I do not yet believe President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 election. I strongly suspect others close to him did. I also expect the president would not want any such connection exposed, even if those close to him were mere dupes rather than active collaborators.
"I would be very surprised if Trump himself committed any collusion," I wrote to a cousin of mine on Facebook on Oct. 26. "No joke: If I was doing illegal stuff to change an election result, the last guy I'd tell would be Trump. He'd tweet it that day. By morning, Kellyanne Conway would be on 'Fox and Friends' bragging about it while Jared and Ivanka [Kushner] would be telling the [Washington] Post and the [New York] Times, as anonymous sources, that they knew but tried to talk him out of it."
Four days later a grand jury indicted the president's campaign manager for laundering Russian money. Last week the president's former National Security adviser pleaded guilty to lying about meeting with the Russian ambassador about lifting sanctions.
Cheerleaders for impeachment are almost as giddy these days as "lock her up" Hillary Clinton haters used to be. At the other political end, reactions included angry spewing that the special counsel is on a witch hunt. Witch hunts rarely indict a campaign manager and get a guilty plea from a former National Security adviser, though.
"Somewhere in the middle lies the truth" is a good rule of thumb. A reasonable person can also take some educated guesses, given what can readily be seen.
Vanity is much more likely than collusion to land the president in trouble. Vanity is his kryptonite. Nothing is more precious to Trump than the idea he won through his own efforts and appeal. He declared there was massive voter fraud in at least two states based on no other evidence than getting trounced therein. The whole "Russia thing" grates him because it cheapens his victory. This is a man who made himself and his staff look foolish by pressing a clearly false claim about the size of his inauguration crowd.
As it became clearer daily that the Russian "hoax" is no hoax, the president may have done anything he could think of to cover up its existence, much less any connection between it and people in his campaign.
Cliches become cliches for a reason. It really is never the crime. It is the cover up. Making a collusion case against the guilty is difficult. Proving a cover up, if one happened, is not nearly so hard, whether it benefited friends, family, members of the campaign or was just done to spare one easily bruised ego.
The special counsel's investigation is not just a collusion investigation. It is also an obstruction of justice investigation. I am not happy about this. As I said in July: "What Russian leader Vladimir Putin is doing to our elections is more important than whether a Trump colluded about it. The investigation into the Trumps is part of a much bigger whole." I hope special counsel Robert Mueller holds the same view, but cannot reasonably expect Mueller to ignore obstruction if it happened.
I also cannot fathom the argument that investigating obstruction of justice somehow goes beyond what the special counsel was appointed to do. That argument would make no sense even if the letter appointing the special council had not very specifically granted him such power. Investigating any obstruction of justice is a very big part of 2 C.F.R.600 4(a), the federal code explicitly cited in the letter.
Even if Mueller had been appointed for only the very narrowly defined mission of finding if there was collusion, he could not legally or ethically ignore any interference with that narrowly defined mission.
Then there was the whole bizarre incident a week ago in which a damaging tweet from the president was quickly claimed by one of his attorneys instead. Then this same lawyer went on to claim the president cannot obstruct justice because he presides over the Justice Department. Justice and the Justice Department are not the same thing, as the department's many critics insist.
Then there was Donald Trump Jr.'s weird claim of attorney-client privilege for a conversation just because a lawyer was in the room when the talk took place.
These are the actions of people who are hiding something. Whether it is out of guilt or arrogance remains to be seen.
Commentary on 12/09/2017