The Biggest Question is ‘Why?’ Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The Biggest Question is ‘Why?’

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

We are seeing what started as a whistleblower complaint about pressure on Ukraine expand into something much larger. President Trump was trying to coerce Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 election or lose critically needed military aide in its slow motion battle with Russia. Now we see that Attorney General Bill Barr has been making the rounds of the world pressuring allied governments to embrace conspiracy theories about bad actors in the US government plotting against President Trump. They are also pursuing theories that Russia was framed for the 2016 interference campaign. A basic question gets lost in the onrush of revelations: why?

With Ukraine, one part is clear enough. President Trump wants to be reelected. At least to date he’s seen Joe Biden as the biggest threat. So he’s corruptly using his power as President to force a foreign government to attack Biden. It’s a hideous abuse of power but the practical logic is straightforward. But why the effort to investigate the “origins of the Russia investigations”?

The usual answer is vindication, payback. The scandal haunted Trump’s presidency for two years, defied his control, battered his popularity. He’s angry and wants revenge against the people who started it. He wants to prove that he didn’t just beat the rap but was in fact set up. He is the aggrieved party, the victim.

But this doesn’t quite add up. Mueller didn’t exonerate Trump of collusion. But for Trump’s purposes, close enough: insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. Trump has shown that is more than enough for him to claim exoneration and vindication. At the end of the day, it’s done. Mueller closed shop. There are no indictments of the President or his family. Even the indictments of his associates have not touched specifically on a conspiracy with Russia or directly implicated Donald Trump.

At the same time, a pliant Justice Department Inspector General has produced friendly reports, lined up former FBI #2 Andy McCabe for prosecution, issued an excoriating report against James Comey, who Trump fired. Trump’s got yet another long-awaited FISA report coming. If Trump wants vindication and payback he’s managed a fair amount of each. But here we have him angling the entirety of his government – the State Department, Department of Justice, the White House – toward the end of trying to prove that the Mueller probe itself was a conspiracy against him.

This gets lost in the mix. People talk about the ‘origins’ of the probe. But when Mueller took over the investigations he inherited most of the original investigators. He also had to dig deep into how the probe began – Papadapoulos, Mifsud, Carter Page, Manafort, all of it. If it was a plot against Trump, Mueller and his investigation are clearly part of it because they have literally investigated the origins of the probe themselves. If there was a problem they would have found it. He is not only focused on proving wrongdoing by Americans but exonerating Russia.

This seems to be the theory behind Bill Barr’s recent trip to Italy – the claim that Joseph Mifsud, the presumed Russian intelligence asset who befriended George Papadopoulos, was actually a western intelligence operative sent in to set up candidate Trump.

This is even more clear in Trump’s references to “Crowdstrike” and the missing server in his calls with President Zelensky. As Matt Shuham and Josh Kovensky explain here, this is a reference to what is usually called the “Seth Rich conspiracy theory.” This one holds that Russia never hacked the DNC. It was an inside job, a disgruntled DNC employee who wanted to expose Democratic wrongdoing. That was Seth Rich, who was later murdered by the Clintons or others associated with the Democrats. (Seth Rich was actually killed in a random street crime. This conspiracy theory, pushed on the right and in Russian propaganda channels for years, has stalked his grieving family for three years.) Crowdstrike was brought in, in this theory, to frame Russia for the hack and then sell that false claim to the FBI.

This is quite a rabbit hole to go down. But the central premise and aim is key: President Trump is trying not only to prove his innocence and victimization. He’s trying to prove that the Russian interference campaign never happened, that Russia was framed too.

One can easily speculate various nefarious reasons why this would be his focus. The most ‘innocent’ explanation I can see is that he and his entourage got focused on exonerating Paul Manafort as the prelude to a pardon. Manafort appears to have looped Giuliani and Co in with all his old Ukrainian contacts and business partners. That channeled all those cover stories and diversions through Giuliani to Trump. Needless to say, the focus on exonerating and pardoning Paul Manafort raises no fewer questions than the need to exonerate Russia.

What it all comes down to is this. Most of us seem to get that the President’s actions have been gravely wrong and merit removal from office. The rush of revelations have been so rapid, though, that we’re not quite zeroing in on what he’s trying to accomplish with this wrongdoing. The, why?

All of this seems focused on pushing (and getting backers for) the idea that US intelligence agencies and the Mueller office were plotting agains the President and that Russia was framed for interfering in the 2016 election. And the storylines and theories are mostly or all ones that first surfaced in Russian propaganda outlets. Again, why? Just feeling wrongly accused or trying to exonerate himself simply isn’t a sufficient explanation.

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