Still unsolved: Mystery of Trump and Russia
Mueller only answered questions he was asked
Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report vindicates President Donald Trump’s insistence that there was no collusion with the Russians on the 2016 campaign. Clearing him and his team of a provable conspiracy is a matter of law. But as a matter of national security, Barr’s letter does not clarify much about the relationship between Trump’s inner circle and the Russians, or the behavior of Trump himself.
On the central question Mueller investigated, there is no evidence to link the Trump campaign to the Russian government. The report lays to rest — and for this we should be thankful — the possibility that the U.S. president knowingly cooperated with an enemy government in seeking election.
This, however, is an odd finding and one that is difficult to square with how many people are in legal trouble for lying about this very issue. If there was no canoodling with the Russians, why was there so much lying? How did Mueller manage to unravel what looks like a tangle of deceptions about Russia — and then conclude that there was no collusion with the Russians?
It may well be that Mueller only uncovered the usual swampy mess found under some of the slimiest rocks in Washington. It is not news that there are millions of dirty Russian dollars — billions, even — infesting an army of consultants, lobbyists and law firms in most of the world’s major capitals.
The second possibility is that Barr is parsing Mueller, noting — at least to the eyes of a layperson — that Mueller could not legally establish that any member “or associate” of the Trump campaign reached out and made a deal with people they knew to be representatives of the Russian government.
Terms like “knowingly,” “associates” and “government” are potentially doing a lot of work in Barr’s letter. If Roger Stone, for example, communicated with Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s emails, does this pass the test of “campaign associates” “knowingly” working with “the Russian government”? For a lawyer, perhaps not, since Stone was not officially associated with the campaign, and Assange is not part of the Russian government. For anyone following the bread crumbs from WikiLeaks to Moscow and from Stone back to the Trump family, it’s an easier call. What a lawyer can prove, however, and what a counterintelligence analyst might believe with a high degree of certainty, are not the same thing.
A third possibility: If senior figures in the Trump campaign knew they had done things that were unethical or illegal, they may have assumed that Mueller had more evidence, or that he was willing to prosecute them on the evidence he had. They may have then made a decision to lie pre-emptively.
Until Congress sees the full report, we will not know Mueller’s reasoning. But if Mueller refused to pursue charges for which he did not have an ironclad case, then Trump’s exoneration ironically rests entirely on Mueller’s caution and prudence — the very qualities that prevented a witch hunt.
This summary of the Mueller report tells us nothing about the president’s longstanding relationship with the Kremlin — including his attempts to hide negotiations on a deal in Moscow during the campaign — nor about his bizarre admiration of, and deference to, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Robert Mueller has done his country a great service. He has cleared a president on an important charge against him and damaged the Russian intelligence services in the process by exposing their efforts to influence our elections. He has jailed people for serious crimes. But he cannot answer questions that he was not asked, and those questions remain.