A Lot of Russia Edition
Ed. Note: On the surface, I have nearly unlimited time these days to read and digest political news. After all, I’m home from work taking care of a tiny human who sleeps 85% of the day. There is no conceivable reason I should be too busy to get out TWIPN. And yet, somehow, we got to Thursday this week and I had not even begun. Do not ask me what I have been doing, but somehow most days it is all I can do to brush my teeth (showering is definitely not happening with regularity). All of which is to say that this newsletter may be getting slightly less regular in its production. We’ll just have to see. (And I have no earthly idea how I will put this together once I’m back at work, but we have a couple more months to figure that out.) So be warned!
RIGHT-WING COUNTER NARRATIVE ON RUSSIA: For those of you who occasionally check in to Fox News or see right-wing commentary on Twitter, you will have seen that this week, the Right decided that The Real Russia Scandal actually involved Hillary and the Democrats and that they are the ones who colluded with Russia. They are going all in on this story, stirring up enough frenzy to convince multiple GOP-led House committees to start new investigations of Hillary, because 2016 will never, ever end, and in Fox News Land, Hillary is president (go to minute 5:55 of that link). So I thought it would be helpful to explain just what fever dreams the Right is swimming in now, so that you can brace yourself for the ensuing months of chatter about The Real Scandal. (Note that this explainer relies extensively on Jonathan Chait’s extensive run-down of this whole thing.)
So there are two main stories the Right is muddying. First, we have “Uranium One,” a story about a 2010 acquisition of a Canadian energy company with lots of uranium interests by a Russian firm, which was approved by the Obama administration. The Right already tried to make hay of this story during the 2016 campaign, claiming that Clinton’s State Department only approved the acquisition because the Russian firm had donated to the Clinton Foundation. But the State Department was one of nine agencies that had to approve the deal, including the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There’s no there there. But Fox just keeps saying “Clinton” and “Uranium” in the same sentence, with a lot of hand-waving. (Much, much more on this at Lawfare, if you’re interested)
The second story, which the Right is really running with, involves the so-called Russian dossier. This was a compilation of research into Trump and his company’s shady ties to Russia, put together by an independent investigator named Christopher Steele during the 2016 election. The dossier contains lots of salacious rumors and allegations (ie, the pee tape), along with other facts about connections between Trump and Russia that have been proven accurate. Some of this research came from Kremlin-connected sources (ie, people who knew about the Kremlin’s ties to Trump allies and businesses, and told Steele about them). Steele’s research was not released before the election (to the disappointment of the Clinton camp) and the existence of the dossier became known only when Buzzfeed published it in January. While it was known from the beginning that Democrats had paid for this research during the election, it came out only this week that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Fusion GPS, the firm that employed Steele, to research Trump and his company. After Buzzfeed’s publication, the FBI began its own investigation into the allegations, given the serious corruption alleged involving the president-elect.
Their version of the story uses Steele’s research in Russia as evidence that Steele is a tool of the Russian government. Steele’s report, charges the The Wall Street Journal editorial page, is “based largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources.” Ergo, “Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate. Did someone say ‘collusion’?”
The next, essential step in this theory says that, since the FBI investigated Steel’s findings, which were planted by Putin, then we must conclude that the FBI is itself a tool of the Russian conspiracy -- rendering James Comey a criminal and Mueller’s entire investigation suspect. Pretty impressive, huh?!
The logical flaws with this “theory” are legion, not least of which is that Trump’s apparent collusion was rooted in a crime -- the illegal hacking and dissemination of private emails -- that both Trump and Russia spent months vociferously boosting to the American public. What’s more, we already know that Trump’s closest campaign advisors -- including his son, his campaign chairman, and his son-in-law -- met with a Kremlin agent with the express purpose of learning Kremlin-funded dirt on Clinton. And let’s not forget that Trump himself asked Russia to hack Hillary’s emails.
Just today we learned two new pieces of information: The Russian lawyer who promised Don Jr. to provide info on Clinton coordinated with a top Russian official: “[T]he memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.” In addition, the Wall Street Journal reports that a data analysis firm working for Trump had reached out to Julian Assange in the summer of 2016 with an offer to organize, index, and better disseminate the DNC emails that had been illegally stolen by Russian operatives. (And let’s not forget the truly insane fact that Trump has “blown past an October 1 deadline to implement [Congressionally-mandated] sanctions [against Russia]. Lawmakers are now searching for answers as to whether the president is even planning to follow the law that they passed and he signed.”)
We cannot forget, in all of this insanity, the undisputed conclusion of America’s intelligence agencies that the Russian government sought to interfere in the 2016 election, through a variety of means that included spreading fake news and hacking into voter databases, and that they intend to do so again in 2018. (Importantly, the Steele dossier “played absolutely no role” in this intelligence assessment.)
And yet the Republicans are so intent on protecting Trump that they have refused to actually acknowledge this fact and, you know, do something about it. Thus the truly astonishing and terrifying moment last week when our chief law enforcement officer, Jeff Sessions, told Congress that the DOJ has done nothing -- nothing -- to prepare for and work to styme Russian interference in 2018 and beyond. The fact is that the Right welcomes this interference. And the rest of us are forced to watch, slack-jawed, as our democracy is sacrificed to GOP electioneering.
THIS IS WILD: The Daily Beast reports: “House Republican leaders have taken the extraordinary step of curtailing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s (R-CA) ability to conduct official business out of fear that he is too compromised by his ties to Russia. . . . [T]he House Committee on Foreign Affairs has placed heightened restrictions on the trips abroad that he can take with committee money as well as the hearings he can hold through the subcommittee on Europe that he chairs.” Why would they take such an extraordinary step? Because Rohrabacher truly does seem to be a Russian agent of some kind: “Last summer, Rohrabacher planned to use his subcommittee to hold what critics saw as a show trial of Bill Browder, an American-born Putin critic who was the driving force behind a U.S. law, the Magnitsky Act, sanctioning Russian officials for human rights violations. Rohrabacher had planned to confront the former businessman with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that sets out to destroy his reputation. Rohrabacher had been given the propaganda film by one of Putin’s top officials at a secret meeting in Russia.” No wonder Paul Ryan “joked” that Rohrabacher was on Putin’s payroll.
TALK IS GREAT, BUT ACTION IS WHAT COUNTS: I have exhausted myself with this Russian stuff, so I’m not going to summarize the pretty remarkable speech by Jeff Flake from earlier this week, coming on the heels of Bob Corker’s comments that Trump is unqualified to be president. I welcome these Republicans’ acknowledgment of what is plainly true and obvious to anyone with eyes and ears. Flake’s speech was truly incredible in many ways, not least of which was his acknowledgment that his entire party was “complicit” in Trump’s egregiousness. But, while I don’t expect these senators to start voting like Democrats, there are concrete, tangible actions they can and must take to actually address the profound dangers of Trump that they have correctly identified. It is on the basis of those actions (or their refusal to take those actions) that we should judge Flake and Corker (and all Republicans), not their speeches. Yglesias has a great article about how Flake, Corker, and McCain can use their leverage to take actual concrete action to hem in Trump -- which is their actual job as legislators. Greg Sargent lays out five questions for Flake and Corker, including whether they agree that Trump and the GOP must stop denouncing and degrading the investigation into Russian interference in our elections and whether the GOP should insist that Trump release his tax returns. Brian Beutler urges them to use their power to take Russian meddling -- and Trump’s numerous lies about the investigation -- seriously. “If they are sincerely fed to the teeth with Trump ‘calling fake things true and true things fake,’ then this instance, in which Trump’s dishonesty serves the interests of a hostile power, seems like as good a place as any to draw a line.” Republican Never-Trumper argues that Flake and Corker should stay and fight rather than resign. “The dwindling number of anti-Trump Republican elected leaders now nears an empty set, risking a future in which the war against Trumpism is fought entirely along Democratic vs. Trumpist lines.”
Endorsements:
- I got too tired to cover the tax cut fight (short story is that the Republicans have paved the way to pass a massive, $1.5-trillion-deficit-adding tax cut with only 51 Senate votes, but still have not released an actual set of real, concrete proposals, even as they want final passage by Thanksgiving), but I HIGHLY recommend this Josh Barro piece about one central GOP proposal to slash taxes on pass-through income. He shows how the whole idea is basically entirely unworkable in the real world. These problems are yet another flaw in the GOP’s effort to keep its plans secret (slash, not actually have concrete plans) and then try to pass something as quickly as possible without time for analysis and problem-solving. Did they learn nothing from the Obamacare fight?
- Andrew Sullivan’s lead essay this week is basically a recounting of how everything is terrible. It's grim but comprehensive.
- Matt Yglesias provides the highlights of a truly depressing (but morbidly hilarious) interview of Trump by Fox’s Lou Dobbs. If you forget that this man controls the nuclear codes and also defeated the most qualified presidential candidate in history, Trump’s ignorance and inability to form complete sentences is really quite funny.
- These are sentences the president actually spoke out loud to the young children of the White House Press Corps on a Halloween visit.
- This came out when I was on break, but if you have not yet read Rachel Aviv’s truly heartbreaking New Yorker article about schemes to defraud seniors, READ IT NOW.
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