REPRESENTATIVE JERROLD NADLER (D-NY): It’s clear that the campaign colluded, and there’s a lot of evidence of that.
REPRESENTATIVE ERIC SWALWELL (D-CA): In our investigation, we saw strong evidence of collusion.
SENATOR RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): The evidence is pretty clear that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
SENATOR RON WYDEN (D-KS): There was clearly an intent to collude.
DNC CHAIRMAN TOM PEREZ: And over the course of the last year we have seen, I think, a mountain of evidence of collusion between the campaign and the Russians to basically affect our democracy.
REPRESENTATIVE MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): Here you have a president who I can tell you, I guarantee you, is in collusion with the Russians to undermine our democracy.
FORMER REPRESENTATIVE DAVID JOLLY (IND-FL): Donald Trump is done. He’s done. There is no question.89
Even lawyers and professors steeped in the law made erroneous predictions of criminality by contorting conspiracy statutes in an attempt to conform them to facts and evidence that had no application. Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University and acting solicitor general under Obama, stated that Trump had ordered the commission of felonies and “has got to know his future looks like it’s behind bars.”90 Four months later Katyal doubled down to say that the Mueller Report marked “the beginning of the end” for Trump.91
Jens David Ohlin, a law professor and vice dean at Cornell University Law School, said that emails produced by Donald Trump, Jr., confirming a meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower were “a shocking admission of a criminal conspiracy.”92 They were not, and the president’s son was never charged with conspiracy or anything else. Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor turned legal analyst at MSNBC, said that “what Donald Trump Jr. is alleged to have done [is] a federal crime” because he was “conspiring with the U.S.’s sworn enemy to take over and subvert our democracy.”93 Except, of course, that he had not “conspired” under the law, and no such crime had occurred.
The moment Steele’s “dossier” was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, the media embraced the “collusion” delusion without first verifying any of the allegations therein. It was their holy grail of evidence that Trump was a “pretender” occupying the Oval Office that rightly belonged to their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton. As anchors, reporters, and commentators spun their collective narrative, they argued that an unproven secret pact between Trump and Putin was the reason she had lost. Day after day, they accused the president of being a Russian asset whose crimes would soon be exposed:
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: We’re about to find out if the new president of our country is going to do what Russia wants . . .
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: This is unsettling because if the worst is true, if the presidency is effectively a Russian op, right, if the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian intelligence services and an American campaign—I mean, that is so profoundly big.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC AND NBC: This cloud about collusion with Russia will hang over him no matter where he stands.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC: This is not funny. This is really bad. Just for the record, we’re all really nervous.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC: I think they’re shocked that the noose is tightening.
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL, MSNBC: The beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.
DONNY DEUTSCH, MSNBC: You could feel the thread being pulled, you can feel the clothes starting to come off the emperor. I believe this is the beginning of the end.
DONNY DEUTSCH, MSNBC: We have a treasonous president.
CARL BERNSTEIN, CNN: We now have to figure out how to deal with a president of the United States who wittingly or unwittingly has been compromised.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: The president sees the walls closing in, and he’s lashing out.
JOY REID, MSNBC: What if he refuses to open the White House door? What if the Secret—or if he fires any Secret Service agent who would allow in the federal marshal? What if Donald Trump simply decides, I don’t have to follow the law? I refuse to be held under the law, no marshal can get into this White House?94
Some of those statements were inane, while others were uninformed. But they all shared a common denominator: Trump’s guilt was predetermined. His imminent removal from office was preordained. The mainstream media said so; thus it must be so. Facts mattered little. The law was irrelevant. In the echo chamber occupied by the vast majority of journalists in the United States their repeated condemnation of Trump reinforced one another’s convictions. “Collusion” would lead them to their political Promised Land, where the president was behind bars instead of the Resolute desk. As it turned out, the Mueller Report was not their salvation and liberation.
Both Democrats and the media lapsed into shock when the results of Mueller’s investigation were announced to the public on March 24, 2019. There would be no deliverance from Trump. That became apparent when the full report was released on April 18. Mueller burst the bubble of the “collusion” hoax when he stated that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. [author’s italics]” In plain language, Trump did not criminally “collude” with Russia.
Mueller’s conclusion should have come as no surprise to anyone who was paying attention. The notion that Trump had coordinated or conspired with Moscow to steal the presidential election from Clinton was pure sophistry. Talk with anyone involved in his campaign, and they’ll tell you that it was an undisciplined, unmethodical shoestring operation. The whole of it was an embarrassing model of entropy. It was a disorganization.
The truth is that the Trump campaign could not have organized a free lunch, much less an elaborate plot with a foreign power. His candidacy was built on ideas, personality, and a collective sense of indignation. Trump was the driving force and chief messenger. He tweeted out heated denunciations of the Washington elite to millions of embittered and angry voters. He traveled from one venue to the next in all the key electoral states, holding rallies that drew many thousands of voters. Those events were frequently televised live and were seen by a much larger audience of voters everywhere. He was the symbol of a new empowerment and radical change. He embodied government transformation.
This strategy was so fundamental—even pedestrian—that it actually worked. The candidate’s name identification gave him an enormous advantage, to be sure. It also helped that his opponent was a lackluster campaigner and an uninspiring candidate. But Trump’s penchant for brutal candor and well-placed derision of the DC establishment was what attracted so many people to his corner. He was the antipolitician at a time when Americans had come to loathe politicians. The “swamp,” as Trump called it, was a chronically dysfunctional group of stale and self-interested careerists. The people they were supposed to be serving were fed up with the incompetent service. Voters felt they were often deceived. Promises were invariably left unfulfilled. The electorate deeply resented that treatment. When Trump vowed to drain the swamp, millions cheered him on. His timing was fortuitous. The moment had arrived for an unconventional choice. There was no one more unconventional than Donald Trump.
The media, which never understood how Trump could be elected, was more than willing to sign on to the “collusion” narrative. It justified their own mistakes and rationalized their misjudgments. Trump had to be an illegitimate president, they reasoned. That was the only explanation for why Clinton had lost. The race must have been stolen from her—and them. They never bothered to examine the facts, evidence, and law. They embraced “collusion” as if simply saying the word meant it was a crime. Any conversation or contact with a Russian was “collusion” and therefore criminal. Any chance encounter or casual handshake with a Russian was vilified. Journalists never bothered to cite a specific statute. They were satisfied, indeed anxious, to level the accusation as a legal conclusion. T
hey insinuated a crime by using a word that connoted a crime.
In The Russia Hoax, I argued that “ ‘collusion’ is not a crime, except in anti-trust law.”95 I was lambasted for making that legally correct statement. But it was eventually affirmed by the special counsel’s report when it observed that “collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the U.S. Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law.”96 After spending two years suggesting that “collusion” must necessarily be criminal, the New York Times confessed, “Outside of specific factual contexts—such as price fixing in antitrust law—the word ‘collusion’ has no legal meaning or significance.”97 The “newspaper of record” finally got it right.
At its core, “collusion” is merely an agreement to do something. Historically, the term is laden with criminal overtones. It is often associated with secrecy. But it is criminal only when two or more people agree to commit an illegal act. Over the stretch of two chapters in The Russia Hoax, I examined several federal statutes that might have some application to the Trump-Russia investigation, such as conspiracy to defraud and federal campaign finance laws.98 That was what Mueller did, as well. To the chagrin of the media and Democrats, he arrived at the same conclusion that I had in my book: there was no criminal “collusion.”
The Collusion Delusion
The special counsel’s inability to find a scintilla of incriminating evidence against Trump was not for want of trying. Mueller consumed 199 pages in what he called “volume I” of his opus describing in excruciating minutia every interaction—however arbitrary—between Trump campaign associates and any known Russian. No trivial contact or insignificant communication was spared a full-throated analysis. If a courteous handshake was extended or a casual “Hello” was said, Mueller gave it an exhaustive examination. Even a conversation with a Russian diplomat, which is frequent and standard in Washington, was fully scrutinized for some hidden illicit purpose. The report made it evident that Mueller and his team were obsessed with establishing wrongdoing. They worked assiduously to find it. As Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal observed:
What stands out is just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds worked to implicate someone in the Trump World on something Russia . . . and how—even with all its overweening power and aggressive tactics—it still struck out.
While it doubtless wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s intention, the sheer quantity and banality of details highlights the degree to which these contacts were random, haphazard and peripheral. By the end of Volume I, the notion that the Trump campaign engaged in some grand plot with Russia is a joke.99
It was no joke to President Trump, who was encumbered with false accusations from the outset of his presidency. The attacks inhibited his ability to do his job. The demands of the special counsel consumed valuable time and resources at the White House that could have otherwise been spent more productively on matters of state and for the benefit of the American people. Untold time and effort were misspent by his having to respond to relentless allegations of “collusion” that never happened. The president’s critics, especially the media, focused like a laser on several events that had occurred during his campaign. They assured their viewers and readers that any one of them rose to the level of criminal “collusion” with Russia. Mueller addressed six of them at length in his report.
First, despite chronic reporting that the Trump campaign had somehow been involved in the hacking of the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party email accounts, there was not a shred of evidence that this was true. None. The Russians are adept at cyberespionage. Why would they need someone on the Trump campaign to help them? Besides, there was no one on the team who had the skills to contribute anything of value. The Mueller Report concluded that Russian actors operated on their own. In 2016, they allegedly hacked into computer networks and stole thousands of documents that were then published by WikiLeaks beginning in July 2016. According to Mueller, the Trump campaign “showed interest” in learning the contents before they became public.100 Of course they did. So did hundreds of curious journalists, myself included, who reached out to WikiLeaks or otherwise tried to locate the missing emails through what are known as “open-source” methods. That’s not criminal, it’s normal.
At a public event in July, Trump jokingly quipped that he hoped Russia would be “able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Clinton’s server.101 Those were the emails she had deliberately deleted (including work-related documents), even though Congress had ordered that she turn over all of her communications. By the time of Trump’s flippant remark, it was well known that Clinton had exposed her private email account to outside theft and that the FBI had stated publicly, “It is possible that hostile actors gained access.”102 Predictably, Trump critics such as Norman Eisen and many others declared that the GOP candidate had broken the law by making his comment.103 He had not, and it’s ridiculous to say so. Trump’s sarcastic swipe at his presidential opponent did not violate campaign finance laws and did not come close to meeting the legal requirements of a conspiracy with Russia to hack computer systems. A mocking public comment is hardly an agreement to commit a crime. Mueller did not conclude otherwise.
Second, the special counsel meticulously detailed how Trump adviser George Papadopoulos had allegedly heard from Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud that “the Russian government had ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.”104 Papadopoulos had then allegedly repeated the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who had eventually notified the FBI. As explained in an earlier chapter, passing along hearsay gossip is not a crime, even if it has something to do with Russia. Moreover, Papadopoulos denied he had even repeated the gossip. Indeed, he had no memory of it, which tended to underscore its unimportance. In addition to determining that Mifsud lied, Mueller found no evidence that Papadopoulos had advised anyone in the Trump campaign that he had been the recipient of the rumor.105 No one in the campaign knew anything about it. The special counsel rendered this conclusion:
No documentary evidence, and nothing in the email accounts or other communications facilities reviewed by the Office, shows that Papadopoulos shared this information with the Campaign.106
Third, Mueller tried mightily to connect Trump’s erstwhile campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to some amorphous conspiracy with Moscow by virtue of his business dealings in Ukraine. Enormous pressure was brought to bear by the special counsel. The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said he had been made aware of the tactics allegedly employed by Mueller’s team:
Manafort’s attorney told me how the prosecutors would play this charade. They would yank him out of solitary confinement, order him what to say, and when he wouldn’t say it because it was untrue, they’d dump him back into solitary and bring him back a week later. They did it a dozen times. They wanted Manafort to lie about the president, but he refused. He kept telling them he didn’t know anything about Trump colluding with Russia. The prosecutors didn’t care. They just wanted to get Trump even if it was all a lie.107
In the end, Manafort was charged with a series of financial crimes that well predated his brief service for the campaign. This will be discussed at length in a subsequent chapter. No indictment involving Russian “collusion” was ever brought against Manafort or, for that matter, anyone else.
The special counsel uncovered no evidence that Trump was acquainted with Manafort’s foreign consulting activities before he was hired by the campaign. When the media raised questions about his lobbying work for Ukrainian oligarchs, Manafort was forced out of the campaign in August 2016.108 In his report, Mueller regurgitated in agonizing detail every contact, no matter how frivolous or trite, that Manafort had had with persons of Russian-sounding names. It was not only tedious but pointless. At the conclusion of that section of the report, no grand conspiracy was revealed. The special counsel did mention that Manafort had given a longtime employee, Konstantin Kilimnik, “polling data” and expected him to
share it with others in Ukraine.109 Most of the data turned out to be public information.110 Manafort had been trying to curry favor with his clients but had received nothing in return. Naturally, the media instantly claimed that that was the smoking gun that would prove criminal “collusion” once and for all.111 The special counsel team, despite its anti-Trump bias, knew better. It is not a crime to share polling data with someone. Campaigns do it all the time.
Fourth, the special counsel dug deep into the life and times of Carter Page. No wrongful conduct was exhumed. As noted before, Page had traveled to Moscow to deliver a speech. That was about the extent of his supposedly collusive Russian activities—nonexistent. He had not held secret meetings with the Kremlin. He had not been the conduit for “a well-developed conspiracy.”112 He had not negotiated the “lifting of western sanctions” in exchange for a “19 percent stake in Rosneft,” the Russian energy company.113 Those accusations against him in the Steele “dossier” had been debunked, although Mueller declined to specifically call out the document for what it obviously was: a fraud. That was a curious omission, inasmuch as the FBI had launched its investigation of Trump-Russia “collusion” based largely on the “dossier,” then exploited its contents to spy on Page for a year. Was Mueller protecting the FBI’s illegitimate reliance on a phony document that the Bureau had failed to verify? Quite likely.
Fifth, the special counsel devoted much attention to a subject that deserved, frankly, precious little. The Trump Organization had spent decades exploring and, in many instances, consummating development projects all over the world. As Trump had extended his brand through real estate deals and licensing arrangements, his company had grown more profitable and the Trump name had expanded its reach. The idea of constructing a tower in Moscow had been one of many potential projects discussed. After years of intermittent negotiations with prospective Russian partners, a letter of intent (LOI) had been signed in the fall of 2015.114 It was not a binding contract to build anything. It was not a “deal” that had been consummated. It had simply been an agreement to engage in “further discussions,” as Mueller’s report recognized.115 Government approval would be required, and Trump associates had moved forward to obtain it. Whatever the motives of people such as Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, associates who were pursuing the venture on Trump’s behalf, no evidence emerged that the candidate himself had sought to leverage the contemplated project in his campaign for president. In early 2016, the discussions stalled. Over the ensuing months, Trump declined to travel to Russia and subsequently ended his organization’s discussions about building a tower in Moscow. Although Democrats and the media inferred “collusion,” the evidence gathered by the special counsel did not support it.
Witch Hunt Page 24