‘They’re doing it as we sit here’
If you were searching for a metaphor for the withering ideal of American public service — the one that puts country before party, truth before ‘‘narrative’’ or ‘‘brand’’ — it’d be hard to do better than the painful spectacle of Robert Mueller trying, in his halting voice, to sound the alarm Wednesday about Russian subversion of American democracy.
It’s the same alarm that virtually every member of America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities has been ringing for the past three years: Russia attacked our elections in 2016 and is intensifying its efforts today. ‘‘It wasn’t a single attempt,’’ Mueller said. ‘‘They’re doing it as we sit here.’’
Appearing before two congressional committees rife with politicians intent on using him to fill out their own versions of reality, Mueller seemed frail and at times even confused. But he successfully rebuffed nearly all efforts to draw him beyond the boundaries of evidence established in the report he delivered about Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
The exceptions came when representatives actually showed an interest in Russian meddling and Donald Trump’s embrace of it. ‘‘I hope this is not the new normal,’’ Mueller said at one point, in response to
a question about whether American candidates might now feel free to welcome foreign influence, ‘‘but I fear it is.’’
The ‘‘sweeping and systemic’’ nature of that interference was the most unequivocal finding of Mueller’s 448-page report, although just as disturbing was the report’s meticulous recounting of the ways the Trump campaign accepted and even encouraged it.
Nearly all Republicans on both committees failed even to acknowledge the threat posed by Russia and other countries. With significant exceptions like Will Hurd, representative of Texas, Republican lawmakers seemed much more focused on protecting Trump and deflecting any concerns about electoral security by impugning Mueller’s integrity, attacking the origins of an investigation that he did not initiate, and — in one particularly disgraceful jab by Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania — accusing his investigative process of being ‘‘un-american.’’
In another era — the time Mueller seemed to hail from — an attack by a foreign government to divide Americans and upend their elections might have produced a different response. It might have drawn legislators together to develop a bipartisan initiative to make clear, as Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it, ‘‘that we, the people — not some foreign power that wishes us ill — we decide who shall govern us.’’
Trump has pretty much had one rejoinder to the report’s revelations: ‘‘No collusion.’’ But as Mueller’s testimony made clear, that’s misleading. For one thing, collusion is a legally meaningless term in this context.
At least twice Mueller called for legislation to improve information-sharing and other coordination among intelligence agencies — an objective that was supposed to have been met with reforms after the Sept. 11 attacks.
But that kind of concerted legislative action seems unlikely. To this day, Trump refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of Russian intervention, and the Republican-controlled Senate is unwilling to consider legislation for enhanced election security — maybe because doing either could be seen as an admission that the election was tainted.
Conceding the obvious might seem like a small price to pay. But the president appears more concerned with nursing his ego than safeguarding American democracy — and that puts us all, Republicans, Democrats and independents, at risk.