It’s not the sort of news President Trump’s Democratic adversaries were hoping for, but it was far from nothing. On Monday we learned of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates. We also learned that a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos, had already pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators.
Whether anybody on the Trump campaign colluded with Russia or not, Manafort and Gates appear to be guilty, at the very least, of tax evasion and lying to investigators. From 2010 to 2014, according to the indictment, the pair accepted payments totaling more than $75 million from pro-Russian entities in Ukraine—entities tied to the ousted president Victor Yanukovych—and had the money wired to bank accounts in Cyprus and the tiny Caribbean state of St. Vincent. (Yanukovych was driven from office in 2014 on the grounds that he was a Russian stooge. He’s wanted in Ukraine for treason and now resides in Russia.) It’s not entirely clear if Manafort and Gates are guilty of laundering illegal money, as the indictment alleges, or simply of hiding vast sums of technically lawful cash from the IRS and the FBI. But a guilty verdict for either would almost certainly land Manafort and Gates in prison.
Mueller’s charge is to investigate “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” The Manafort-Gates indictment would appear to be one of those matters “aris[ing] directly from the investigation.” It has nothing directly to do with the Trump campaign colluding with the Russian government. Still, it’s now apparent that the head of Trump’s presidential campaign during the summer of 2016 had extensive and secret ties to—and presumably sympathy with—Kremlin-backed forces in Ukraine. One assumes Mueller’s team will press Manafort and Gates for information about possible collusion between the campaign and the Russian government, but their indictment isn’t about collusion.
The Papadopoulos indictment contains no real evidence of collusion. Papadopoulos, a 30-year-old American-born “energy consultant” based in London, was a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. In that capacity he met with several people purporting to have close ties with Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Vladimir Putin himself. Mainly, Papadopoulos tried to set up a meeting between Russian officials and representatives Trump campaign; he even suggested to an unnamed contact on the campaign that he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin. When it was suggested to Papadopoulos by one of his Russian contacts that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, he expressed keen interest to his contact on the Trump campaign.
All of this casts the heretofore virtually unknown Papadopoulos in an unflattering light: prone to exaggerating the importance of his political connections, and (like Donald Trump Jr.) eager to solicit “dirt” on an American political candidate from a hostile government. But Papadopoulos was a bit player in the Trump campaign. It’s hard to imagine anyone covering the 2016 election looking for insights into the campaign’s operations or policies and thinking, Get Papadopoulos on the phone! And his self-promotional maneuvering seems to have resulted in no meetings or transfer of information.
The whole sordid episode reminds us just how dishonest American electoral politics has become. Whether anybody on the Trump campaign actually cut a deal with the Russian government to harm the Clinton campaign, Team Trump wasn’t offended by the idea. The head of the Trump campaign was so deeply invested in pro-Russian interests and compromised by Russian affiliations as to be almost a Kremlin hack. Campaign aides from low-level advisory board members (Papadopoulos) to top-level decision-makers (Trump Jr., Manafort, Kushner) showed no aversion to the prospect of accepting “dirt” on their chief opponent.
The Democrats are hardly guiltless here, either. The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign paid the political consultancy Fusion GPS to find scandalous information on Donald Trump, and when they got what they paid for, they were happy to pass it on to reporters as though it were the result of legitimate research rather than what they knew it to be: a wild concoction of speculation and Russian disinformation. That Clinton campaign officials knew what they were doing is evident by the fact that they paid Fusion GPS through a law firm, thus keeping Fusion’s name out of the campaign’s financial disclosures.
It’s hard not to conclude that political campaigns in America are staffed mostly by people willing to do almost anything if it damages their opponents. Soliciting rumors and disinformation from a hostile regime just to win an election? Sure.
And we wonder why Americans have soured on politics.
