Helsinki summit: intel personnel’s quandary; standards for impeachment; tracing Guccifer 2.0, and more

Standards for impeachment: Trump’s defense of Putin in the face of Russia’s electoral attacks (Bob Bauer, Lawfare)
Robert Mueller produced yet another detailed masterwork last week, documenting the seriousness of the Russian attack on the electoral process in 2016. The president wasted no time in scorning his inquiry. Shortly after reaching foreign soil ahead of his  meeting with Vladimir Putin, he referred to the Russia probe as a merely “political problem,” no more than “pure stupidity.”  It was not a throwaway remark. President Trump took up the point yet again at the Helsinki press conference on Monday with an attack on the special counsel’s probe as “ridiculous” and “ a disaster for our country,” which he alleges to have had only a “negative impact” on U.S.-Russian relations.  He was at first mostly silent as the Russian president denied again any interference; Trump managed only to report that Putin “feels very strongly” in registering this denial.” But then, in a later exchange, President Trump aligned himself with Vladimir  Putin’s rejection of the American intelligence community findings.
Public discussion of possible impeachment charges against Trump has focused so far on issues of obstruction of justice or evidence of his and/or his campaign’s collusion with the Russians in their bid to influence the 2016 presidential election. It is time to add to that list his refusal to acknowledge openly and respond appropriately to the Russian threat. The Mueller indictment released Friday establishes beyond question the scope and seriousness of the threat from Russia, and Trump’s response confirms that he will persist in actively resisting these findings. In effect, he will stand with the Russian president against the U.S. law enforcement, defense and intelligence communities, and also without regard to the Senate intelligence committee’s bipartisan conclusion about the fact and extent of Russian electoral intervention.

….

In his just-published case against the impeachment of Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz does not directly address the question of Trump’s affinity for Putin and its effects on foreign policy. He argues, however, that as a matter of constitutional law a president cannot be impeached unless the conduct before Congress is a crime, not merely cause to question his or her fitness for office. Dershowitz would distinguish between an impeachable offense, based on criminal conduct, and what he calls a “political sin.” 

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Dershowitz’s argument is wrong in key particulars, most notably in his understanding of federal campaign finance law. But the larger problem with the argument is its central thesis: that even “extreme” conduct by a president, if it does not violate the law, cannot support impeachment. He takes his case to the limits, citing another extreme hypothetical of a president who, accepting a Russian “original” claim to Alaska, acquiesces in its seizure of the state. Impeachable? No, says Dershowitz, though he accepts that others might disagree.

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The argument that a president is not subject to impeachment for this pattern of conduct is hard to fathom. The behavior cannot easily be broken down into discrete “crimes,” but it is well within range of the serious, indeed dangerous, “abuse or violation” of public trust that justifies a discussion of impeachment. It is remarkable how “extreme” it seems in the hypothetical form; but as extreme as it may seem, it is not hypothetical.

Is this the kind of “maladministration” that the Founders consciously removed from the category of impeachable offenses—that is, a question of bad policy or incompetence in executing it? Assume one gives the president the benefit of the doubt and accepts that his behavior on the Russia issue is not just pique at any suggestion that his electoral victory was tainted. Perhaps he imagines that he is making better “policy.” He might even have believed that it was in the interests of an adjustment in “policy” toward Russia that he should win the election and encourage and accept Putin’s assistance toward that end. He might also have believed that firing James Comey would justifiably subordinate law enforcement interests—especially ones he so intensely discounts— to his judgment of the larger policy imperatives. And to make all this work, he might think he can lie to the public about the Russian behavior, to limit public pressure on him to take more vigorous actions to counter Kremlin electoral interference. 

But not just any reason satisfactory to a president represents a legitimate “policy” judgment to which he can appeal in defending against the constitutional impeachment process. Presidents can take to extremes their personal judgments and preferences—their choice of ends and their selection of the means to those ends—and they may do so with great confidence in their instincts and in the tactics and strategies that brought them fame and fortune when they were private citizens. This cannot be passed off as policymaking. 

And when presidents engage in such behavior, they may or may not commit crimes but they face the question of whether they are losing their claim on the office. It is a question that requires being asked with some urgency after Helsinki, as we see—to the degree that it is possible—what more comes out of the one-on-one meeting between the friendly “competitors.”

Intel chiefs won’t say if they’ll resign over Trump’s betrayal (Spencer Ackerman, Daily Beast)
The president all-but-said he trusts Vladimir Putin more than own intelligence agencies. Will the heads of those agencies quit as a result?

What do you do now, U.S. national security leaders? (Kevin Baron, Defense One)
A key senator says Trump violated his oath of office. An ex-CIA boss says his defense of Putin was “nothing short of treasonous.”

Russia-NRA arrest: This is as close as it gets to collusion (Betsy Woodruff, Daily Beast)
For all the indictments, arrests, and guilty pleas in the far-flung investigation into Russian influence, none has come close to alleging collusion. Until Maria Butina was nabbed.

Tracing Guccifer 2.0’s many tentacles in the 2016 election (David E. Sanger, Jim Rutenberg, and Eric Lipton, New York Times)
The Friday indictment of twelve high-level Russian intelligence operatives for interfering in the 2016 president election in order to secure Donald Trump’s victory, offers a new look at the central role of Guccifer 2.0, the digital persona alleged to have been set up by Russian military intelligence, which passed the stolen Democratic documents and misinformation to WikiLeaks and some Americans, who then spread it through social media and news organizations. The indictment provides never-before-seen detail of how the Russian cyberspies operated, based on intercepts that had to have come from American, British or Dutch intelligence, interviews in recent months show. All three eventually got into the Russian networks, but it was the British who had first warned the National Security Agency that they were seeing the DNC’s messages running through communications lines controlled by the Russian military intelligence service, called the GRU.

Mueller probe: Russian hackers stole half a million voters’ information in 2016 (Matt Vasilogambros, Governing)
Members of Russian military intelligence attempted to infiltrate local election administration systems during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, stealing the voter information of 500,000 Americans, according to indictments announced Friday by Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. deputy attorney general.