On October 30, special prosecutor Robert Mueller indicted President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and deputy chairman Rick Gates on 12 charges, including money laundering, false statements, and conspiracy against the United States, related to their work with Ukrainian political entities. That same day, Mueller’s team revealed that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, had pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with Russians, which included discussing the possibility of the Trump campaign obtaining thousands of hacked emails with “dirt” on rival Hillary Clinton.
Those headlines alone could mark the start of a sweeping scandal of the sort Washington hasn’t seen in years. But they are just two of a handful of shady stories, all involving Russia, that raise serious concerns about the vulnerability of America’s political institutions to meddling from the Kremlin.
The week before the Mueller indictments, news broke—after months of speculation and the threat of congressional subpoenas—that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the infamous “dossier” of unverified intelligence about Trump’s Russian connections that was privately circulated in Washington prior to last year’s election and published after it by BuzzFeed. Marc Elias, the general counsel of the Clinton campaign, used his law firm Perkins Coie as an intermediary to hire opposition research firm Fusion GPS to collect damaging information about Trump. Former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta both told the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors (the former in October, the latter in September) that they knew nothing of the Democrats’ funding of Fusion GPS. Sitting next to Podesta during his testimony was his personal lawyer—Marc Elias. As the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman tweeted, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” Times reporter Kenneth Vogel was even more specific: “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying, ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’ ”
Another scandal is an old one made new. In 2015, former Republican speechwriter Peter Schweizer charged in his book Clinton Cash that a Russian state-owned corporation received U.S. approval to buy a majority share in Uranium One, which held 20 percent of America’s strategically vital uranium production capacity, after money from the company’s investors flowed into the Clinton Foundation. Schweizer’s allegations were largely corroborated by independent reporting by the New York Times. All told, tens of millions of dollars from Uranium One investors went to the Clinton Foundation.
An October 17 report in the Hill revealed significant new information. Even as the Obama administration was approving the deal, with direct involvement from the Clinton State Department, the FBI was investigating Russian extortion and bribery efforts to gain control of American energy interests. The Trump administration recently took the unusual move of removing the gag order on an FBI informant in the case, which will allow him to testify before an interested Republican-led Congress about the matter.
These scandals are complicated matters whose details can be hard to follow. Press coverage of each is heavily colored by partisan and personal interests that sometimes overlap. The Mueller indictments have sparked a media feeding frenzy; what’s less obvious is that they suggest a wider and more alarming story.
Almost nothing is surprising about the charges Manafort and Gates hid $75 million they received for their work for the pro-Russian government and political parties in Ukraine. Manafort was long fingered as a frontman for Russian interests; it was widely reported when he left the Trump campaign last fall under a cloud of scandal surrounding his consulting work. “It’s important to note that these investigations predate Manafort’s time as head of the Trump campaign,” concedes the Washington Post. The FBI was investigating Manafort as early as 2014.
But Manafort and Gates’s suspect lobbying activities might have been a bipartisan affair. Mueller’s indictment notes that the pair farmed out some of their Ukraine work to two unnamed organizations; the press has identified them as the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs. The Podesta Group, one of Washington’s most lucrative lobbying concerns, was founded by brothers and Democratic fundraisers Tony and John Podesta (the latter left the shop years ago). The Podesta Group worked with Manafort on behalf of an organization known as the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a front for former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian government. Both organizations claim they didn’t know the center was a front for foreign interests; Mueller’s team is investigating. But already, Tony Podesta has resigned from his eponymous firm—the same day the Mueller indictments came down. The real scandal may end up being not just the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia but the extent to which Washington’s influence-peddling industry was already in cahoots with pro-Putin interests.
The charges against Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos speak more directly to the issue of collusion. Papadopoulos lied to investigators about the timeline of his contacts with people claiming connections to the Kremlin, falsely stating he’d met them before he joined the campaign. He actively pursued the prospect of obtaining stolen emails from the Russians, possibly with approval from other campaign officials. According to court documents, Sam Clovis, Papadopoulos’s supervisor on the Trump campaign, told him “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to “make the trip, if it is feasible,” to Russia for a planned off-the-record meeting. Clovis denies any wrongdoing and is said to be cooperating with Mueller’s probe, but on November 2 he withdrew his nomination for a high-level job in the administration.
Ultimately, Papadopoulos didn’t come close to securing any stolen emails. And in fact, Russia might have been manipulating both campaigns. One telling detail, courtesy of the Washington Post: “Sergei Millian, who was a key source of information contained in a dossier of information about Trump’s ties to Russia, told people around him that he was in contact with Papadopoulos during the campaign.”
While much of Washington is focused on the domestic political ramifications of these scandals and the possibility of overt collusion with Russia, it could turn out that Moscow didn’t actually have a rooting interest in the 2016 election. Russia’s real purpose may simply have been to exploit corruption and partisan divides to weaken our institutions, undermine American confidence, and soften opposition to its global agenda. If that’s the case, since Washington is now buried in Russia-related scandals, it’s hard not to conclude that the Kremlin has had remarkable success.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
