President Trump is delaying his planned bilateral meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin until after the conclusion of the Mueller probe. It may seem like a small move, but it’s a move in the right direction.
National Security Adviser John Bolton announced the decision Wednesday in a statement to the White House press, saying that “the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year.”
Eyes will roll over a formerly respectable official like Bolton reflexively adopting the president’s crude rhetoric about the Mueller probe, and the president probably intends to use the move to put more pressure on the special counsel to bring his investigation to a swift conclusion. But delaying a vist from Putin until after the conclusion of the investigation gives Trump the best chance to stand strong against Putin whenever it becomes necessary.
During the first few years of the Trump administration, the White House has been Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to the Kremlin. At times, Trump has moved decisively to punish Russia’s aggressive tendencies, including by (begrudgingly) implementing sanctions passed by Congress to punish Russian election meddling, by further sanctioning Russian individuals and firms connected to Russia’s destabilizing actions on Crimea, and by expelling Russian intelligence officers following a Russia-linked assassination on British soil. Further, the State Department announced plans to provide Ukraine with lethal defensive weapons. It is to these actions that Trump refers when he insists that “no president has been tougher on Russia than me.”
But the president has also constantly displayed one enormous weakness when it comes to Russia: He has consistently shied away from holding Putin publicly accountable for working to destabilize American elections in 2016, including by stealing and disseminating the emails of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. From the earliest days of the campaign, and despite the unanimous testimony of U.S. intelligence agencies, Trump has frequently shown a willingness to give Russia the benefit of the doubt, culminating in last week’s embarrassing performance in Helsinki, where Trump stood at the podium feet from the Russian leader and said he held both sides responsible for the interference.
“My people came to me—Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump said. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” (Trump later partially walked back these comments.)
Some of Trump’s more conspiratorial foes see in these mealy-mouthed equivocations the specter of the fabled kompromat—the notion that Putin has something on Trump, and is using it to blackmail him into doing Russia’s bidding. Saner observers largely agree on a different theory: Trump is so irritated by the media’s fixation on Russian election meddling—and his purported complicity in that meddling—that he reflexively fires back against any suggestion that meddling happened at all, even if that means covering for Putin. “He can’t separate meddling from colluding,” is how one source close to Trump described it to Axios. “He can’t publicly express any nuanced view because he thinks it concedes maybe there’s something he did wrong.”
So long as the Mueller investigation looms large in Trump’s mind, any diplomatic engagement with Putin is likely to lead to more spectacles like the one in Helsinki, with Trump more focused on beating down his adversaries in the media than in standing firm against our adversary in the Kremlin. Once the investigation wraps, however, one of two things will happen: Either Mueller will produce evidence that the Trump campaign did collude with the Russians—at which point a lot more will suddenly be at stake than Trump’s posture toward Putin—or he will find that the Trump campaign had no special knowledge of their destabilizing activities. If Trump’s name is thus cleared, and the question of the 2016 election finally settled, the president may finally begin to approach Putin with the same prickly, gung-ho attitude he has consistently shown toward other world leaders.
Many of the president’s critics will likely suggest that the delay of the Putin meeting is intended to improperly pressure Mueller, and indeed this may be the utility Trump sees in the change. But Mueller, who is directly accountable only to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, still retains a great deal of autonomy in his investigation—which was, after all, the entire purpose of appointing a special counsel in the first place. Meanwhile, it is certainly no bad thing for Mueller to feel encouraged to keep things moving at a sprightly clip. As Trump’s continued Putin antics have shown, we’ll all be a lot better off once we can put the 2016 election behind us, one way or another, once and for all.
