Donald Trump’s weird relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia is back in the news. But something big is missing.
After his remarks earlier this month encouraging the Russian leader/war criminal to invade NATO countries that do not increase their defense spending, there was a flurry of stories in the media that referenced Trump’s peculiar years-long love affair with Putin. Another rush of similar commentary followed the death (or murder) of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp, when Trump at first said nothing about this tragedy and then issued a self-serving statement that did not condemn Putin or Moscow but instead compared Trump to Navalny, citing his own supposed persecution by “CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges.”
Reporting Trump’s dreadful, delayed, and narcissistic response to Navalny’s death, the New York Times noted, “The former president has a long history of complimenting Mr. Putin, calling him ‘pretty smart’ even as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine. And he has at times favored [Russia] over traditional U.S. allies.” A week earlier the paper mentioned Trump’s “odd affinity” for Putin. Following Trump’s NATO remarks, NPR produced a piece noting there was a “romance” between the American right and Putin. The Associated Press reported that Trump “has often praised [Putin] as tough.” A Forbes article
on Trump’s NATO comment pointed out his longtime “pro-Putin stance.” Check, check, check.
What was absent in much of this recent coverage was the Putin-approved covert attack on the 2016 election that helped elect Trump. None of the above-mentioned reports—as well as others—alluded to it. This major and successful assault on American democracy appears to have disappeared
in the media’s memory hole—the result of Trump and his crew’s successful long-running disinformation campaign.
You know the drill. For years, whenever the subject of Putin’s pro-Trump operation came up, Trump and his cultists have bellowed, “Hoax!” or “Fake news!” and insisted there was no “collusion.” They and their mouthpieces in the right-wing media (and sometimes the far-left media) have derided references to Putin’s assault on the 2016 campaign as nothing but the fever dreams of deranged Trump critics, derisively dismissing the matter as “Russia, Russia, Russia.” All this seems to have worked—to such an extent that even when Trump’s weird affection for Putin becomes part of the news cycle, the Russian operation that helped land him in the White House is left out of the story and the possible explanation for Trump’s unwavering fondness for Putin.
Still, the importance of that episode cannot be overstated. For the umpteenth time, the Russians did
mount a clandestine scheme to boost Trump in 2016. And the Trump campaign—in a meeting between top Trump aides (Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner) and a Moscow emissary—signaled to the Kremlin that it welcomed this secret intervention. Then Trump and his henchmen aided and abetted the attack by echoing Putin’s denials. The full story is spelled out in a variety of sources, most notably a 2017 US intelligence community assessment, a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee (when it was controlled by Republicans), the final report
from special counsel Robert Mueller, and the comprehensive 2020 bipartisan report issued by the Senate intelligence report. All this official reporting is backed up by private cyber research firms and media accounts. (The book that I wrote with Michael Isikoff,
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, remains a good primer on this sordid chapter.)
It should not be too hard for the political-media world to recall that the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, led to a series of leaks—courtesy of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, who were in cahoots with Russian operatives—that hobbled the Clinton campaign in the final month of the campaign. In a race as tight as the 2016 contest, these Moscow-engineered leaks were definitely one of several critical factors that determined the outcome.
But there was no collusion! Or so Trump and his enablers have endlessly screeched. The meeting between Trump’s top aides and a Kremlin-dispatched go-between—which Trump tried to cover up following the election—might be considered collusion, but let’s put that aside. There was no evidence, at first, that Trump and his lieutenants were directly involved in the hack-and-leak or social media operations conducted by Russian intelligence and Moscow’s trolls. As is often noted, Mueller found no evidence to charge Trump or anyone else with participating with the Russians in a
criminal conspiracy.
Yet the question of criminal collusion was a bit of a red herring. The main thing has always been that Putin tried to subvert an election to help Trump, and Trump and his aides provided cover for this. They sided with the enemy and gave aid and comfort to a foreign adversary. How is that not an act of profound betrayal? Or even treason? Perhaps the greatest treachery in US history since Benedict Arnold. Trump and his minions subsequently defined the issue as collusion—of which they claimed to be innocent—because that deflected attention from Trump’s actual sins. They succeeded.
The collusion issue, however, is not the dead horse many believe it is. That 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee Report—produced and released when the committee was chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican—revealed that, yes, indeed, there had been collusion of sorts. It noted that Manafort, while he was a senior Trump campaign official, had extensive dealing with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the committee describes as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” The committee noted it had obtained “information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” It called Manafort a “grave counterintelligence threat.”
So, Trump’s campaign manager was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign to assist Trump. And there’s more: The report also found information that raised “the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information was redacted. But the details the report disclosed were quite collusion-ish.
I will spare you more of the details. (The Senate Intelligence Committee report is 966 pages long.) There have been plenty of distractions that Trump and his gang have exploited—the so-called pee tape and the Steele dossier (the existence of which I first reported)—to create a smokescreen, but the basic facts have long been established: Putin engaged in information warfare against the United States to aid Trump, and Trump accepted that assistance and joined Putin in covering up the assault.
Because of this Kremlin operation—partly, if not wholly—Trump reached the White House. How can this be ignored when we now discuss—or puzzle over—Trump’s never-ending affection and reverence for Putin? If we’re pondering Trump’s BFF adoration of Putin and Trump's unconventional approach to US-Russia relations, it might be important to note that not long ago Putin subverted the American democratic system on Trump’s behalf and that Trump cooperated with that effort.
There has been too much Trump outrage over the past eight years to keep track of. Trump’s attempt to steal an election and his incitement of a riot to destroy the constitutional order, naturally, has eclipsed most of his other transgressions.
But it should not be difficult to keep front and center the original sin of the Trump presidency. Imagine if years after leaving the White House, Richard Nixon ran once more to be president…and no one mentioned Watergate. (Okay, Nixon could not have campaigned again because he had been elected twice to the office; the 22nd Amendment would have blocked that. But you get my point.)
One of Trump’s most dastardly deeds is inextricably linked to today’s stories about his ceaseless flirtation with Putin, yet it’s not part of the media coverage. It’s not a campaign issue. As Gore Vidal once quipped, “‘USA’ should stand for United States of Amnesia.” Of the many things for which Trump has not been held fully accountable, this is a big one. His post-2020 effort to sabotage American democracy does loom far larger. But that allegedly criminal scheme to retain power failed. The 2016 Russian op he encouraged and supported succeeded magnificently—and it’s an integral part of his enduring relationship with Putin. With Putin and his misdeeds a crucial component of Trump’s presidential origin story, is Trump’s current conduct that strange? “What’s past is prologue,” William Shakespeare told us. But it’s our duty to remember.
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