Did Trump Commit So Many Crimes that We'll Fail to Get to the Bottom of His Collusion with Russia?

Donald Trump has the distinction of being the only president in U.S. history to be impeached twice - once for his attempt to extort a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponent and once for inciting a riot at the Capital in order to overturn an election. While a partisan Senate failed to convict him on either charge, the latter is still being investigated by congress. In addition, he faces a whole array of civil and criminal charges related to financial fraud and sexual assault that are currently working their way through the system.

There is, however, one major issue with Trump that seems to have been placed on the back burner, even though it was never resolved. Here's David Frum's explanation about why that happened.

Since Donald Trump declared for president in 2015, it’s seldom been possible to get to the bottom of one scandal before Trump distracts attention with a bigger and worse scandal. For more than a year, the United States has been convulsed by Trump’s frontal assault on election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power...These dark threats have understandably overwhelmed the effort to fill in the blanks of the Trump-Russia scandal of yesteryear.

I agree with Frum that part of the problem is that much of the focus has understandably been placed on uncovering Trump's role in an insurrection. But let's not forget former Attorney General Bill Barr's role in lying about the result of the Mueller investigation. He is the one who repeatedly said that the special prosecutor found no evidence of "collusion." Barr then dismissed multiple examples that Mueller uncovered in which the former president attempted to obstruct justice. 

But Barr didn't stop there. He also appointed John Durham to muddy the waters with an investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. After indicting two people for lying to the FBI, right wingers are now busy re-writing the story as a hoax perpetrated by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. For example, take a look at the false narrative created by J. Peder Zane from the right wing site RealClearPolitics.

Russiagate began with a kernel of truth: Someone – probably Russians, though we still don’t know for sure – hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Fearful of what might be released, the Clinton campaign tried to discredit any damaging material by raising dark questions about its source...

In response, the Clinton campaign financed an absurd collection of conspiracy theories involving peeing prostitutes and billion-dollar bribes, the so-called Steele dossier. Its importance cannot be overstated – it was the dossier that linked the Trump campaign to the hacking. No dossier, no collusion theory...

The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the fantasy in May 2017 fueled the fire. His effort became part of the scheme: He only looked for evidence that might implicate Trump, ignoring questions about who cooked up the conspiracy theory, how they disseminated it throughout the government and media, and the laws they might have broken in the process.

Despite his best effort, Mueller said he’d found no evidence of collusion when he released his report in April 2019. That should have killed the conspiracy theory and – following the script of previous major scandals – sparked a period of reflection by the government, the media and the American people that asked: How did we get this so wrong?

Let's take up a couple of the blatant lies.

1. We know exactly who hacked the DNC and Clinton servers. It was the Russian government. End of story.

2. The Steele dossier did not launch the collusion theory. The FBI opened their counterintelligence investigation on July 30, 2016. According to an inspector general report, they did not know about the dossier until September 19, 2016. 

3. Mueller found reams of evidence of collusion (not a legal term), but had been limited to a criminal investigation. He was not able to prove the existence of a criminal conspiracy. 

In these efforts to re-write history, Max Boot points out that these Trump enablers want to ignore the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s election interference. Here's just one example:

The report also sheds further light on the connections between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which was used by Russian intelligence to release stolen Democratic emails. The report concludes: “The Trump Campaign took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails…; created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release; and encouraged further theft of information and continued leaks.”

The key campaign middleman was Roger Stone, who refused to cooperate with investigators and was later pardoned, along with Manafort, by Trump. The report cites extensive evidence that, despite Trump’s denials, Stone kept Trump informed of his contacts with WikiLeaks.

For the last month of the 2016 campaign, Trump was obviously obsessed with Wikileaks - declaring his love for an organization that had been "used by Russian intelligence to release stolen Democratic emails."

The other thing right wingers like Zane want to ignore is that, when it comes to Durham's indictment of Michael Sussmann, the entire case is falling apart. It has now become clear that Durham cherry-picked communication among the researchers that discovered the internet connection between the Trump Organization and Alpha Bank in order to suggest that they questioned its relevance. 

[D]efense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.

The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.

Steven A. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.

In addition to that, documents recently released by Durham undermine his claim that Sussmann lied to the FBI about the client(s) he was representing during a meeting with James Baker. The indictment suggests that Sussmann was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, but lied when he stated that he was not meeting with Baker on behalf of any client. A report of the Durham team's interview with Baker in June 2020 contradicts that claim.

According to that report, Mr. Baker did not say that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of any client. Rather, he said the issue never came up and he merely assumed Mr. Sussmann was not conveying the Alfa Bank data and analysis for any client.

“Baker said that Sussmann did not specify that he was representing a client regarding the matter, nor did Baker ask him if he was representing a client,” the Durham team’s report said. “Baker said it did not seem like Sussmann was representing a client.”

Of course, none of that matters to Trump enablers like Zane. Durham's 27-page indictment provides them with fodder to suggest the whole Russia investigation was a hoax cooked up by the Clinton campaign. They're going to run with that, just as they swallowed Barr's lies about the Mueller report. 

While right wingers create a false narrative about Trump's collusion with Russia, there are several things that remain disturbing about the whole affair:

• The former president has pardoned key players in the whole scheme (ie, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone). 
• We don't see any effort to hold Trump accountable for obstructing justice (even as he continues to brag about it). 
• We still don't know whether, for four years as president, Trump was acting as a Russian asset.

I will continue to assert that getting to the bottom of all of that is at least as important as uncovering his role in an insurrection.