The obstruction was the collusion?; 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset; The dueling narratives on Trump and Russia, and more

Although I find the president’s behavior shocking, I am not shocked, or at least not surprised, at the FBI’s investigative response. The idea that the original and overarching FBI investigation concerned Russia, “period, full stop,” as Jim Baker apparently testified to Congress, and that the investigation then evolved to include the Trump campaign and eventually the president himself, is the expected sequence of events. The Russians have been engaged in election interference of one sort or another for years—even before Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin offered money to Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election. So one would expect the FBI to be investigating the Russians in connection with the 2016 election and then to follow the evidence where it led.
The opposite sequence, in which a criminal investigation of Trump or the Trump organization led to the Russians, would have been more unusual, but even that would not be totally unprecedented. Sometimes a criminal investigation morphs into a counterintelligence investigation.
But the idea that a counterintelligence investigation or other FBI counterintelligence  work involving Russian election interference evolved to include the Trump campaign is hardly news. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment order of Special Counsel Robert Mueller directs Mueller to continue the investigation cited by Comey in his March 2017 congressional testimony and specifically includes “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
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What is most interesting about this is that the FBI has a detailed manual, a set of standard procedures, that regulate its investigations of political candidates and public officials. So, while the case of President Trump is very unusual and no set of procedures could offer complete guidance in such a case, the FBI could at least anchor itself in these as a matter of good order. I don’t know anything about how the internal deliberations went, and perhaps troubling information about them will become public. But as I have said before, for now at least I do not think there is any credible claim that these DIOG procedures were violated.

Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset (Max Boot, Washington Post)
Here is some of the evidence suggesting “Individual 1” could be a Russian “asset”:

— Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in an invaluable New York magazine article: “From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.” According to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress, Trump was even pursuing his dream of building a Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign with the help of a Vladimir Putin aide. These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

— The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

— Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening”), on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

— There were, according to the Moscow Project, “101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives,” and “the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.” The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and a Kremlin emissary promising dirt on Clinton. Donald Trump Jr.’s reaction to the offer of Russian assistance? “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

— The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

— Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

— Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. (Stone has denied it .)

— Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing” — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. As Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes argues, “the obstruction was the collusion” — Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.

— Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He has accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.

— Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.

— Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO — he has suggested that France should leave the E.U. and that the United States should leave NATO, reportedly saying, “NATO is as bad as NAFTA.” The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

— Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

— Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of allied nations. Trump even praised Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats and, notwithstanding instruction from his aides (“DO NOT CONGRATULATE”), congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.

— Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, according to a Post article on Saturday, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials . . . Several officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki.”

— Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

— Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

— Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

— Trump is sowing chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown and “acting” appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.

Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence:

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I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.
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This is hardly a “beyond a reasonable doubt” case that Trump is a Russian agent — certainly not in the way that Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames were. But it is a strong, circumstantial case that Trump is, as former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden warned during the 2016 campaign, “an unwitting agent of the Russian federation” (Morell) or a “useful fool” who is “manipulated by Moscow” (Hayden). If Trump isn’t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.

Subpoena the interpreter (David Frum, The Atlantic)
There are real costs to such a move—but the public needs to know what was said between Trump and Putin.
Now Congress faces a very hard question: Subpoena President Donald Trump’s translator, or not?
On Saturday, The Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported new details of the extreme things done by Trump to conceal his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin from even the senior-most members of Trump’s own administration. Trump even reportedly seized the interpreter’s notes after one of his meetings, the Trump-Putin sit-down at the Hamburg G20 meeting in July 2017. Even more disturbingly, Trump and Putin met privately a second time at Hamburg—with no American present. In an act of astonishing recklessness, Trump relied entirely on the Russian interpreter, preventing any U.S. record-keeping at all.
All this would be unusual enough for any president. It is more than suspicious for a president being formally investigated by the FBI as a possible Russian-intelligence asset.
Concern focuses most on Trump’s meetings with Putin at the Helsinki summit in July 2018. The Russian president, and the American president helped into office by the Russian president, met for two hours with no aides. No agenda was published before the meeting, no communiqué issued afterward. The Russian side later claimed that a number of agreements had been reached at the summit. Nobody on the American side seemed to know whether this was true. At a press conference four days after the meeting, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said, “I’m not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened in Helsinki.”
There’s only one American who does know: Marina Gross, the professional interpreter who assisted Trump.
Should she be asked? It’s a tough, tough, tough question.
Arguments against:

·  A friend who holds a senior foreign-policy position in an EU government was absolutely horrified at the prospect of a subpoena for Gross. No admirer of Trump’s, this person felt such a subpoena would create a new precedent that would shadow all future confidential presidential conversations with non-English-speaking heads of government, allied as well as adversarial.

·  The Trump administration would surely raise an executive-privilege objection. In the 1974 caseU.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court rejected an absolute claim of internal privilege within the executive branch. But it acknowledged “the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties.” The court stressed that this privilege was at its strongest in military and diplomatic affairs, which would presumably describe the Helsinki meeting.

·  There is a nontrivial possibility that Gross might refuse to testify. Interpreters have a strong professional code of confidentiality. This code is not recognized in law, but like a newspaper reporter protecting his or her sources, Gross might feel honor-bound to uphold the code anyway—risking a contempt citation or even jail. Should she be put in that position?

Against those arguments is this fact: We are facing very possibly the worst scandal in the history of the U.S. government. Previous high-profile cases of disloyalty to the United States—Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s betrayal of atomic secrets to the U.S.S.R.; Secretary of War John B. Floyd’s allowing federal arsenals to fall into secessionist hands in 1861—did not involve presidents. Previous presidential scandals did not involve allegations of disloyalty.
Is the president of the United States a Russian asset? Is he subject to Russian blackmail? Is he at this hour conniving with the Russian president against the interests of the United States? These are haunting questions, and Trump’s own determination to defy normal presidential operating procedures to keep secret his private conversations with Putin only lends credibility to the worst suspicions.
I wrote in my book Trumpocracy about the “autoimmune disorders” triggered by this most corrupt, most authoritarian, and perhaps most compromised of all presidencies. Trump’s breaches of norms force other agencies of government to breach norms in reply, in order to protect supreme public interests threatened by Trump. These norm-breaches by the other agencies do genuine harm, just as the aggressive autoimmune responses of the human body do real harm. But the alternative—suppressing all immune responses—is to allow the infection to fester and eventually destroy the host it occupies.
The scandal of the Trump presidency leaves Americans only bad choices. Powers and privileges essential to the functioning of an honest and patriotic presidency are called into question by this dishonest and unpatriotic presidency. Succeeding presidents and Congresses will have to find a way to restore or replace busted norms with new ones—but pretending now that the old rules can function as intended is not only delusive, but dangerous.
Subpoena the interpreter now; write a new law formalizing the confidentiality of interpretation later.

Trump’s AG nominee pledges to allow Mueller to complete investigation (Marianne Levine, Politico)
Attorney General nominee William Barr will pledge this week to allow special counsel Robert Mueller to complete his investigation into suspected collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, according to his written testimony submitted to the Senate.
The Mueller investigation is expected to take center stage when Barr appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing Tuesday and Wednesday. In his prepared testimony, Barr emphasized his respect for the investigation and aimed to reassure lawmakers that his allegiance is to the rule of law.
“I believe it is in the best interest of everyone – the President, Congress, and most importantly, the American people – that this matter be resolved by allowing the Special Counsel to complete his work,” Barr wrote in his testimony. “The country needs a credible resolution of these issues.”

Kremlin blessed Russia’s NRA operation, U.S. intel report says (Betsy Woodruff, Daily Beast)
When Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin brought NRA bigwigs to Moscow, it wasn’t a rogue mission. It was OKed from the very top, according to a report reviewed by The Daily Beast.

The dueling narratives on Trump and Russia (Andrew Kragie, The Atlantic)
While Democrats express alarm over Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, Republicans see partisan conspiracy theorizing.

The weekend’s Trump-Russia news, explained (Andrew Prokop, Vox)
Trump hiding Putin meeting details, the counterintelligence investigation into the president, and Bill Barr’s promises on the Mueller probe.