Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment Friday of 13 Russian individuals and 3 businesses effectively exonerated President Trump and his campaign from the media’s allegations of “collusion” with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election.
The indictment also returns the investigation of Russia’s meddling in America’s politics back to where it began – namely, as a counter-intelligence investigation.
The indictment provides a thorough timeline for Russian interference reaching back to the first half or 2014 – long before there was a Trump for President campaign – and shows us how the Russians used identity theft, fraud, and fake social media accounts to carry out their strategic campaign to “sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The indictment shows that these efforts continued into 2017.
Examples of the Russians’ post-election efforts to sow discord included organizing rallies both to support President-elect Donald Trump and to protest his election.
In the indictment, special counsel Mueller twice describes Trump campaign officials’ interactions with Russians as “unwitting.” It is not politically reasonable that at some future date Mueller would then describe other campaign interactions as “collusion.” Such a radical change of direction would be one of the most severe shifts in the difficult history of special counsel investigations, and would shake the confidence of many Americans in Mueller’s work.
Changing the characterization of Trump campaign officials from “unwitting” to “colluding” in any future indictment is unlikely because Americans’ confidence in the special counsel’s results is based largely on the professionalism with which the investigation is conducted, revealed and concluded. The issuing of indictments is the most important way that a special counsel reveals some of the facts the investigation has uncovered as well as advancing charges that can be definitely proven.
We saw just that last Friday with Mueller’s most recent indictment: The revelation of facts and charges that can be proven.
Here’s a final and important point about the indictment: It shows the results of a vast investigative effort that went on unseen by the American public or the media. The extent of that effort can be glimpsed by the extensive details in the indictments about specific bank and PayPal accounts, the theft of real Americans’ identities, as well as the results of intercepted emails between Russian defendants and others (including emails exchanged with their own family members).
The amount of forensic analysis – both financial and electronic – that went into the research behind the indictment is impressive.
The logical next step for this investigation is not in the direction of Trump or his campaign as the “unwitting” beneficiaries of some of the Russians’ efforts, rather it would be to address the Russian hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
And while it is no doubt mildly embarrassing for President Trump to have had the Russians targeting his opponents during the 2016 election, he can take comfort in the indictment’s implicit exoneration of his campaign from any intentional collusion with the Russians.
Ken Cuccinelli was the 46th attorney general of Virginia and is the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund.
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