It’s spy vs. spy vs. spy

the White House. It is still slightly hypothetical, because we don’t know the results of the investigation, but the fact that [the FBI] started an investigation at all, and this question had to be asked at all, shows how weird and unprecedented this situation is. If the music stops right now and actually there’s nothing to it, still the fact that we had to ask this question, and it was investigated, is extraordinary.

My inclination is to say the FBI would have had to have a strong basis of evidence. Where did the information probably come from? We’ll hopefully know in 50 years’ time when the records are out, but it seems likely that they probably came from different sources, from signals intelligence, maybe from human sources, from foreign intelligence and from allies, as well. Unlike the U.S., and this is a crucial point, where there are restrictions on eavesdropping of phone calls and communications of U.S. citizens, those rules don’t apply to international allies. So it may well be that closer allies like Britain or Germany would have been collecting phone calls in a way the U.S. wasn’t. But it would not be inconceivable to say “this happened.”

I’m struggling to find another parallel where Russia or another known power might have helped to install someone with loyalty to another country in the White House or in particular behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The Kremlin used the KGB repeatedly throughout the Cold War to meddle in U.S. domestic politics. Every major branch of [President Franklin Roosevelt’s] wartime administration was penetrated by Soviet intelligence — in particular by now-infamous KGB agents such as Alger Hiss, who was working in the State Department. Also, FDR’s close adviser Harry Hopkins had set it up so that if, in 1944, FDR died — and unfortunately, it looked quite likely that he was going to die then — he would appoint Alger Hiss to be his secretary of state and Harry Dexter White to be his secretary of the treasury. And we now know from KGB records that both were Soviet agents.

In 1968, the Kremlin offered to secretly subsidize the election campaign of Hubert Humphrey, who was running against Richard Nixon. He politely turned down the Kremlin’s offer. The KGB’s greatest attempt to meddle in