Collusion

 

There’s been a lot of rhetoric concerning A.G. Barr’s summary of the Muller Report for the last couple of days. Frankly I’ve seen many on both ends of the political spectrum making assertions that aren’t supported by the facts, so here’s my analysis of this document. In this post I’m specifically addressing the Russian collusion portion, I’ll probably follow this up with an analysis of the obstruction of justice allegation. First, we have to recognize that both the Muller Report and Barr’s summary are legal documents addressing whether criminal charges should be brought. Second, we have to separate the criminal aspects of the investigation from the larger political ramifications of the findings of this investigation.

Muller found that there is insufficient evidence to charge President Trump or anyone else of colluding with Russia to influence the results of the 2016 Presidential election. Importantly though, both the Barr letter and information contained in the indictments that have come out of the Office of Special Counsel Investigation indicate that Russia implemented a two prong effort to influence the election. They both conducted an online misinformation operation designed to sow dissension and create mistrust of political institutions while they also targeted hacks of computer systems including hacking the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s emails. President Obama took a hard-line against Russia and helped foster an international collation aimed at weakening Russia’s global standing. They likely saw Hillary Clinton as a continuation of Obama’s Russia policies and wished to prevent her from taking office, or if she did take office, to weaken her position domestically. Trump on the other hand had sought business opportunities in Russia for decades and had proven himself open to working with the Russian government. It’s also likely they felt that they had information on Trump they could use to help pressure him to take a consolatory position towards them. We already know that Trump lied about not having any business dealings with the Russians, when in fact he continued to negotiate with them into the summer of the 2016 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

So clearly Russia favored Donald Trump in the 2016 election and at a minimum wanted to delegitimize Hillary Clinton if she won. To that end they managed to hack Democratic, possible also Republican, emails, there’s absolutely no reason to think that Trump had any thing to do with this. This was a Russian operation to weaken and divide western democracies and as a result to strengthen Russia’s hand, they didn’t need any help from Trump. Russia used Wikileaks to get these hacked Democratic emails into the public realm and we know Trump associate Roger Stone was in contact with Wikileaks concerning the emails. We also know that Stone turned around and advised the Trump campaign concerning hacked emails. By all accounts Trump seemed more than happy about this development but this probably doesn’t constitute a crime although his failure to alert the authorities is morally questionable.

There is also the infamous Trump tower meeting in June 2016. This is still a pretty big open question that hopefully the full Muller Report will answer. It’s almost certain that Trump lied when he said he didn’t know anything about it, but it also seems likely that the meeting wouldn’t constitute criminal collusion, although again, there are pretty serious ethical questions surrounding this event. Taken altogether I don’t have any problem accepting the Muller conclusion that no criminal activity involving collusion with the Russian Government took place. I do still think there are significant ethical questions concerning the activities of the Trump Campaign and its ties to Russia that the public has a legitimate interest in seeing. I understand there may be parts of the Muller Report that will have to be redacted for legal reasons, but there is a vital national interest in the fullest possible version of the report being released as quickly as possible.

Here’s a link to AG Barr’s letter: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706351394/read-the-justicedepartments-summary-of-the-mueller-report?fbclid=IwAR0X5jdUZNUVG0RbjZiix2BUJglioJzsj2G8qhxvpugZuxySn4-I1S119mo