"All Roads Lead to Putin"

In October 2019, the New York Times published a chilling story about the Russian Air Force bombing of hospitals in Syria in order to crush the resistance to President Bashar al-Assad. A report from the U.N. published in July 2020 said that the bombings - which also hit schools and marketplaces - amounted to a war crime.

That is what was happening on the ground in Syria when Trump announced that he was pulling U.S. troops out of the country, a decision that would effectively cede control of the area to the Syrian government and Russia.

It was during a meeting with congressional leaders at the time that the photo above was taken. The House had just passed a resolution to rebuke Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria and Democrats were challenging the president to explain his strategy. 

Why, [Pelosi] asked, did he withdraw U.S. troops from Syria — a geopolitical calculation that allowed a toehold in northern Syria for Russian President Vladimir Putin?

Why, she asked with lawmakers and aides watching and a White House photographer snapping away, do “all roads lead to Putin”? 

By then, Trump had spent years kowtowing to the Russian president. In Helsinki, he had publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested that it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine. 

All of that is important to keep in mind as Russia once again dominates the headlines. While an invasion of Ukraine remains imminent, Republicans are ignoring history and, as Sen. Ted Cruz recently demonstrated, seem intent on blaming Biden for Russia's actions, claiming that it is the current president who is weak and feckless. 

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that, just as all of that has been unfolding, right wing media outlets have been pretending that Durham's investigation has proven that the whole Trump-Russia collusion story was a hoax. For example, Gregg Jarrett of Fox News recently published a piece titled "Hillary Clinton was the mastermind behind the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and may never face justice."

Make no mistake --it was Clinton who invented the elaborate collusion hoax, financed it, and directed the process by which it was circulated to the media and the FBI. Her false claims were then disseminated by a cadre of cronies and dirty-tricksters working secretly in the shadows.

That confluence of lies is what passes for conventional wisdom on the right these days. Of course, to get there, they have to dismiss all of the evidence of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia that were identified by Robert Mueller, as well as the 10 counts of obstruction of justice the special counsel documented. 

But even more importantly, they have to dismiss the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. Here is how Mark Mazzettii described their final report:

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services...

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary...

...the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

Signing off on those findings was the chair of the committee, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), along with the other Republican members: Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Susan Collins (R- Maine), Roy Blunt (R- MO), Tom Cotton (R-AR), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Ben Sasse (R-NE). 

In addition to what was reported publicly, all of those Republicans had access to the classified information that was eventually redacted from the report. Regardless of whether the evidence met the legal standard of a coordinated conspiracy, they saw proof that Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump become president and that there was an extensive web of contacts between the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials. In other words, there was no "hoax," and they know it.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the same people who want to re-write U.S. history in order to make it more "comfortable" for them are the same folks that are currently engaged in an attempt to re-write the history of Trump's relationship with Russia. But Speaker Pelosi nailed it when she said that, when it comes to the former guy, "all roads lead to Putin."