This Wheel’s On Fire by Josh Marshall

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

I haven’t written much in recent days because my family suffered an unexpected loss last week. I was in one day and kept up on the toplines of the news. But I was generally too insensible to write, even as the new revelations piled up. Everything I’ve seen at a distance over recent days brings me back to this post I wrote on Thursday. Helsinki seems like an inflection point. On a long drive yesterday I listened to cable news chatter and I noticed a difference: the default assumption was that President Trump is compromised in some way. Or perhaps it’s better to say that there was a common assumption that the most logical explanation of Helsinki and what we’ve seen before and since is that Vladimir Putin has some leverage over the President. One former diplomat who said something like this pointed out that it’s not the only possible answer, just the most likely one. He’d really like to find another answer. But he hasn’t.

I continue to be struck by how resistant the system is to this now elementary conclusion. In this case, I don’t mean the formal constitutional framework or “the system” in some 60s Marcusean sense. I just mean a more general function or consensus of elite opinion, what is an acceptable premise of discussion and what is not. But this resistance is hardly a surprise. It is an almost fantastical proposition, something out of cheap finish-it-in-90 minutes TV movie fiction. And yet here we are. It is hardly unimaginable if we set the context with everything we’ve seen over the last two years. And just in recent days the pace of revelations, always matched by new flare-ups as rage covering for feelings of threat.

It was two years ago to the yesterday, July 23rd, 2016, that I wrote this post: Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing. That was a day after Wikileaks’ first release of DNC emails. But I didn’t mention that in the post because I’d started writing the post two days earlier, before that happened. The hacked emails didn’t figure at all in my thinking. The connection to Russia seemed too unclear to me to add to what I thought and still believe was abundant evidence of a connection between Trump and Putin that was largely visible in plain sight.

There’s actually an additional backstory to my interest. On June 14th, 2016, The Washington Post first broke the story of the Russian government hacking into the DNC computer network. At the time, the focus was on their allegedly stealing opposition research on Donald Trump. The source for the claim that Russia was behind the intrusion was Crowdstrike, the cyber security firm the DNC had hired to investigate the hack and secure their networks. The next day a friend of mine emailed me and said he was suspicious of Crowdstrike’s account and their certainty it was a Russian hack. This friend has no particular expertise in this field, just a general knowledge of the business and tech world. He thought that this was Crowdstrike going to the press with an unproven theory to drum up corporate business with a burst of free media.

An interesting theory. We assigned a reporter to the story, specifically to see what we could glean about what independent network security experts made of Crowdstrike’s theory and evidence. The piece never got written. Like many reporting topics it simply stalled for a handful of reasons. But a key one was that a broad range of security types seemed to agree with Crowdstrike or at least find their work and their analysis in this case credible.

In retrospect, I don’t know whether the outcome of that reporting made me give the whole Russia connection another look. My imperfect recollection is that the two storylines weren’t really connected in my mind. Like many others, over the course of late 2015 and early 2016 I’d watched the odd list of clues about Trump and Russia as they popped up. But, oddly enough in retrospect, I think it was this article about Carter Page that really got me thinking. It’s from Bloomberg. And it’s now mostly behind a paywall – something that wasn’t the case two years ago. But here’s the lede …

A globe-trotting American investment banker who’s built a career on deals with Russia and its state-run gas company, Carter Page says his business has suffered directly from the U.S. economic sanctions imposed after Russia’s escalating involvement in the Ukraine. When Donald Trump named him last week as one of his foreign-policy advisers, Page says his e-mail inbox filled up with positive notes from Russian contacts. “So many people who I know and have worked with have been so adversely affected by the sanctions policy,” Page said in a two-hour interview last week. “There’s a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation.”

Obviously, I didn’t know – I guess few if any people out of US law enforcement knew – that Page was already suspected of being an agent of Russian intelligence well before 2016. But how could these few sentences alone not tell you something was seriously wrong?

We already knew at the time about Manafort’s ties to Russia and Ukraine. But that seemed like a one-off oddity, just a random detail about Trump’s crowd of has-beens and desperados. But Trump’s Europe/Eurasia advisor griping about how the Crimean sanctions regime had walloped his bottom line. Business contacts from Russia expressing excitement about sanctions relief with Carter in a key role? This combined with Manafort was exceedingly odd, especially when combined with Trump’s aggressive courting of Putin on the campaign trail. I think at this point I started digging further into the Trump Soho story, which of course added an entirely new dimension to the story.

There was no way to know then that both Page and Manafort had already been the subjects of FISA surveillance as suspected foreign agents or that a third advisor, the nonsensical George Papadopoulos, a grown man who was still listing a Model UN assignment on his highly embroidered resume, had already established contact with a Russian intelligence asset in London. Only a month earlier, the now-president’s son, son-in-law, and Manafort had met with an emissary of the Russian government offering dirt on Hillary Clinton – something that would only become known a year later.

Here there is an interesting parallel in the arrest of Mariia Butina, the barely plausible Russian gun rights activist who had founded a gun rights organization in Russia – a country with very thin gun rights and little gun rights culture – which surprisingly enough seemed to be both supported by the Russian government and extremely interested in the US Republican party. Butina, her mentor/handler Aleksandr Torshin and the NRA have been an out in the open story for well over a year. The key initial reporting came from Tim Mak at The Daily Beast. But as The Washington Post notes here, the FBI had been surveilling Butina as more or less obviously a Russian agent at least since she permanently moved to the US in August 2016 and likely before.

This gets at a troubling and elusive issue hovering over this whole drama, a point I addressed in a number posts last year. I accept the FBI’s account that ‘Crossfire Hurricane’, the investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible ties to Russia began on July 31st, 2016, roughly a week after the first Wikileaks/DNC email dump and in response to reports from Australian intelligence about George Papadopoulos, which were conveyed to the US in response to the Wikileaks’ dump. But it has never been plausible to me that suspicions and fears about the Trump campaign within the intelligence community did not begin earlier.

Let’s consider some of the details we just discussed in the chronology of 2015 and 2016. As we know from the Butina indictment and other sources of information, the FBI was aware of Russian state efforts to build ties to the conservative movement and the GOP well before the 2016 campaign. FBI agents in New York and New Jersey had a still little explored relationship with Donald Trump stretching back decades. More recently, a man at the center of Trump’s river of money from the former Soviet Union, Felix Sater was an informant and FBI cooperating witness for the entirety of the decade he worked with Trump. As I noted last year, it’s clear that Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian money were well-known within the FBI, if not necessarily known broadly within the institution. In March 2016 Trump announced a first slate of five foreign policy advisors and a new top advisor, in charge of managing the GOP convention, Paul Manafort. Of these six men, two had already been the subject of FISA surveillance as suspected foreign agents of Russia or Russian interests in Ukraine.

The threshold for opening a counter-intelligence investigation into a major party nominee for President was and certainly should be very high. The Papadopoulos report was tangible evidence of a campaign advisor having advance knowledge of and possible complicity in a Russian intelligence operation aimed at turning the presidential election. It was specific. It was tied to the election campaign. It was tied to an overt act by Russian intelligence operatives. It makes sense that this would be the tripwire, the concrete and tangible lead that would meet that very high threshold. But to me it has always beggared belief that the entry of Page and Manafort into what appeared to be leading roles in the campaign did not put people in US counter-intelligence on alert.

This brings us to another point raised by the Butina indictment. Butina and Torshin were hardly operating under some kind of deep cover. Butina’s story was so preposterous as almost to amount to an affirmative defense. Indeed, the Russian government now seems to be suggesting as much. The NRA wasn’t duped into believing it was building ties to some dissident group in Putin’s Russia. The purported role of Butina’s gun rights group merely facilitated a bond based on rightist politics and authoritarianism, much as Russia has cultivated ties with rightist parties in other parts of Europe. President Trump operates in a similar fashion. It’s hard to say he’s some Russian asset deeply embedded in the US political system. He has openly sung the praises of Putin’s Russia and routinely presses his desire to build closer relations with Russia. This curious mix of deception and blatancy is what has allowed Trump and his followers to oscillate between calling the Trump/Russia controversy an absurd conspiracy theory and a run-of-the-mill nothing-burger. Don Jr. called reports of looking for dirt from the Russian government fantastical until, faced with irrefutable evidence, he called it awesome.

This leads me to my concluding thought. A few days ago Andrew Sullivan proposed that we are perhaps making the whole Trump/Putin thing too complicated, that Trump “simply believes what he says.” As I write above, much of the ties between the GOP and Russia isn’t about sleeper agents and cabals. It’s about ideological affinity, at least for Russia’s ruling oligarchy and the revanchist factions of the Republican party. The relationship has been greased by money and I suspect hard or soft blackmail. But it starts with common beliefs and common enemies. This is hardly surprising. The combination was a stock in trade for much of the 20th century when the Soviet Union was the vanguard of the totalitarian left.

Trump believes in and embodies a world of predation and power, of zero-sum calculations. Mutuality and rule-based regimes, as his alt-right supporters might say, are for cucks. The world is based on power and autocracy, with tests of strengths in which some win, others lose and the losers must follow and bow down to the winners. This fact about Trump’s worldview is all unquestionably true as far as it goes. You see it in Trump’s crude neo-mercantilism, his oligarchic vision of private business thriving through political subservient to him, his contempt for international organizations.

But none of this really explains what we see. Vladimir Putin is not even the most important or powerful autocrat in today’s global community. And while autocrats may have a respect and desire to emulate fellow autocrats, it is not in the nature of would-be autocrats to grow supine and submissive in the presence of autocrats, especially ones of second-tier powers. It is not in the nature of the animal. What we see in Donald Trump’s relationship to Vladimir Putin isn’t ideological affinity or peer admiration. It is most akin to those cases where a mob turncoat finally takes the stand in the trial against the boss and somehow, to the prosecutor’s shock and chagrin, has suddenly forgotten everything.

Or a more cinematic example …

Mr. PENTANGELI — Mr. PENTANGELI. Were you a member of the Corleone family? Did you serve under Caporegime Peter CLEMENZA — under VITO Corleone — also known as — “The Godfather”?

PENTANGELI

I — I — I never know no Godfather.I got my own family, SENATOR.

QUESTADT

Mr. PENTANGELI you are contradicting a sworn statement that you previously made to me and signed. I ask you again sir — you are now under oath — were you at any time a member of a crime organization — headed by MICHAEL Corleone.

PENTANGELI

I don’t know nothin’ about that.. Oh — I was in the Olive Oil business with his father but that was a long time ago that’s all.

CHAIRMAN

We have a sworn affidavit — we have it — your sworn affidavit that you murdered on the orders of MICHAEL Corleone. Do you deny that confession, and do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial.

PENTANGELI

Look the FBI guys promised me a deal. So I made up a lot of stuff about MICHAEL Corleone ’cause that’s what they wanted — but it was all lies — uh — everything. And I kept saying — MICHAEL Corleone did this and MICHAEL Corleone did that — .uh — so I said yea sure, why not.

Trump’s behavior tells us the story. I’m an agnostic on just what the source of leverage or control is. I’m as versed on the details of this story, at least as reported to date, as anyone. And I genuinely do not know what it is. But we don’t need to know the details of the leverage to know it exists. We know the black hole exists because we see the star caught in its orbit.