605
As mind blowing as that might seem that is the Occam’s Razor interpretation. But there’s no question that there has been and still is great skepticism that the Trump campaign really ‘colluded’ with Russia. During early 2017, while the media took the Russia investigation seriously, they tended to be pretty doubtful about the underlying crime of ‘collusion’-the word has been so omnipresent in our discourse it’s a meme but in truth the FBI counterintelligence investigation that started on July, 31, 2016 begun asking the question not about ‘collusion’ but ‘coordination’ between the campaign and Russia.
There’s a great deal of confusion around the notion of ‘collusion’-while many have been skeptical, other times they say things like ‘but collusion is not a crime’-further muddying the waters. Are they skeptical that collusion happened or are they saying ‘even if it did happen it’s not a crime?’ And again, technically the investigation is into coordination not collusion and clearly it is a crime as Mueller has already convicted a number of Russian nationals for the crime of ‘conspiracy against the United States.’
But the process by which the MSM came to accept the possibility of ‘collusion’ has been slow and painstaking. Before the election they scarcely discussed it at all. They found the idea that the Trump campaign was being investigated for possible collusion with a Russian election interference effort was much less interesting than that Hillary Clinton used a server while Secretary of State-meanwhile, we now know that Ivanka uses the Trump Tower private server for government business and the media is far from freaking out about it.
UPDATE. I wrote this initially on November 24, 2018-here we are on March 23, 2018 and just this week we learned that Kushner used WhatsApp for his government business-he’s not the only one in the Russia House by any means:
The ironies abound, but one difference between using an encrypted app versus a private server for govt business is that the possibly classified messages are gone on the former but preserved on the latter. Using an encrypted app is potentially more damaging https://t.co/Bg5m0frR0n
— Richard Stengel (@stengel) March 21, 2019
The media like James Comey acted during the election like the ‘500 year flood’ was not Russian interference and possible collusion But Her Emails!
Of course Kushner’s WhatsApp is potentially much more harmful and has gotten just a fraction of the scrutiny of the damn emails.
End of Update.
After the election-after ‘that woman’ was safely ‘defeated’ they started to take it seriously. Indeed, while Obama has rightly been criticized for letting Mitch McConnell bully him into not making a pre election statement, Obama-as I argue in (Chapter A) actually deserves to be commended for at least speaking about it after the election. This was a big improvement over LBJ’s WH 48 years ago which ultimately decided that ‘the national interest’ was served by the public not knowing of Nixon’s treacherous collusion and treason.
After Obama and the intelligence community put out statements in December and January, the media begun to treat it like a serious scandal and when Comey revealed the investigation’s existence in his March, 2017 testimony it was treated even more seriously. But still, most journalists/pundits didn’t really believe that ‘Russian collusion’ happened-it just struck them as ‘too farfetched.’
This was true even of many liberal pundits and journalists-like Josh Marshall who didn’t really start to entertain the idea that collusion itself was a possibility until the story of the Trump Tower Russia meeting of June, 2016 broke in July, 2017. Marshall admitted that part of his previous skepticism was it seemed too cynical! That’s the problem-regarding Trump-and for that matter, his party-it’s impossible to be too cynical.
(see if you can find the Marshall quotes, Mike).
After Trump fired Comey, the reaction of many journalists was that now Trump is in trouble, because obstruction of justice is much easier to prove than ‘Russian collusion.’ Of course, since then the Trump apologists have largely convinced the conventional wisdom that somehow finding Trump guilty of obstruction without proving collusion would be somehow cheap-even though Nixon was found guilty of obstruction without ever proving he knew specifically about the Watergate break in-Bill Clinton was also impeached over ‘process crimes.’
Which is risible-if obstruction isn’t a crime unless the underlying crime is proved then obstruction isn’t a crime.
What this risible premise doesn’t explain is why would someone commit criminal conspiracy if they were innocent of the underlying crime? The Roger Stone answer seems to be ‘I’m not guilty of collusion but I’m guilty of other stuff that the collusion investigation will uncover so, no fair.’ Sure, tell it to Al Capone-who Trump actually implicitly has defended in his criticism of informants (Chapter C).
It took Matt Yglesias to finally suggest-maybe Trump acts guilty because he’s guilty.
But everything that Mueller has done makes it clear he has collusion clearly in his sights-going back to his wonderful head fake in October, 31 2017-the famous Mueller indictment Monday-the day he indicted both Manafort and Papaopolous. Manafort was expected-and the Trump Russia House had their talking points-the crimes Manafort was indicted for had nothing to to do with ‘collusion’ and they happened ‘many years’ before the 2016 campaign. This was a canard. But though they did happen before Manafort was on the campaign, it was less prior to it than Whitewater was to 1994 when Ken Starr begun his far flung fishing expedition-Brett Kavanaugh finally reeled in the fish four years later using a classic perjury trap (Chapter B). Everything the GOP has said about the Mueller probe-a ‘fishing expedition’, ‘a perjury trap’ DID apply to Whitewater.
But Mueller’s head fake on Mueller Monday was Papadopoulos-no one expected that, The story of the Coffee Boy’s ‘Russian Professor’ Joesph Misfud who revealed to him the existence of ‘incriminating emails on Clinton’ blew expectations wide open. After that ‘Russian collusion’ became a possibility taken even more seriously.
But even now, many MSM pundits are skeptical, and I would guess many average Americans who don’t pay such close attention like a few of us do find the idea rather fanciful. These skeptical voters aren’t necessarily Trump fans. And they may well see the investigation as legitimate-they presume Trump is guilty of something, maybe money laundering, and financial crimes-again no one thinks Trump is innocent-that is the one word no one would use to describe him, not his loyalists, not even he himself-his excuse is whataboutism: but what about Hillary’s server, but what about Obama, but what about Andrew Gillum getting two free Hamilton tickets?
A comparison that doesn’t even pass the laugh test-what is getting a couple of free tickets to Hamilton next to quite possibly colluding with Russia to ‘win’ an American Presidential election? Free Hamilton tickets have a retail value of what? $150 dollars? Yes-what about it?
Indeed, one of the things that gets under the skin of many of us in the #Resistance-a lot of people don’t cop to this term, but I’m happy to be called a card carrying member of the #Resistance with its fine historical analogy-Trump is in some sense Hitler in the American context-is when Trump and his GOP friends respond to accusations of obstruction and collusion with ‘Yeah but what about someone from the Clinton Foundation trying to get-and not even getting-a diplomatic passport?’
What’s so pitiful about the whatabouters is they contrast the great crimes Trump is accused of with absolutely piddly accusations against Clinton or other Democrats that even if true would pale into the wallpaper next to what Trump is credibly accused of. Indeed as we see in (Chapter B) Bill Clinton and the Congressional Dems in 1993 allowed the investigation into possible Reagan-Iran collusion in 1980 to be buried in an unmarked grave. The Reaganites in the GOP thanked him for his helpfulness by opening up an investigation into Whitewater-which added insult to injury by actually predating the time of the alleged 1980 election collusion: the Whitewater allegations were about something that happened in the 1970s, so even a time basis, it was hardly ‘turning the page’ and ‘looking forward not backwards’-or as Clinton’s own 1992 campaign theme song had it ‘not stopping thinking about tomorrow.’
But then the GOP’s tendency of ignoring truly earth shattering allegations against their own high ranking officials for piddly, quite silly accusations against the Democrats perhaps understands an enigmatic aspect of human psychology.
Gary Sick, who had served on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council of Advisors and who was originally a skeptic of Reagan-Iran collusion but started to rethink it after-among other things-a jury found Richard Brenneke innocent of perjury and stated categorically to believe there had been a meeting between the Reagan campaign and Iran in Paris during October 1980 and that Brenneke was in fact there, as documented in (Chapter D)-made this observation:
“We are accustomed to the petty crimes of Washington politics. A candidate for high office is a lush or a compulsive womanizer; a member of Congress diverts campaign funds for a private account; an official lies to coverup an embarrassing policy failure. These are misdeeds on a human scale, and those miscreants who are unfortunate or careless enough to get caught are pilloried and punished by the press and their peers in periodic cleansings. We regard such rituals with a certain satisfaction, evidence of our democracy at work.”
“There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet Andre Chenier, as “les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois,” crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of nerve.”
Pg. 226
Because a crime like this happens on such a grand scale, many people find it hard to even wrap their heads around it-and would prefer not to think about it.
“We understand the motives of the thief, even if we despise them. But few of us have ever been exposed to the seductions of power on a grand scale and we are unlikely to have given serious thought to the rewards of political supremacy, much less to how it might be achieved.”
Pg. 226
Many people then have a failure of both imagination but I think this failure is willed: people would rather not believe crime on this level occurs. It seems too cynical to them.
“Those who operate politically beyond the law benefit from our often false sense of confidence. There is a natural presumption to believe, even among the politically sophisticated that ‘no one would do such a thing. Most observers are predisposed towards disbelief, and therefore, and therefore may be willing to disregard evidence and to construct alternative explanations for events that seem too distasteful to believe. This all-too-human propensity provides a margin of safety for what would otherwise be regarded as immensely risky undertakings.”
Pg. 227
I love that- ‘this all too-human propensity’-Nietzsche!-that the truly great crimes that most people have a hard time believing could be true. People find it easier to believe in piddly, nothingburger ‘crimes’-and often become quite outraged over.
Indeed, and something like this is at work regarding Anthony Weiner as well-prior to his conviction for sexting with a minor-which as we see in (Chapter E) itself requires a whole lot of asterisks as he was entrapped-had committed no crime-his only sin being sending sexts to consenting women over the age of consent. Yet many people found this shockingly tawdry and sleazy. Many seemed to find his rather pitiful cyber sexts as more reprehensible than the real sexual assault and harassment Trump has credibly been accused of.
This structural tendency of many people is something that the GOP counts on again and again.