This week Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. It was an important move, and one that President Donald Trump made unavoidable with his erratic and irresponsible behavior over the past fortnight.
It all began on May 9 when Trump fired FBI director James Comey. For two days, the White House misled the American public about how and why this dismissal took place. The White House emphasized Comey’s handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server, which Rosenstein had reviewed and criticized in a memorandum for his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The attorney general, in turn, had recommended a change of leadership at the FBI. President Trump, his spokespeople insisted, was simply implementing this recommendation.
White House officials were working hard to create the impression that the decision to fire Comey had originated somewhere other than in the Oval Office. But the claim was false. The president had asked that the case against Comey be constructed to justify a decision he’d already made. Rosenstein later told the Senate that he’d known Comey would be fired even before he drafted his memorandum. In an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt on May 11, Trump acknowledged that the decision to fire Comey was his alone and one he was going to make without regard to what Rosenstein and Sessions recommended. “I was going to fire Comey,” he said. “My decision.”
On May 12, Trump threatened the ex-FBI director on Twitter: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” With Trump, there’s always the temptation to dismiss such outbursts as adolescent bluster. But he has a long history of surreptitious taping in his business career, and White House spokesman Sean Spicer refused to deny that Trump was recording Oval Office conversations when asked repeatedly about the possibility.
On May 15, the Washington Post reported that Trump had disclosed highly classified information in an Oval Office meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, related to th e threat of ISIS-engineered explosives concealed in laptop computers, came from an ally and was allegedly shared without its permission. The White House at first categorically denied the claims, calling the story “as reported .  .  . false.” But in public comments over the next 48 hours, officials confirmed many of the details.
On May 16, the New York Times reported that Comey had written official memos about each of his interactions with Trump. In one of them, describing a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office on February 14, Comey claims that Trump asked him to end the FBI’s investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn. “I hope you can let this go,” Trump told Comey. The White House has denied that this happened.
The next day, Rosenstein named former FBI director Robert Mueller special counsel for the investigation of “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.” The order allows Mueller to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
The White House initially welcomed the news. “As I have stated many times,” the president said in a press release, “a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know—there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.” But by early Thursday morning, May 18, the worm had turned and Trump had taken to Twitter: “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel [sic] appointed!” And “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”
What to make of all this? There certainly is plenty to investigate. And the question of who should properly do the investigating is a knotty one, admitting of no simple answer. The liabilities of special prosecutors are well known and have been articulated in these pages on several occasions over the last two decades: Such investigations can spin out of control; prosecutors can feel undue pressure to seek scalps, so as to justify work that has stretched out for months or years; and so on.
That said, there is little evidence that the current appointment was ill-motivated. The decision was in the hands of Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, because Attorney General Jeff Sessions had previously recused himself in matters related to the FBI’s Russia investigation after it was discovered he’d testified falsely—he says accidentally—that he had had no contact with Russian government officials during the campaign. Sessions had in fact hosted Kislyak in his Capitol Hill office in September.
While Sessions’s failure to disclose an official meeting when asked about his contacts with Russians raised eyebrows, nobody thinks it is evidence that he is a secret Putin stooge. But many others in Trump’s coterie of advisers have had significant dealings with Russia, relationships likely to be at the center of Mueller’s probe.
Paul Manafort, who served for a time last summer as chairman of the Trump campaign, has longstanding connections to Vladimir Putin’s allies. After stints advising dictators in the Philippines and Zaire, the political consultant began working for Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych in 2005, helping restore his pro-Putin party to power in 2010. In 2006, Manafort also took on Russian aluminum billionaire Oleg Deripaska as a client—signing, according to the Associated Press, a $10-million-per-year contract with Deripaska to “advance Putin’s interests.” Manafort and Deripaska (who is suing the AP for libel) both deny the allegations. Manafort came aboard team Trump in May 2016, offering to work for free. In August, the New York Times published findings from a “secret ledger” showing $12.7 million in off-the-books cash payments to Manafort from Yanukovych’s party. Five days later, he resigned from the Trump campaign.
Manafort’s former business partner and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone predicted WikiLeaks’ disclosure of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails, said to have been procured by a Russian hack. In August, Stone tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel.” WikiLeaks released Podesta’s emails in October. Stone claims he enjoyed “back-channel communications” with WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange through a “very good mutual friend.”
Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn was fired from the administration after 24 days for falsely characterizing calls he made to Kislyak after the election in November. In their increasingly frequent exchanges after Trump won the election, Flynn reportedly discussed setting up a backchannel for communication between Putin and Trump—a way for the two world leaders to forge diplomatic relations out of view of national security bureaucrats, whom Trump and Flynn believe are meddlesome and vindictive. Among other matters under federal scrutiny, the Pentagon is investigating the retired general’s failure to obtain approval for a paid public appearance in Moscow, alongside Putin, at an anniversary party for the Russian propaganda network Russia Today in December 2015. Flynn has offered to testify to the FBI and to House and Senate investigators, but only in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, is currently under FBI investigation for his ties to Russia—and has been for the better part of a year. He worked in Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office and advised Russian oil companies before the Trump campaign brought him on in March 2016. On a trip to Moscow last summer, while he was working for the Trump campaign, Page gave a speech critical of the U.S. sanctions imposed after Russian aggression in Crimea and Ukraine. By September, Page had left the campaign amid allegations that he was in contact with high-ranking Russians while working to elect Donald Trump.
Trump defenders are fond of saying there’s no hard evidence of collusion between Trump associates and the Russian government. Fair enough. But Trump’s first national security adviser resigned because of misleading claims he made in relation to his contacts with a Russian official. Trump’s campaign chairman resigned amid questions about his work for pro-Putin politicians and entities. And a foreign policy adviser quit after questions about his continuing contact with Russians. Justifiably or not, such a string of coincidences raises suspicions. The president himself will benefit enormously if an investigation widely seen as thorough, professional, impartial, and independent dispels them.
In naming Mueller as special counsel, Rosenstein cautioned against assuming that laws have been broken and prosecutions are inevitable. It’s good advice. There is no reason to assume that this will be a witch hunt.
As Michael Warren and Jenna Lifhits report elsewhere in this issue, Robert Mueller is a man of integrity. Nothing in his record suggests the investigation he conducts will be anything other than serious and thorough, driven by facts and evidence. Such an investigation, we need hardly add, would stand in dramatic and welcome contrast to the partisan sniping and half-truths that have dominated the discourse in Washington over the past six months. Only those who thrive on ideological warfare would be disappointed.
The White House’s initial reaction—to welcome a chance to lay suspicions to rest—is one no doubt shared by millions of Americans. We share it ourselves. We welcome the investigation.
