In the Russia investigation, President Trump has decided that the best defense is a good offense.
It is a testament to how swiftly the news cycle moves in Trump’s America that Thursday’s much-anticipated meetings with lawmakers concerning the Russia probe were largely buried under headlines about the aborted North Korea summit. Their significance should not be lost, however.
Trump has abandoned his previous legal team’s passive strategy of handing over documents to special counsel Robert Mueller and hoping for the best, punctuated by the occasional Twitter venting session. The president is now trying to reframe the entire probe as a series of Democratic dirty tricks against him and his 2016 campaign, with his tweets getting followed up by action promoting his counternarrative.
According to Trump and his allies, “Russiagate” is now “Spygate” (for which New England Patriots fans everywhere thank him). The real issue in this telling is the surveillance of Trump’s campaign under a Democratic administration and the use of an FBI informant, described by Trump as a “spy,” to gather dirt.
Now Trump is hitting back against his enemies in the “deep state,” the Obama administration, and the Democratic congressional caucus. He is trying to get information being protected by the Justice Department and the FBI to allies like Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., two committee chairmen who complained they were being stonewalled. And he is naming names.
“[Former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper has now admitted that there was Spying in my campaign,” Trump tweeted on Thursday morning. “Large dollars were paid to the Spy, far beyond normal. Starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. SPYGATE — a terrible thing!”
“They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence which is what they do,” Clapper said earlier this week on ABC’s “The View.”
All this comes amid signs that outside of Democratic voters, who are as passionate as ever about getting to the bottom of what happened during the 2016 presidential election, the public’s patience with the Russia investigation is starting to wear thin.
Trump’s public relations campaign against the Russia “witch hunt” has gained support among House conservatives, who have themselves become increasingly critical of Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and beleaguered Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Candidates running in Republican primaries have slammed the investigation and said it is time for it to wind down. Pro-Trump television and radio commentators call for Mueller to be fired, or even investigated himself.
It is unclear whether any minds were changed by the Trump-Russia information lawmakers viewed Thursday. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, was defiant afterward, insisting there was “no evidence” a spy was placed inside the Trump campaign.
But the political argument has expanded beyond Russian interference designed to swing the election to Trump to include “alternative facts” — including the president’s own insistence that Democratic appointees and deep state bureaucrats intervened to swing the election in the opposite direction.
Even if this ultimately turns out not to be the case, the discussion now includes the Christopher Steele dossier, its origins as a Democratic opposition research document, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, wiretapping, and Stefan Halper.
“[T]he investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 election was created as a cover for domestic interference with the 2016 election,” writes columnist Mark Steyn.
There is a more sophisticated version of the case the president is making. “The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation,” Andrew McCarthy contends. “With the blessing of the Obama White House, they took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans — Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries.”
The counterargument that all was proper is not well served by Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and fired FBI Director James Comey all going around on television behaving like partisan opponents of the president. And Trump now has Rudy Giuliani on TV arguing with them, however confusingly.
Trump delights in it all.
“Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State,” Trump tweeted Wednesday. “They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!”
