Russiagate

Mueller crushed at least a dozen other major, narrative-driving “bombshell” stories, often with single sentences. Take the frenzy over Jeff Sessions having discussions with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak at the Republican convention. Remember how much oxygen that story took up? How long the freakouts persisted?

Sessions insisted his meeting with Kislyak had been part of his normal duties as a Senator, but of course no one believed this. There were no innocent reasons to be contacting a Russian during these years. A cigar was never just a cigar. Julia Ioffe of the Atlantic wrote a massive piece scoffing at the Sessions excuse called “Why Did Jeff Sessions Really Meet With Sergei Kislyak?” She insisted “an examination of Sessions’ activities in 2016” called his protestations “into question.”

After all, what explanation could there be for contacting “spymaster” Sergei Kislyak? So many stories (without real evidence) described Kislyak as a hub in a conspiratorial wheel that they’re almost impossible to count. “Who is Sergei Kislyak?” asked Esquire, in a typical treatment. “And what does he know?”

How about nothing? Mueller says the Sessions meeting with Kislyak didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the Presidential campaign.” So much for all those stories. The report added Kislyak’s contacts with Trump campaign officials both at an April 16, 2016 Trump speech and at the Republican convention were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” 

How about the “Trump Pushed a Pro-Russia RNC Platform on Ukraine” story? 

The premise there was the Trump campaign intervening for Russia at Trump’s convention, preventing the Republicans from green-lighting a call to arm Ukraine. This tale was often used to buttress the quid pro quo theory.

“The hacked documents would be in exchange for a Trump Administration policy that de-emphasizes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and instead focuses on criticizing NATO countries for not paying their fair share,” is how Russiagate MC Schiff put it in a House hearing, gravely noting both Manafort and Carter Page were at the convention.

“The same month that Trump denied Putin’s role in Ukraine, his team weakened the party platform on Ukraine,” Democratic congressman Andre Carson of Indiana added.

I looked into this story two years ago, when Byron York of the Washington Examiner did a piece insisting a) the amendment proposing “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine would have been killed in committee anyway, and b) the final Trump-approved language on Ukraine was actually tougher, not weaker, than the original Republican proposal. 

I was not a fan of Byron York’s. We clashed in some ugly ways over financial crisis issues. But his story proved right. 

The delegate who proposed the amendment, a kindly octogenarian named Diana Denman from the San Antonio area, explained. Back in the eighties, Mrs. Denman served in the Reagan Administration in a number of capacities, including as co-chair of the Peace Corps Advisory Council.

This whole drama was started not because spies whispered in Trump’s ear to rewrite policy to please Russia, but because Mrs. Denman was troubled by an old memory. Ukrainians, it turned out, reminded her of the Contras. She recalled with sadness the rifles the Contras had weren’t very good. “I wondered if they’d even shoot,” she told me. 

For this reason, she proposed a paragraph in the platform that would have called for “maintaining (and, if warranted, increasing) sanctions” on Russia and sending “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. 

Even though Denman had some support, members of the “America Resurgent” National Security Subcommittee confirmed the “weapons” line would not in any case have passed the committee, which essentially voted it down twice.

As one committee member said, the York story was “pretty close to the upshot of what happened, as well as what did and did not matter.” The final passage called for sanctions and “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine.” Both additions made the Ukraine resolution more aggressive than the original GOP text, which called only for “appropriate measures” and “resolve.”

The final RNC platform text was also, incidentally, tougher on Russia than the Democratic platform, which didn’t call for either sanctions or arms for Ukraine. Most MSNBC viewers would be surprised to learn the Democratic platform that year included this passage:

We will make it clear to Putin that we are prepared to cooperate with him when it is in our interest… but we will not hesitate to stand up to Russian aggression.

This was a classic case of blue-state media not following up legit red-state reporting (of course the converse is just as often true, speaking to a major structural flaw in the business). York’s story ended up being confirmed by Mueller, who wrote: “The investigation did not establish that one Campaign official’s efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.”

The absence in the report of any indication Paul Manafort interacted with Julian Assange seems to confirm what everyone except the editor of the Guardian already knows: that Luke Harding’s tale of a secret meeting between the two from November 27 of last year was a hoax.

Before the election, Slate published “Was a Trump server communicating with Russia?” which described ostensibly suspicious interaction between a computer server for Alfa-Bank in Russia and a server registered to the Trump campaign. Remember Clinton campaign adviser Jake Sullivan’s comment after that piece came out? “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia,” he wrote.  

Mueller’s report says nothing about this server, but it does say Alfa-Bank chief Pyotr Aven tried, and failed, to make contact with the Trump campaign during the transition, through Center for the National Interest board member Richard Burt. He supposedly had a line to Jared Kushner through CNI head Dmitri Simes. 

So either the infamous server was indeed a secret hotline and Aven was just pretending to scrounge for a meeting the way everyone else would – by going through his phone book in search of someone with connections – or the server story was meaningless. 

The most important passage on the collusion front was one noted by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

The Office identified multiple contacts—“links,” in the words of the Appointment Order—between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government… The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future. Based on the available information, the investigation did not establish such coordination.

This passage means that all those sprawling org charts about Trump’s Russia connections – drawn in feverish fashion, as if to emulate movie representations of mafia hierarchies or Wire-style drug crews – turned out to be gratuitous exercises in connecting actually unrelated dots. 

In any other situation, implying people who have no relation to one another beyond nationality are conspirators would be considered insane and racist, but it was done with regularity during this mania. As my friend and former Moscow Times editor Matt Bivens noted, just being Russian went a long way to getting you in the papers in these years. 

A Soviet émigré named Yuri Vanetik became the subject of multiple McClatchy piecesapparently because he once took a selfie with Paul Manafort. In the Wall Street Journal, Vanetik described how McClatchy, without alleging any wrongdoing, made hay of the fact that he had an LLC. “LLCs sometimes [are] used for a wide array of nefarious purposes,” McClatchy wrote, “including tax evasion and money laundering, because they can hide their true ownership.” There are over two million LLCs in the United States. 

The Washington Post published “Trump Campaign’s Russia Ties: Who’s Involved,” which included a clickable interactive chart. It showed a slew of Trumpsters seemingly connected to a slew of Russians. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, for instance, was shown linked to Putin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. 

The genesis of this “connection” involved Cohen’s failed efforts to get Russian backing for the infamous Trump Tower deal he and buddy Felix Sater cooked up in 2015–2016. From Mueller, we know Cohen literally had to cold-call the Kremlin in search of official support in this episode. Moreover, in a detail that speaks to the total absurdity of this conspiracy tale, Cohen’s efforts to cold-mail Peskov failed at first because he mis-typed the address! From the report:

Cohen erroneously used the email address “Pr_peskova@prpress.gof.ru” instead of “Pr_peskova@prpress.gov.ru,” so the email apparently did not go through…

It did eventually arrive, but got no reply. Undeterred, the Post described this mis-sent, not-followed-up-upon email as follows:

The email marked the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.

In another ludicrous detail, Cohen appears to have blown off an offer of help with the Tower deal from Dmitry Klokov, a former press chief to a Russian Energy Minister, after Googling him and confusing him with an Olympic weightlifter of the same name. 

Buzzfeed then made the same mistake in its reporting, relying upon “four people familiar with the matter” (familiarity turned out to be a fluid concept in Russiagate), telling of a “Russian athlete who offered to introduce Donald Trump to Putin.”

In numerous re-reports of this affair by other outlets, Klokov the not-weightlifter was often simply described as “Russia,” as in “Trump campaign was offered political synergy by Russia.”

Reading the report, it’s clear that while the not-weightlifter was in fact offering to set up a meeting with a “person of interest” (Putin, according to Mueller, although it’s not clear if Klokov actually had such connections or was yet another in a sea of BS artists in this story), Cohen’s response was guarded.

He told Klokov any such meeting, involving Cohen or Trump, would have to be “in conjunction with the development and an official visit.” In other words, he insisted on any meeting not being in secret. This detail is at odds with the perception of a Trump campaign determined to seek out secret pathways to Putin.

Google that “In conjunction with” email and you’ll find two hits, both from the last week. Search for “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA” or “we will get Donald elected,” and you’ll find thousands. It’s amazing what emails were leaked, which ones were not, and which ones reporters chose to make into news. 

The Trump Tower deal was a legit story, on the surface. It absolutely suggested the possibility of corruption. It was easy to imagine Donald Trump changing a policy take or two in exchange for a lucrative real estate deal. 

If there was even a grain of truth to such a narrative, it would be easy to understand why Adam Schiff might call this “A different form of collusion.” The Tower story also offered an at least distantly realistic possibility of blackmail, as Trump in early 2016 was publicly claiming not to have business dealings in Russia when he technically still did (or thought he did). As Schiff noted again, “The Russians knew it wasn’t true,” and could have used this against him, although this assumes Trump would know to be embarrassed by the revelation.

But the Mueller report raises questions as to whether there even were any Russians in this story by then. 

The project seems to have begun with Michael Cohen freelancing in search of a buck. He then bailed the instant it became clear his would-be partner, Felix Sater, wasn’t delivering on big talk or doing any of his promised heavy lifting on the connections side.

It seems Sater was the driver of the Tower deal throughout. As noted by Johnny Dwyer of The Intercept (and no one else in blue-state media, to date), Mueller for some reason neglected in the report to note the “New York-based real estate advisor” Sater is one of a number of known federal informants dotting this peculiar narrative. Sater’s 1998 federal cooperation agreement was even signed by one of Mueller’s senior prosecutors, Andrew Weissman. 

It was Sater who authored the amazing headline-grabbing emails of the “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA” and “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in” variety. He’s also the one who convinced Cohen to rekindle interest in the deal in the spring of 2016, months after Cohen lost interest, promising him a personal meeting with Putin if he would attend the St. Petersburg Forum (“Russia’s Davos,” Sater chirped). 

Cohen at first agreed (“Works for me,” he wrote), but later withdrew again, as the report notes:

Cohen was concerned that Russian officials were not actually involved or were not interested in meeting with him (as Sater had alleged) and so he decided not to go to the Forum.

Sater invoked to Cohen the names of both Putin and Peskov, but neither they nor any other Russian official actually show up in this whole timeline, apart from Peskov confirming he ignored Cohen’s email.

Cohen was ultimately convicted criminally for lying about the deal ending in January, and the press was replete with tales of sinister “Trump–Moscow” negotiations. This was despite the fact that there might not have been much “Moscow” in this deal (the truth seems more like “Sater–Cohen negotiations”). 

As with the tale of George Papadopoulos, a sorry castoff from the Ben Carson campaign who seemingly within minutes of joining the Trump campaign was bumrushed with unsolicited gossip by a Maltese professor and a woman Papadopoulos came to think was Vladimir Putin’s niece (Putin doesn’t have a niece), it’s never established – not even in the Mueller report – where the official Russian connection is. Mueller refers in the Papadopoulos sections to “Russian dirt” and “Russia-related communications,” but it’s not asserted, anywhere, that any of these people Papadopoulos met were actually Russian officials. All that’s established is Papadopoulos thought they were.  

The real significance of Mueller failing to find “coordination or conspiracy” in any of the countless “links” between Trump and Russians or perhaps-Russians is that it renders ridiculous years of news stories searching for meaning in these connections.

In March of 2017, for instance, when James Comey testified the FBI had been investigating whether there was “coordination between people associated with the Trump campaign and the Russians,” the entire news business went insane. A Guardianreport was typical:

…a remarkable and unprecedented threshold in US political history, putting beyond doubt that a sitting’s president’s entourage was under investigation for possibly conniving with a foreign adversary to put that president in power.

Of course, Mueller has now determined there was no conspiracy or coordination, which again raises questions we should have been asking at the time, like: what, exactly, was the basis for this “unprecedented” probe? What did they have? 

There were countless stories of this type, from the manufactured leak of the Steele report, to the arrest of Papadopoulos, to news that Mueller had impaneled a grand jury (among other things to look at, as CNN put it, possible coordination with “Russian spy agencies”) to the “pre-dawn raid” at the home of Manafort, to the indictments of Manafort and Rick Gates, to the search warrant served on Cohen, to the constant speculations about “treason.” These headlines look a lot different now that Mueller failed to find an underlying conspiracy. 

Even the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya looks like a joke in the report. Veselnitskaya had lobbied politicians in Washington before, always with the same pitch, promising to help end Russia’s insidious adoption ban in exchange for loosening Magnitsky Act sanctions that directly affected her scummy client firm Prevezon, whose assets were frozen because of them. Mueller reports: Veselnitskaya never delivered anything like dirt on Hillary Clinton, and was so personally annoying, Jared Kushner tried to beg out of the meeting three times in less than 20 minutes, eventually leaving early:

Kushner sent an iMessage to Manafort stating “waste of time,” followed immediately by two separate emails to assistants at Kushner Companies with requests that they call him to give him an excuse to leave…

The problem with the way all of these stories were reported was that the possibility of Trump not being guilty, or of any explanation that fell short of damning conspiracy, was simply not investigated. The typical method of covering that base involved including a Trump denial, and before long even Trump’s denials were reported almost as confirmations of wrongdoing, as in “Trump slams ‘fake dossier’ despite some verified claims.”

Because Trump is a gasbag and a reflexive liar prone to denouncing even true things as “fake news,” like for instance those reports about his order to Don McGahn, most blue-state audiences never saw anything like a sober examination of alternative explanations for this story.

But reporters should have been wondering all along, not for Trump’s sake but their own, if the allegations against Trump were true. Anyone paying attention would have seen the collusion case was being built via sleight of hand, which ought to have scared the press.

The illusion was built in part by people like Schiff claiming to have “more than circumstantial” evidence of a scandal “beyond Watergate” in size. There were also reams of unverifiable tales whispered, many of them scandalous (multiple reporters in England and the U.S. were falsely told one married senior Trump official had an affair with a Russian, for instance). Not all of these tales got into print, but information was delivered in big enough quantities that reporters soon enough started buying pigs in pokes. A typical construction came in a March 2017 CNN story:

The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN.

Suspected… possibly… these words allowed anonymous “US officials” to make public assertions that punched above their evidence. Reporters let them do it over and over, without demanding they disclose their “information,” and why it “indicates” something so serious. 

Another trick was to tell reporters about actions taken by politicians and law enforcement that seemed to bolster the Trump conspiracy story – the opening of investigations, whispers about fears of blackmail, etc. – when in fact all they did was tell a story about the intramural communications or actions of security officials. An example was “Report: Intelligence Officials Withhold Information From Trump” in The Hill in February 2017. 

This piece was surely accurate in the sense that information probably was withheld from the President, but it allowed unnamed officials to publicly communicate concerns about “trustworthiness,” again without disclosing actual evidence of compromise.

The other major trick of this sort was the release of the Steele report, which got out as a story about serious officials passing around what turned out to be a less-than-serious document. The Steele report provided audiences with a clear picture of conspiracy without ever passing a fact-check, either at a news organization or, so far as we know, in any government agency. Should it have been examined more aggressively?

The Times just released “Mueller Report Likely To Draw More Scrutiny” in the wake of the Mueller findings. Citing still more anonymous sources – people “familiar with Mr. Steele’s work” – the paper now reports, “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.” 

Where were those sources back then? Why was the Times not asking? Same with Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” dossier “needs to be investigated.” Did he not wonder before?

The idea that the security sources and politicians would knowingly push an evidence-free narrative was outlandish to consider, but so was the idea that the FSB or Putin would involve backstabbing blabbermouth Donald Trump in so elaborate a conspiracy. This is why I worried this story was a minefield at the start. 

We were being asked to accept a lot on faith, and if the Trump conspiracy story wasn’t true, there were few alternative explanations that were not equally bizarre and unlikely. The only safe thing to do was to proceed with extreme caution and investigate both Trump and his accusers simultaneously, and that didn’t happen.

This is why it’s so bizarre that press figures are now claiming the Mueller report proves reporters got the story “mostly right” because they correctly reported some factual things, like that Trump did indeed ask Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn. 

Well, congratulations. Given that you missed the overarching fact that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, not screwing up lesser developments leaked directly to you, like the McGahn business, is not exactly reassuring. It’s like painting a portrait and bragging about getting a freckle right, when you forgot to paint the giant tree growing out of the subject’s head. 

Failure to investigate in two directions, to paint the whole picture, led to the crazy, one-sided dot-connecting that dominated this affair. It became genuine conspiracy theory.

The similarities between QAnon and Russiagate are obvious. QAnon, of course, is far more ridiculous, uniting basically every conspiracy on earth, from the Knights Templar to Black Nobility to Trauma Based Mind Control to the JFK Assassination to Satanism and “Agenda 21” to Peak Oil and a hundred other things. Still, both cults feature religious worship of an all-knowing investigator (Q in QAnon, Mueller in Russiagate) who is triumphing in secret over an ever-expanding cast of evildoers.

Both stories also feature incredibly zany, elaborate charts. Nothing can beat “The QAnon Ultimate Conspiracy Chart,” but New York magazine’s “crazy quilt of connections” accompanying Jon Chait’s infamous PRUMP TUTIN cover story comes close. 

Even the language the groups use is similar. It was startling to watch the Washington Post, for instance, fail to notice that it laughed at “deranged” conservatives for waiting on “bread crumbs” from Q even as they published deadpan stories like Rubin’s “More bread crumbs for Mueller to follow.” 

Axios reporter Garrett Graff wrote a piece called “Mueller’s breadcrumbs suggest he has the goods” that was circulated widely and stirred the pot for CNN viewers, too. “You also talk about the clues, that Mueller sprinkled all these bread crumbs in his previous court filings,” asked Brooke Baldwin. “Yes,” said Graff gravely, recalling “that famous bread crumb” where:

After Donald trump made his ‘Russia, if you’re listening comment’ on the campaign trail, that actually the Russian GRU military intelligence hackers returned to their office that night to target Hillary Clinton’s server for the first time…

“Myself and many others were drawn to that comment,” he went on, “thinking that Mueller was sort of casting some sort of future clue there. And, again, we’re sort of left with this dangling thread, not really understanding what the significance was of why Bob Mueller bothered to call this out…”

It turns out there was no significance. The “Russia, if you’re listening” episode is mentioned in the Mueller report, but apart from noting Mueller asked about it, and Trump answered he made that comment “in jest and sarcastically, as was apparent to any objective observer,” there’s nothing there.

Some thought Trump’s “are you listening” word-vomiting would be charged as a crime, an attempt to illegally solicit “anything of value” from a foreign national during an election. More than one pundit sincerely believed Mueller was signaling his intent to file that charge when he mentioned it in his GRU indictment. But Mueller, in his report, dumped on those fantasies, too. 

This is all Russiagate ever was, at least on the collusion side: Journalist QAnon, a religious fantasy in which all the wrongs of the world – especially the mistaken election of an illegitimate president – were secretly being put right, behind the scenes, by God’s very own prosecutor. 

One last note on the obstruction question. Given what we know now, it’s actually a surprise Trump didn’t lash out more. Trump probably should have have fired all four of Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and NSA chief Mike Rogers the moment they pulled that cheap power play of handing over the bogus Steele report and promising to keep it “close-held.” Even Comey admitted he was concerned this looked like “an effort to pull a J. Edgar Hoover” on Trump, probably because it was just that. A more experienced politician would have seen through this caper and told them all to clear out their desks.

Comey especially comes out of this report looking bad. At the infamous dinner in which Trump tells him “I need loyalty,” Comey piously replies, “You will always get honesty from me.” Yet in that same meal, when Trump asked Comey if he could investigate the Steele allegations to “prove they were false,” Comey answers that he doesn’t want to (as Mueller put it) “create a narrative that the FBI was investigating him personally, which was incorrect.” Yet the FBI had been investigating Trump already, or at least his campaign, as Comey would make clear in public testimony just a few months later. The whole business is incredibly sordid, and it’s appropriate that there should be an investigation into what happened here, just as even those of us who were skeptical on the collusion front still called for an investigation at the outset of that scandal. 

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It’s been suggested, by David Corn at Mother Jones, that there’s an easy way to smoke out whether a critic of Russiagate is acting in “bad faith.” All you have to do, he says, is ask if the critic acknowledges that a) Russia interfered in the election, and b) the Trump campaign “ran interference” for Russia after being briefed about its culpability. 

So my good-faith test supposedly is, “Do you accept these basic facts, and acknowledge the profound seriousness of each one?”

I guess I flunk this test. I don’t particularly care about the Russian interference story, at least not more than any other national security issue. I don’t wake up worrying about shipping lanes or terrorists, either. I may also have a high threshold for understanding “foreign interference,” having lived in Moscow in 1996 when American advisors literally had an office in the Kremlin and bragged about helping Yeltsin to victory on the cover of Time after the election (“Yanks to the Rescue!” July, 1996). That experience might also make it harder for me to take Russia seriously as a geopolitical adversary. 

As for Trump “running interference” for Russia, it seems a dubious proposition to declare that absolutely given the long list of Trump policies hostile to Russian interests, from pressure on Europe to stop buying Russian national gas (an issue even more important to Russia than the Magnitsky sanctions) to the pursuit of regime change against Putin ally Nicholas Maduro. To fully understand this story we’d also need to ask a lot of other questions. What other forms of foreign influence go on? Apart from Russia, do countries like Saudi Arabia, Israel, the U.A.E. and China also interfere in elections, with money and lobbying as well as through political ads and cyber interference? 

Also, how much meddling do we do ourselves? From talking to people like Alex Gibney, maker of the outstanding Zero Days documentary about the StuxNet virus, it appears the major industrialized countries of the world are in a constant state of undeclared war, with hackers routinely violating each others’ infrastructure. I’m certainly concerned about this and agree with the many people who think we need to create clear rules of engagement on this front, so we don’t have to rely on Thomas Friedman to tell us what is and isn’t an act of war, or a “9/11-scale event.” In the context of all of this, was Russian behavior in 2016 unusual compared to other years, other countries, us? 

Even if you stipulate the answer to that question is yes, it doesn’t mean it was ever right to see a conspiracy that wasn’t there. People rely on us to be straight with them about these things, and we weren’t.

The first thing I ever said about Russiagate was we needed to sort out if we were dealing with just a Russian interference issue, or an interference issue that involved the Trump campaign’s active cooperation, because the second story was an order of magnitude more serious than the first. Most of the press seemed uninterested in working that out, and freely conflated the narratives for years, which was mystifying, irresponsible, and (it turns out) a huge mistake. The job is to figure out what happened, not determine the relative badness of Donald Trump. “It reflects really badly on Trump either way,” is a politician’s take, not an answer that should satisfy the curiosity of any journalist. People don’t need reporters to be good team players. They need us to be right, and we weren’t right about this.