Since I wrote What the Mueller Report Should Look Like on February 25, 2019, I’ve seen the conversation shift in the direction I suggested it should. On St. Patrick’s Day, former Justice Department official Marty Lederman made an argument almost identical to mine in the Washington Post. Essentially, he stated that the most important part of the work Robert Mueller has been doing is not the criminal work but the counterintelligence investigation. And the reason is that the core of the job the Office of Special Counsel is tasked to perform is an assessment of the risks the country faces in the present and going forward, rather than a retrospective look at who may have committed crimes.
One useful way of stating this is that “It’s not the collusion, stupid! It’s the compromise.”
Here’s how Lederman described this, echoing my own argument:
The public has understandably focused thus far on the special counsel’s prosecutorial decisions. Mueller was hired in the first instance, however, to superintend an ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation. Although detection of crimes is often part of such an investigation, its principal function is not retrospective and punitive but forward-looking and preventive — to disrupt, or protect against, an ongoing foreign threat.
Mueller’s primary charge, in particular, is to ascertain the nature and extent of the Russian threat to the U.S. election system and any “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” including, but not limited to, Trump himself.
It’s nice to have someone with more relevant experience and reach and credibility than me making these points, but what’s more gratifying is that the argument has now reached the intended audience.
…in an interview with NBC News, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said he is steering his investigation in a new direction to focus on [the counterintelligence aspects] — and he will demand any relevant evidence compiled by the FBI or Mueller’s team.
The California Democrat also expressed concern that Mueller hasn’t fully investigated Trump’s possible financial history with Russia.
“From what we can see either publicly or otherwise, it’s very much an open question whether this is something the special counsel has looked at,” Schiff told NBC News.
Schiff said the public testimony from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that in 2016 Trump stood to earn hundreds of millions of dollars from a secret Moscow real estate project is a staggering conflict of interest that must be fully explored.
“I certainly agree that the counterintelligence investigation may be more important than the criminal investigation because it goes to a present threat to our national security — whether the president and anybody around him are compromised by a foreign power,” Schiff said. “That’s not necessarily an issue that can be covered in indictments.”
Anyone who saw the president’s performance in Helsinki should suspect that President Trump is compromised. I’ve argued for a long time that it has already been established that Trump is compromised. The fact that he was pursuing the Moscow Trump Tower project during the primaries was something that Putin knew, that Trump was denying, and that could have sunk his campaign if it was divulged. And that is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle indicating that the Russians know a lot of things about Trump that he doesn’t want revealed.
It’s good to know that House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff now understands the product he most wants to see from Mueller is not a report on who he indicted or declined to indict, but their internal assessment of who in the Trump administration or orbit, including the president himself, is a security risk because they’re subject to foreign control.
We can argue about which offenses are high crimes, low crimes, or forgivable crimes, but there can be no serious defense of a president who is compromised. There is admittedly more subjectivity involved in assessing someone’s security risk than in figuring out if they’ve violated a criminal statute, but we have a whole system for providing or denying security clearances. That’s the system we should be interested in. It has brought all the government’s awesome powers to the task of looking at the president of the United States’ potential compromise by foreign powers.
What have they concluded?
“No serious defense of a president who is compromised”
Well, it obviously wouldn’t/doesn’t bother the true MAGAites in the slightest, as they are already parading around with signs proclaiming “Better Putin than Dem!” or some such. They now openly prefer a (Repub) prez compromised to a foreign adversary to an American Dem. So one can stick a fork in this society. (Ditto Trumper’s latest rants championing the (anti-democratic) electoral college and his reviling of One man, One vote.)
As the demented and mentally-polluted “conservative” base goes, so goes the Repub Party. The candidates/officials cannot deviate from the Id-like desires of the base. (Although one has to ask whether the low-grade morons who make up that base even understand the concept of “compromise” by a foreign power…)
The question for me is simply how much more of Der Trumper’s endless surreptitious foreign entanglements, secrets and deceptions is even left to uncover? Hasn’t everything that Putin could use to actually influence our political criminal and rapacious dunce already become publicly known? We know about the “Trump Tower Kontract” bait and switch. We know about the Putin-dictated memo about Dopey Don Jr’s Russian meeting. We know that a raft of Trump campaign crooks and imbeciles were in frequent contact with Russian intelligence regarding Dem and Hillary emails. We know about Russian agent (and NSC chief) Flynn. What more can be left? Even more financial ties, I guess. But since Repubs and rubes don’t give a fig for the ones we do know, it’s hard to see them caring about more.
Der Trumper is a wannabe fascist and foreign authoritarian fanboy and ass-licker. The less democracy a nation has, the more he likes its glorious strongman/leader. (That is unless Israeli leadership disagrees, ala Iran) He will find excellence in the deeds of autocrats and dictators (both living and dead), while reviling Angela Merkel and Canada. He is too ignorant and stupid to recognize America’s actual interests (because he is so enamored of his below-average IQ) and thinks that breaking up the status quo is a sign of his “stable genius” and “vision”.
This nihilism is all out in the open, but the “conservative” movement no longer cares, and the unwashed base is gleeful because Trumper’s War against Non-white Immigrants takes precedence over ACTUAL national security. This is National Trumpalism, circa 2020.
Well there’s also the pee tape.
Is he really Kompromat? Or is there a more simple explanation? Trump holds a permanent childlike grudge against anybody who ever criticized or opposed him. And he loves dictators, especially if those dictators he naturally admires for their “strength” in suppressing dissent, executing political opponents or beating them into submission, controlling the news media through violence and intimidation, etc.
Putin quickly learned how to leverage this love of authoritarianism by openly praising Trump and forming an informal alliance with him. Trump has never crossed Putin, leading to suspicion that he’s Kompromat. But, it could simply be that he sees Putin as an indispensable ally against his enemies in the media, Congress, Democrats and especially the entire executive branch, especially the police and military agencies that have resisted doing what he wants, and generally showing the slavish loyalty he demands.
In short, Putin is his ally against his domestic critics and political enemies. Is this treason? In Trump’s eyes the entire world is simply divided into people who do what he wants and those who do not. There’s no concept of honest disagreement, or officials following the law instead of demonstrating their loyalty to Trump.
“I never saw the King of Kings punish his officials for corruption. Let them enjoy their corruption, as long as they showed their loyalty.” — Ryzard Kapuschinski, The Emperor: Fall of an Autocrat