On February 16, 2017, less than a month after he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump made a categorical declaration. “I have nothing to do with Russia,” he said. “To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”
He’s said this—or a version of it—numerous times since he announced his presidential bid three years ago. He made the claims more frequently, and more emphatically, as he found success in politics. On July 27, 2016, shortly after he’d officially become the Republican presidential nominee, Trump declared, in the exact same language he’d use as president. “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
On October 10, 2016, during the second presidential debate, Trump responded to claims from Hillary Clinton that Russia was working on his behalf by saying: “I know nothing about Russia. I know about Russia, but I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia. I don’t deal there. I have no businesses there. I have no loans from Russia.”
“I have nothing to do with Russia. I never did,” Trump said in a July 2018 interview.
“On at least 23 occasions since the summer of 2016, Mr. Trump has said either that he had ‘nothing’ to do with Russia, or that he has ‘no deals,’ no investments and no ‘business’ in Russia,” according to the New York Times.
Virtually all of those statements were misleading. Many of them were lies.
They’ve been exposed as lies not primarily by Trump’s critics but by those closest to him. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate conference that Russians accounted for a significant part of the Trump’s business interests. “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he said. “Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of my pouring in from Russia.”
Trump’s younger son reportedly made similar claims, telling author James Dodson in regards to golf-course financing, “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
And on Thursday, Trump’s longtime confidant and lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump’s business interests in Russia in order to protect candidate Trump’s electoral prospects. Cohen, who led the efforts, told investigators that Trump’s efforts to establish a Trump Tower Moscow continued into June 2016, weeks after Trump had become the de facto GOP nominee and long after Cohen had told Congress they’d ended. Cohen told investigators that his efforts included direct dealings with an adviser to Vladimir Putin and that he kept Trump and his family members briefed on the progress.
Following the disclosure of Cohen’s plea, Trump told reporters that his longtime adviser was lying. But the president nonetheless offered an explanation for the behavior Cohen described. “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
On Friday morning, Trump tweeted an acknowledgement of his business pursuits in Russia.
Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2018
Trump has gone from insisting that he had “nothing to do with Russia” to justifying his business efforts there. His false claim that “no person that I deal with” works with Russia has been superseded by an admission from one of his closest advisers that he worked with an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin to advance Trump’s business interests. His insistence that his team hadn’t even had contacts with Russians has given way to a flood of confirmed reporting about the contacts his associates had with Russians.
While there is much that remains unclear about Donald Trump and Russia, what we do know is deeply troubling. Trump lied repeatedly about his dealings with a hostile adversary while that hostile adversary worked to get him elected president. Trump has for years gone out of his way to excuse Vladimir Putin’s misdeeds. On more than one occasion, Trump has publicly sided with the anti-American authoritarian over the U.S. intelligence community.
Why has Trump behaved this way? We don’t know. He lies all the time, about matters large and small. And then, when he’s caught, he simply pretends that he hadn’t lied in the first place. The behavior is pathological but the lies are not dispositive.
It remains important not to let our conclusions get ahead of the evidence. But we seem closer with each passing day to a better understanding of what happened with Trump, Russia and the 2016 election.
The sooner, the better.
