater – who is described throughout the Mueller report promising an ability to set up meetings with the likes of Putin – has never been shown to actually have “deep contacts” in Russia.
In fact, according to Mueller, Cohen ultimately bailed on the Trump Tower project precisely because he started to realize Sater was full of it and and became “concerned that Russian officials were not actually involved” in any of the discussions he thought he’d been having.
Absent some indication that its pile of dots has ever been proven to mean anything, the inanity of this as a journalistic exercise is mind-boggling. Here are some of the things the Times still counts as showing a “depth” of connections with Russia:
— Hope Hicks, Trump’s former communications chief, “received an email on behalf of the editor-in-chief of a Russian internet newspaper asking for an interview with Donald Trump.”
— Hicks also “received an email from an official at the Russian embassy” containing Putin’s formal congratulations after the election. The paper made sure to note the email was subject-lined, “Message from Putin.”
— Former Trump aide Michael Caputo was “contacted by a Russian business associate.” This is a reference to Sergei Petrushin, a rock music producer and club owner who’s been Caputo’s longtime partner in a PR firm, Zeppelin Communications; the two have known each other for decades.
— In the same dot, the Times went on to note Petrushin “said” he wanted to put the campaign in touch with “a Russian who had dirt on Hillary Clinton.” This makes it sound like a sneaky Russian-to-Russian approach of Caputo. Actually, the second “Russian,” Henry Greenberg, is a 17-year FBI informant who bumrushed Petrushin at a Miami studio opening with a phony offer of PR work, then asked to be put in touch with Caputo. This story in particular stinks to hell (much more on it later).
— Trump was “invited by a Russian deputy Prime Minister to attend a forum in St. Petersburg.”
— In a separate dot: “Trump was ‘honored to be asked’ to participate in the forum, but would ‘have to decline,’ according to an email from [Trump’s] personal assistant.” (So the issue here is, what – being “honored” by the invite?).
— Corey Lewandowski was “forwarded an email inviting Trump to attend a forum in St. Petersburg.”
Amazing how fast an email chain about one thing can turn into multiple “dots.” This goes on throughout. The approach of Trump aide George Papadopoulos by a Maltese professor claiming (but never proven) to have Russian ties produces another six or seven dots on the chart. It’s nuts.
Conceptually, the Russia story of course is at least somewhat different now. Just after the release of the Mueller report, the Times ran a piece called “Prodded by Putin, Russians Sought Back Channels to Trump Through the Business World.” This article led with a scene involving Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, sending a text to a “Lebanese-American friend with ties to the Trump campaign.” Dmitriev, it seems, was instructed by Putin to “come up with a plan for ‘reconciliation’ between the United States and Russia.”
The piece went on (emphasis mine):
The outreach by Mr. Dmitriev, according to the special counsel’s report, was part of a broad, makeshift effort by the Kremlin to establish ties to Mr. Trump that began early in the campaign and shifted into high gear after Mr. Trump’s victory… Especially after the election, they led to a conflation of diplomatic and financial interests that was a stark departure from the carefully calibrated contacts typically managed by an incoming administration…
The paper could have told this tale differently. Dmitriev’s post-electoral search for a lane to the Trump transition, after all, underscored Mueller’s conclusion about how the Russian government “appeared not to have preexisting contacts” with the Trump campaign. This kind of thing should make it clear that those years of speculation about a pre-election conspiracy were always absurd.
Instead, while the paper glumly noted Mueller did not find evidence of such a plot, it moved straight to the new line: Putin “vigorously” sought “points of contact” throughout, while “people on the American side” were “willing to participate to one degree or another in discussions that touched on topics as varied as Mr. Trump’s desire to build a Moscow hotel to United States policy toward Ukraine.”
This mouthful placed us in the realm of mind-crime: Putin wanted to collude and some quantity of Trump people were willing to “participate in discussions” about a variety of things. It can’t be stressed enough how far this is from the original theories of direct contact with Russian intelligence that dominated news for years.
The new theory was best articulated by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – one of the progenitors of the years-long media furor – shortly after the release of the Mueller report. He told Anderson Cooper that “if there wasn’t active collusion proven, then I think what we have here is a case of passive collusion.”
Embracing “passive collusion” as anything other than nonsense means taking a ball-peen hammer to the English language. If conspiracy comes from the Latin for “breathing together,” and collusion is derived from “playing together,” “passive collusion” is basically “playing together separately.” It’s a logical absurdity, a thing straight out of Orwell.
Still, it’s at least a slight improvement over the previous theory. We could have saved years, if those who knew how separate the together-playing was, had spoken up to bring us to this point earlier.
Clapper – who surely knew the origins of this investigation – repeatedly tried over the last few years to hint to news outlets that the collusion case might be something less than explicit. He was forever speaking out of both sides of his mouth, but news outlets only listened to the side it liked.
In response to questions about how much collusion he personally saw, he often said things like “there was no evidence that rose to that level.” He would always add a “but...” clause about how there could be more, and headlines ended up stressing these disclaimers, i.e., “James Clapper on collusion between Russia, Trump aides: there could be evidence.”
This is what people like Temple and Schmidt ignore. The press issue all along has been over-interpretation, ignoring dispositive details, and failure to pursue alternative explanations, like for instance that they’d been hoodwinked or intentionally manipulated (this assumes reporters weren’t willingly swallowing overheated information).
This went on for years when “active collusion” was still a theory, and it’s about to happen again with “passive collusion.” We’ll have a desperate fight now over the missing Mueller Sea Scrolls, and their “underlying evidence,” which everyone is convinced contains the belated proof. It’s a fight that for the ten thousandth time in the last three years has plunged us into a “constitutional crisis.”
Even the issue that should have bothered the press the most all along – the fact that so many exposes had to be walked back or retracted – is being washed away in fresh legends, like the oft-repeated refrain: “The leaks all came from the Trump side.”
This has become an excuse for not wondering about the obvious problem of sources leaking clearly bogus or disingenuous stories, a phenomenon that should have inspired a “quest” for explanations in the same way the “curious behavior” of Trump campaign figures did.
It is absolutely true that a lot of anonymously-sourced stories in the last three years came from the Trump White House. Two genres in particular often had Trumpians lurking in the text: news about progress of the Mueller probe, and palace-intrigue stories about panic and impropriety in the White House.
In the former case, leaks came from witnesses or targets trying to get ahead of bad news. In the latter, White House figures dialed up the press to kneecap rivals, protect themselves from scandal, or just because they were not that bright and had a fetish for verbal joy-riding on-the-record (read: Scaramucci, Anthony).
But the most damaging, narrative-driving Russia stories of the last three years, the ones that cost high-level jobs and put others under investigation, were not When a Stranger Calls-type horrors coming from inside the house. Some were clear disinformation.
General Michael Flynn was Exhibit A. Three big stories about him in the last years were at least somewhat problematic – in some cases clear provocations.
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