Even Without Mueller’s Report, Congress Had All the Facts It Needed
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Vladimir Putin’s Russia hacked American emails and used them to help elect Trump to the presidency.
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that agents purporting to represent Putin’s Russia approached the Trump campaign to ask whether help would be welcome, to which Donald Trump Jr. replied , “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Donald Trump publicly welcomed this help : “I love WikiLeaks!”
It’s solid political science that this help from Russia via WikiLeaks was crucial, possibly decisive, toTrump’s success in the Electoral College in November 2016.
October 7, 2016, was the near-death experience of the Trump campaign. That Friday afternoon, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post reported on an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women. The shock battered the campaign. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared publicly that he was “sickened” by Trump , canceled a joint appearance with him, and declined to answer whether he still supported the Trump candidacy.
Less than one hour later, WikiLeaks dumped its largest and most damaging trove of hacked emails to and from Democratic operatives. It included two emails sent years before to the future Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The messages criticized the teachings of the Catholic Church on women and sexuality. The Trump campaign instantly seized on them as proof of the Clinton campaign’s supposed anti-Catholic animus—a useful weapon to help erase memories of Trump’s Twitter attacks on the pope earlier in 201
Even more lethally, the trove included extracts from Clinton’s lucrative speeches to banking groups . In one of those speeches—sponsored by a Brazilian bank—Clinton expressed her hope for a “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future, with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” In another speech in the trove, Clinton suggested that many politicians hold “both a public and a private position” on contentious issues—implying that public words cannot be trusted.
The huge dump took a while to be analyzed and absorbed. It did not immediately displace the salacious Access Hollywood story from the top of the news.
But by the second week of October, WikiLeaks was profoundly engaging the U.S. voting public. Using the Google Trends tool, the website Five Thirty Eight tracked how public interest in the hacked emails surged . Not coincidentally, it seems, Clinton’s poll lead over Trump peaked on October 17, and steadily shrank thereafter. FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 letter reopening the Clinton email case delivered the final blow to the reeling Clinton campaign.
This timeline is one thing to keep in mind as details emerge from the Mueller report.
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Vladimir Putin’s Russia hacked American emails and used them to help elect Trump to the presidency.
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that agents purporting to represent Putin’s Russia approached the Trump campaign to ask whether help would be welcome, to which Donald Trump Jr. replied , “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
It’s not a theory but a matter of historical record that Donald Trump publicly welcomed this help : “I love WikiLeaks!”
It’s solid political science that this help from Russia via WikiLeaks was crucial, possibly decisive, toTrump’s success in the Electoral College in November 2016.
Mueller was asked to investigate how much the Trump campaign knew in advance about this Russian help. Along the way, the special counsel also apparently became interested in the question of why Putin was so eager for a Trump presidency. Did Putin have some kind of prior hold over Trump, financial or otherwise?
For two years, Americans and the world have speculated and argued about the inquiry. But along the way, we have often lost sight of the core truth of the Trump presidency: For all its many dark secrets, there have never been any real mysteries about the Trump-Russia story.
The president of the United States was helped into his job by clandestine Russian attacks on the American political process. That core truth is surrounded by other disturbing probabilities, such as the likelihood that Putin even now is exerting leverage over Trump in some way.
Along the way, we have also lost sight of something that I warned about here in The Atlantic in May 2017 : It’s very possible that Trump himself broke no criminal law in accepting campaign help from Putin. This ultra-legalistic nation expects wrongdoing to take the form of prosecutable crimes—and justice to occur in a courtroom.
But many wrongs are not crimes. And many things that are crimes are not prosecutable for one reason or another—for instance, when a statute of limitations expires.
Mueller served his country by advancing the inquiry into Trump-Russia at a time when Trump’s enablers in Congress sought to cover up for the president. Since the midterm elections, Congress has regained its independence and can recover its integrity. Mueller’s full report will surely inform and enlighten Americans about many details of what exactly happened in 2016. But the lack of further indictments by Mueller underscores that the job of protecting the country against the Russia-compromised Trump presidency belongs to Congress. It always did.
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It is important to remember all this in the midst of the great bamboozling offensive from the right and other Trump supporters.
"probabilities" and "likelihood" !
"Conjecture" …..Thy name is "Liberal" !
Who wrote the Democratic emails? The claim that Russian meddling harmed the Clinton campaign is really a claim that harm was caused by public disclosure of things Clinton didn't want the public to know. Wasn't that the intent of the Access Hollywood video starring Trump? Wasn't that the intent of the Steele dossier?
Democrats are whining that if nothing involving Clinton had been disclosed then Clinton would have won. If the press had only reported what Clinton wanted reported, then Clinton would be President. It didn't matter what Clinton actually did as long as all of it could be kept secret so the public wouldn't know. The 'poor Hillary' claim is intellectually dishonest. That's an argument that the public should remain ignorant so the public will elect Democrats.
Wouldn't a better approach be choosing candidates with a less scandalous background? The idea that the ends justify the means is a two edged sword. A win is a win but a loss is a loss. And Clinton lost on her own merits. Clinton played as dirty as Trump. Clinton wasn't any better than Trump. Russian meddling didn't change who Hillary Clinton is or how Hillary Clinton ran her campaign.
The public was well aware of who and what Trump was by the time of the election. Democrats choose to deliberately ignore all the Republican debates during the primaries. Establishment Republicans were excoriating Trump before the Republican convention and the beginning of the general election. All sorts of dirt against Trump had been publicly disclosed during the primaries and general election. Selective Democratic amnesia won't make any of that part of the election go away.
Trump was compared to Clinton. And Clinton lost. The pertinent question for Democrats should be "why did Democrats think Clinton would win?" That's a problem inside the Democratic Party and something Democrats can directly address without any meddling by Republicans, Russians, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or anyone else. Clinton's loss is all on Democrats.
I'm not sure there is a word in your comment that isn't irrelevant to whether or not Trump or his campaign encouraged and accepted Russian interference in our election.
I'm not sure how anything concerning Trump is relevant to what the public learned about Clinton.
Democrats are trying to argue that Trump won because voters were ignorant while also arguing that Clinton lost because voters knew too much.
Democrats are talking out of both sides of their mouth. How does that encourage the public to trust Democrats?
Nerm doesn't claim there wasn't any Russian interference in our election. Maybe a web site that helps people construct an argument would be a good choice for your web surfing free time.
President Obama assured the American people that no one, including Russia, interfered with the election. No foreign power tampered with voter registrations or with the vote tallies. The claim that Russia interfered with the election was debunked by President Obama.
The only way to claim Russia interfered with the election is to call President Obama a liar. Again the Democrats are talking out both sides of their mouth.
Well said. I never understood how the dems could avoid the point that the information released was actually true but that they wanted to hide it.
It's sad to see the same ole characters still buying into the same ole bull. Trump is not good for the country,never was and never will be.
There is so much presumption about what is in the report before anyone has any inkling of its contents, or how and why Mueller structured it the way he did. Everyone on the right thinks they have enough information to make their ridiculous conclusions.