Some thoughts on Trump/Russia occasioned by the release of the Durham report, which found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation got ahead of itself in launching a full-scale probe of allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia, that it relied too much on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” and that partisan hostility played a determinative role in investigators’ decisions.
Sounds about right. Yet I still don’t know what to think of Trump/Russia and am not satisfied we’ll ever fully understand it.
Certain aspects of the overall Trump story fed the Trump/Russia saga. One is that from the day Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, June 16, 2015, there was a distance, which proved unbridgeable, between elite knowledge of Mr. Trump and normal American knowledge of him. At the time he announced, he had been a New York character for 40 years. We knew him. He was part of our sideshow—the tuxedo-clad hustler plagued by scandals and accusations of shady business deals. He called reporters using fake names with fake voices to plant fake items.
New York, the center of the nation’s media, was, in 2015 as now, full of people in leadership positions in newspapers and networks who’d been watching him for four decades. They came at his candidacy with an unusual level of intimacy; they knew pretty much everything.
But in normal America, which hadn’t spent 40 years reading about him and literally walking by him on the sidewalk, he was the star of “The Apprentice”—the strong, decisive man at the boardroom table. They’d known him that way for a dozen years. He’d written some books. He was a regular guest on “Fox and Friends” with refreshingly heterodox views. They had a completely different sense of who he was.
People high up in government agencies in Washington would have started with a view of Mr. Trump closer to New York’s than normal America’s.
Another aspect that contributed to Trump/Russia is that Mr. Trump was such a shock to the system of experienced people in positions of authority in the professions, very much including government—he was so impossible to imagine as president, such an obviously bad man and thus a threat to our country—that otherwise temperate and responsible people found themselves willing to believe anything about him, and, in the case of the FBI, willing to pursue any probe even when the evidence was thin or nonexistent. They experienced themselves as motivated by patriotism: They were protecting the country. They wound up damaging the reputation of the great institution of which they were part.
This is what they forgot: Even a bad man can get railroaded.
A signal moment in the mess was the release of the famous Steele Dossier, the allegations contained in a report by a former British spy named Christopher Steele, first published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. The dossier claimed that Mr. Trump, in past Russian travels, had been surveilled by Russian intelligence, whose agencies exploited his “personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable ‘kompromat’ (compromising material) on him.” According to “Source D,” “TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential Suite of the Ritz Carlton hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (who he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept” by engaging in perverted acts. The hotel was known to be under FSB control, “with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.” The FSB had documented enough of his “unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years . . . to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.”
Anything is possible, but the dossier read like the breathless work of a 10th-grader who’d just read a spy thriller. It was puerile, half literate—the hissy “he hates Obama” offered as a revelation when anyone who watched television knew that; the prissily careful definition-for-dunces of “kompromat;” the information that spies might use microphones and cameras, the sourcing—the Ritz story was supposedly “confirmed by Source E.”
This wasn’t a first-class intelligence product. It wasn’t even second-class. It sounded like a former spy out of a job and making things up for money. And of course it turned out the whole thing came from a Hillary Clinton operative as part of an operation funded by the Clinton campaign. It was merely a Watergate-type dirty trick.
But then, in July 2018, came a swerve in the opposite direction. The famous Helsinki news conference between President Trump and Vladimir Putin was shocking in a very different way.
By then, Russian attempts to disrupt and interfere in the 2016 election were clear. In the news conference following the meeting of the two presidents, Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press stood with a question for Mr. Trump, noting that every U.S. intelligence agency had concluded that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Mr. Putin had just denied it. “My first question to you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him never to do it again?”
Mr. Trump took that moment to denounce the FBI, implying the bureau was incompetent or corrupt. He then said he had been told by the director of national intelligence Dan Coats, that Russia had interfered. But Mr. Putin denied it: “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be. . . . I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Putin for cooperating with the investigation. “I have confidence in both parties.” (Mr. Trump later said he misspoke and meant to say he didn’t say “why it wouldn’t be.”)
It was chilling: An American president, on foreign soil, was denigrating America’s own intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, undermining his own country, and in front of a dictator he would have known was guilty of interfering with a U.S. election. Russian entities had attempted to contact his campaign in 2016; his own campaign manager had offered polling information to Russian operatives.
In 2016 Russia had hacked the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and arranged for the leaking of its emails. Mr. Trump didn’t publicly call this unacceptable or vow that Moscow would pay a price. Instead he gave a news conference in which he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.
Sen. John McCain called Helsinki, “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” It was.
I’m glad for the Durham report, respect it, and have no reason to doubt any of its conclusions. But its purpose wasn’t to answer every question about Donald Trump and Russia. To my mind there’s still a lot of mystery there.
What was that strange thing between Messrs. Trump and Putin? People say Mr. Trump just likes dictators, but I don’t know. He’ll trash anyone and has—his own vice president, “Little Rocket Man,” China during the pandemic. He never trashes Mr. Putin.
What was that? What is it?