THE
NATIONAL INTEREST DEC. 18, 2020
Trump Won’t Denounce Russia’s Hack Because He’s Still Subservient to
Putin
Photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
In early
September, after Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei
Navalny was poisoned, Western leaders like Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel
issued sharp condemnations and demanded explanations from Russia’s government.
President Trump told reporters he hadn’t yet made up his mind who was
responsible. “So, I don’t know exactly what happened. I think that it is
tragic. It is terrible. It should not happen. We have not had any proof yet,
but we will take a look.”
Two and a
half weeks later, having given him more than enough time to digest all the
intelligence, a reporter asked him again. “Ahh, we’ll talk about that at
another time,” Trump demurred. The other time has not come. Three months later,
that remains Trump’s last word on the matter.
In the
wake of news of Russia’s massive cyber-intrusion into a swath of private and
public networks, including, alarmingly, agencies controlling the nuclear stockpile,
the main lacuna of the story, as it has been for four years, is the president’s
subservient relationship with Russia.
There is
a sharp ongoing debate over just what sort of response Russia’s hacking
operation merits. Some members of Congress likened it to an act of war, or at
least something close. (Mitt Romney’s
comparison was Russian bombers flying undetected over U.S. airspace.) Jack Goldsmith has
made the contrarian case that Russia’s hack was merely a larger and more
successful version of normal spycraft in which the United States also engages.
But even normal spy operations can be met with some kind of government response
short of war, or even sanctions. Russia and the United States have frequently
expelled officials from the country or given verbal warnings in response to
major espionage escalations.
Trump,
though, has said nothing. He has mentioned Russia a few times since
news broke of its massive operation, but only in the context of complaining
about “the Russia hoax.”
The
“Russia hoax” describes a wide array of charges against Trump, the main one
being that his relationship with Vladimir Putin has compromised his ability to
assess Russia’s behavior with the appropriate critical distance. Trump, in
other words, is ignoring Russian misconduct to complain that he has been
accused of being willing to overlook Russian misconduct.
Robert
Mueller was famously unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between the
Trump campaign and Russia. In part he failed because the two figures in Trump’s
orbit who coordinated with Russia’s election operation, Roger Stone and Paul
Manafort, refused to cooperate with the investigation. He also was limited by
his mandate to pursue crimes, and behavior like Trump secretly negotiating for
a huge payoff from Russia during the campaign may have given Putin leverage
over Trump, but it did not violate any U.S. laws, so Mueller didn’t and
couldn’t charge anybody over it.
And yet
the Republican Party has coalesced around Trump’s “hoax” interpretation of this
episode. One of the favored defenses that Trump and his allies have employed in
the postelection period is to equate the charges faced by Trump on Russia with
Trump’s attempts to undo the election results. Since the Russia investigation
undermined Trump’s legitimacy, he’s justified in undermining Biden’s. And since
the “Russia hoax” was built on lies, Republicans are justified in spreading
Trump’s lies about the election.
Senator
Josh Hawley, an aspiring Trumpist successor, explained the “logic”:
“These
are reasonable people and who, by the way, have been involved in politics.
They’ve won, they’ve lost. They’ve seen it all. These are normal folks living
normal lives who firmly believe that they have been disenfranchised. And to
listen to the mainstream press quite a few voices in this building tell them
after four years of non-stop Russia hoax — it was a hoax. It was based on the
whole Russia nonsense. It was based on, we now know, lies from a Russian spy!
The Steele dossier was
based on a Russian spy. After four years of that, being told that the last
election was fake and that Donald Trump wasn’t really elected and that Russian
intervened — after four years of that — now these same people are told ‘you
just sit down and shut up if you have any concerns about election integrity.
You’re a nutcase. You should shut up.’”
Even if
we grant his absurd logic that lies against your own side justify lying in
return, Hawley’s factual account is simply wrong. The truth is that neither the
Russia investigation nor the mainstream media’s coverage of the issue was based
on the Steele dossier, which was a compilation of tips. The actual basis of the
suspicion around Trump’s subservience to Russia was built around proven facts:
Paul Manafort’s links to Russian oligarchs and intelligence agents; the Trump
campaign’s meeting with a Russian agent offering campaign help; Trump literally
requesting Russian help in stealing Clinton emails on camera, and on and on.
In 2017
he boasted that he had discussed forming a joint cybersecurity unit with Putin,
the very person who is trying to penetrate American cybersecurity:
Incredibly,
the two men discussed the absurd idea again the
next year, at the Helsinki summit where Trump appeared almost creepily
submissive. Stopping Russian hackers may be hard, but it’s a lot harder if the
president believes that they’re his friends.
It has
become common for Trump and his aides to insist that he is, in fact, some kind
of Über-hawk on the subject of Russia. White House press secretary
Kayleigh McEnany said, “No one has been tougher on the Russian government than
this president.” Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, wrote, “No
president since Reagan has shown such resolve to Moscow.”
It’s
transparently false. It’s true that the Trump administration has
taken some anti-Russia steps. One of the oddities of the situation is that
Trump is so idiosyncratically a Russophile that he doesn’t have any staff he
can appoint to high roles who share his view of Russia. But the fact that Trump
is the most pro-Russian figure in the Trump administration by far is not
evidence against the proposition that there’s a nefarious element to his
relationship with Putin. It’s the definition of the problem.
Trump is
surrounded by supporters whose interest in the Russia question is wholly
partisan. They would love for him to own the libs by making a forceful
statement against some of Putin’s acts of internal violence or aggressive
hacking. That Trump can’t bring himself to do it tells us a great deal.