Just when it was starting to look like those searching for Russia-related misdeeds by President Trump were going to come up empty, their cups suddenly runneth over.
The free refills seem to be getting poured by the White House itself, at the very moment when some of the president’s biggest critics were beginning to resign themselves to the possibility that there would never be any evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign.
On Monday evening, there was yet another report that Trump sought to influence the Russia investigation, this time unsuccessfully asking two top officials — Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers — to publicly dispute charges of collusion.
The White House also supposedly felt out intelligence officials about getting then FBI Director James Comey to back off the probe into former national security adviser Mike Flynn and Russia, according to the same report.
Flynn announced on Monday through his attorney that he would plead the Fifth and not respond to a Senate Intelligence Committee subpoena. Last year, Flynn criticized a Hillary Clinton IT aide for invoking his Fifth Amendment rights during the private email server investigation.
The White House declined to confirm this version of events. “The White House does not confirm or deny unsubstantiated claims based on illegal leaks from anonymous individuals,” a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “The president will continue to focus on his agenda that he was elected to pursue by the American people.”
But there are other similar reports, plus plenty of the president’s own on the record comments in which he acknowledged having Russia on the brain when he fired Comey as FBI director. Comey is now going to talk with Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller and testify before Congress; his associates are already believed to have leaked a memo he wrote claiming Trump tried to convince him to let Flynn go.
The same day the Comey memo broke, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell — a public Hillary Clinton supporter who was in line to get the job on a more permanent basis if the Democrats won the White House and has described Trump as an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” — said there was no evidence of collusion.
“On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all,” Morell said at a public event sponsored by an intelligence website. “There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”
That’s the opposite of what many rank-and-file Democrats believe. “We no longer just have smoke. We have a raging 10-alarm fire at the White House,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif.
Some liberal voices have nevertheless tried to prepare the Democratic base for the possibility that the investigation won’t turn up criminal wrongdoing or even collusion. For one, Democratic elected officials ranging from institutionalists like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to fierce Trump critics like Rep. Maxine Waters, D, Calif., have admitted the evidence hasn’t emerged yet.
Then there are those in the media. “It is also a simple fact that while news of Russian actions on Trump’s behalf is clear, hard details of coordination between his aides and Putin’s haven’t emerged,” wrote BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, who published the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump.
“Even some Democrats on the [Senate] Intelligence Committee now quietly admit, after several briefings and preliminary inquiries, they don’t expect to find evidence of active, informed collusion between the Trump campaign and known Russian intelligence operatives, though investigators have only just begun reviewing raw intelligence,” reported BuzzFeed’s Ali Watkins, who quoted an unnamed official as saying, “I don’t think the conclusions are going to meet people’s expectations.”
“It is critical to understand that the most important details we need to know about the Russian disruption campaign and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with it may not be crimes,” warned Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall.
“The simple point is that the most important ‘bad acts’ may well not be crimes,” Marshall later added. “That means not only is no one punished but far, far more important, we would never know what happened.”
The Atlantic’s David Frum, a Never Trump conservative, similarly worried that a special counsel would get too caught up in legalities. “The special counsel will investigate whether people in the Trump campaign violated any laws when they gleefully leveraged the fruits of Russian espionage to advance their campaign,” he wrote. “By contrast, what happened in plain sight —cheering rather than condemning a Russian attack on American democracy — will be treated as a non-issue, because it was not criminal, merely anti-democratic and disloyal.”
“You should be prepared to accept that even if the most heinous version of the facts proves to be true,” Frum repeated on CNN, “there may not be any crimes committed or any laws broken. … Even if the worst turns out to be true, it’s a political, probably not a legal, problem.”
“Since the summer before the election, Trump’s critics have been suggesting or sometimes stating outright that Russia is involved with a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of Trump’s inner circle,” wrote Jason Willick in the American Interest. “But now that an unimpeachable bulldog prosecutor has been named to probe these very allegations, the critics seem to be trying to move the goalposts, saying that the real problem isn’t criminality, but the sleaze and outlandish behavior of the Trump campaign more generally…”
“It’s certainly possible to envision an indictment of a low-level operative like Carter Page, or the prosecution of someone like Paul Manafort on matters unrelated to hacking, but the silver bullet that Democrats have been led to expect will sink Trump appears further away than ever,” wrote The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, a progressive who has long been a skeptic of the Russia probe.
When Democrats like Lieu say they say they see smoke rather than fire, however, they are no longer referring to the campaign. They are discussing Trump’s conduct in the White House.
It would be easy to explain away the stories about Trump saying he fired “nut job” Comey to get him off his back about Russia as smears from anonymous leakers, even with the White House’s failure to issue an unequivocal denial, if the president himself didn’t seem preoccupied with the Russia investigation.
In fact, Trump undercut his own administration’s careful messaging on Comey’s firing to raise the Russia probe in his interview with NBC’s Holt and on Twitter. This after defensively mentioned he had been assured he wasn’t under investigation himself in his own statement announcing Comey’s dismissal.
“The Russia concerns were overplayed from the beginning,” said a former Republican national security official. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there shouldn’t have been concerned, but they were overplayed based on the evidence.”
Yet even some who share that assessment now believe that Trump has given his opponents a new opening into what only recently looked like a dead end.
It makes Republicans nervous. Nobody, after all, ever proved that Richard Nixon ordered or even knew about the Watergate burglary before it happened.
