SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

What a week.  Robert Mueller filed 32 more charges against Rick Gates and Paul Manafort.  These charges were handed down by a different grand jury in a different jurisdiction (Eastern District of Virginia rather than District of Columbia), and cover a new set of crimes.  I’ve seen reports of money laundering ranging from $30-75 million, a tidy sum, even on the low end.  And the charges include conspiracy against the United States.  Hold that thought.

Team Trump pooh-poohed the first Manafort/Gates indictments last October because the alleged crimes took place before Manafort began working for Trump.  The new indictments bring things up to date, alleging various forms of fraud that took place during and after Manafort’s stint as Trump’s campaign manager, even as recently as January, 2017.

Meanwhile, Rick Gates was dithering about whether to take a plea bargain from Robert Mueller.  I find it hard to believe that anyone could be this dumb, but some sources say Gates held out hope that the Nunes Memo would lead to the collapse of Mueller’s entire investigation.  On February 1, the day before The Memo was released to the public, Gates met with prosecutors to discuss a plea deal – and lied to them.  He lied to them about a meeting between Manafort and Republicans Dana Rohrabacher and Vin Weber in 2013 about lobbying for Ukraine.  Rohrabacher is the congressman that even Republican leadership knew was on Putin’s payroll. 

The truth will out, and The Memo laid an egg.  Three weeks and 32 indictments later, Gates decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

As the press tries to make sense of all this, there’s a segment of DC punditry (notably Blake Hounshell of Politico, who proclaimed himself a “Russiagate Skeptic”) that has opted for a contrarian position.  They profess to believe that Mueller will never find a smoking gun, which they define as a piece of evidence that will uncontrovertibly satisfy them that Donald Trump worked with Vladimir Putin to hijack the presidential election. 

Oh, Hounshell acknowledges that there’s plenty of smoke.  He just professes to be agnostic about where it came from.  He doesn’t dispute that there was collusion between Russia and people in Trump’s campaign; or that the collusion was extensive enough to involve members of the Trump family.  He acknowledges that Robert Mueller has gotten guilty pleas and will likely get more. 

He’s just decided that unless Mueller can find a written agreement between Trump and Putin, or its audio or video equivalent, none of the rest of the evidence matters much.  Josh Marshall wrote an excellent takedown of Hounshell’s position, which I won’t repeat here.  I’m including links to both essays at the end of this post. 

Russiagate skeptics don’t like to come right out and say it, but their position is this.  Even if Mueller were to secure guilty pleas and/or convictions against a long list of Trump associates (including his campaign manager, his National Security Director, his son, and his son-in-law/closest advisor) on charges of conspiracy against the United States, in the form of working with Russians to influence the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor – that still wouldn’t be enough to convince them that Trump himself was involved in the conspiracy.  In their eyes, Trump apparently had nothing to do with anything his employees and family did during the campaign.

Not only that, but they’re willing to ignore other critical pieces of context.  For them, Trump’s campaign speech (“Russia, if you’re listening”) in which he publicly sought Russian help in hacking Hilary Clinton’s servers, is apparently unrelated to Mueller’s investigation.  And that memo Trump wrote for Don, Jr., in which he lied about the reason for Junior’s meeting with Russian spies in June, 2016, also has nothing to do with Russian election interference.  As far as they’re concerned, the whole Comey firing had nothing to do with trying to stop Mueller’s investigation – notwithstanding the fact that Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn, fired him when he refused, and then bragged to a couple of Russians that the reason he fired Comey was to get rid of the pressure from the “Russia thing.”  Nothing suspicious about that, not at all.

For Russiagate skeptics, those are just random pieces of information.  Nothing seems to add up.  If only there were some really persuasive evidence.  

My guess is that Hounshell knows better, and was just writing a clickbait article.  Other Russiagate skeptics are simply Republican propagandists.  But setting an absurdly high bar for proof of Trump’s personal involvement in Russiagate is exactly what Trump’s own attorneys will do at some point.  It’s a last ditch defense, and the fact Trump sympathizers are already trotting it out makes me wonder if the endgame is closer than we suspect.

As John Heywood wrote in 1546: “Who is so deaf or so blind as he, that willfully will neither hear nor see.”  Or, as the Platters put it in 1958, “When a lonely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/18/confessions-of-a-russiagate-skeptic-217024

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-the-trump-russia-skeptics-are-wrong