It has now been more than nine months since special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, began his investigation of alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia, obstruction, and perhaps other things as well. While Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey may have been the spark leading to the special counsel’s appointment, a broader mix of suspicion about Trump’s financial opacity, unease at Trump’s behavior, partisanship, and conspiracy theories has fueled the probe and the media coverage surrounding it.
Make no mistake: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a threat. It was a threat when former President George W. Bush looked into Putin’s soul and left reassured he had one. It was a threat when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented a silly plastic re-set button to her Russian counterpart, and it was a threat when former President Barack Obama ridiculed Mitt Romney for identifying Russia as a key national security challenge to the United States. The simple fact is that both Democrats and Republicans have acted naively toward Russia since the late President Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, a former KGB operative.
While journalists scramble to identify Kremlin attempts to compromise Republican operatives and advisers, they are dropping the ball if they don’t understand that Moscow sought to play both sides of the American political spectrum. Rather than put all their eggs in one basket, Putin’s goal was simply to have his hands on every basket. Russia’s mechanisms of influence undermined not only the integrity of some of Trump’s closest advisers but also Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.
Consider Ellen Tauscher, a former congresswoman, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs during Hillary Clinton’s tenure, and subsequently an adviser and surrogate for Hillary Clinton as she prepared her 2016 run. After leaving the State Department, Tauscher joined the Atlantic Council as vice chair of its Scowcroft Center. Using her Atlantic Council perch, she unveiled a new initiative which she named “Mutually Assured Stability.”
In a 2013 press release, since removed from the Atlantic Council website but available through archive.org, Tauscher and former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov announced:
The initiative and the reports it produced were pabulum, diplomatic rhetoric geared around the idea that the United States and Russia should emerge from a framework of suspicion and work together in the 21st century. What is amazing that Tauscher did not appear troubled that her institutional partner in the initiative was the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank created by the decree of the Russian president as a nonprofit partnership with the Kremlin in order to act as the Russian government’s representative in the NGO world. By definition, then, any joint funding for Tauscher’s initiative appears to have originated in the Kremlin for the purpose of influencing the Washington debate. Among RIAC’s institutional partners is RT (formerly Russia Today) the Kremlin’s chief TV outlet for Russian propaganda to the United States and Europe. How sad it is that the strategic adviser to “Ready for Clinton,” media surrogate for Clinton, and likely recipient of a senior national security post in a Hillary Clinton White House, would legitimize what it is fair to conclude was a Kremlin influence operation.
Today, Democrats are correct that Russian intentions were not benign in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Frankly, Russian intentions had not been benign for the century preceding that as well. Democrats now see eye-to-eye with many traditional Republicans, including the Republican Party’s nominees for president in 2008 and 2012. While the possible collusion Mueller’s team investigates seems in practice to be largely subjective, to focus on only a handful of Trump aides makes a partisan issue out of a far broader problem with Washington’s political culture. Russian organizations and operatives seem to have had questionable relations with campaign advisers across the spectrum.
Certainly, Putin seeks to play American politics to what he sees as Russia’s advantage. The real scandal, however, is how so many people from each campaign allowed their judgment to be compromised by their relationship to the Russian government or its various shell organizations.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
