For nearly a decade, there have been two core questions at the heart of Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. The first was obvious: Did Vladimir Putin’s regime target the U.S. political system in the 2016 presidential race? The second was complex: Did the Republican campaign partner with Russia during its attack?
For the last several years, Trump and his partisan allies were largely content to focus on the latter. It’s why Americans heard the president repeat the phrase “no collusion” obsessively throughout his first term. The partisan line has never been persuasive — the evidence showed that the Republican campaign welcomed, received and benefited from Russian assistance — but since there is no legal or statutory definition of “collusion,” much of the conversation landed in an “eye of the beholder” box.
Most objective observers, taking a good-faith look at special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings and the reports from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, would likely agree that there were scandalous levels of contacts between Team Trump and Russian operatives in 2016. Nevertheless, for nine years, the president and his confederates focused much of their time, energies and political resources trying to provide an answer to the second of the two foundational questions — insisting that the GOP campaign did not partner with Moscow in 2016. Gradually, the dubious assertion became an article of faith among far-right partisans.
Recently, however, Team Trump pushed its luck. It decided answering the second question was no longer good enough. Instead, it took aim at the first question.
In recent days, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has made a great many mistakes, releasing a bizarre report that accused the Obama administration of a “treasonous conspiracy” and a “years long coup” that, in reality, never existed.
But the foundational mistake was the effort itself: Gabbard is trying to convince everyone that Putin didn’t actually target the U.S. political system to elect Trump at all. Not only was there no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operatives responsible for the attack, the DNI has argued, but there was also no attack.
All the talk about Russian “meddling” and “interference”? Gabbard is effectively telling the world, “Forget it. That never happened. It was also just an elaborate hoax, hatched by Democratic criminals.”
The problem with this line isn’t just that it’s demonstrably wrong. As a CNN report noted, Gabbard is also contradicting Republicans — including some prominent Trump allies — who’ve already stated the opposite.
Her argument is full of holes, as even critics of the Russia investigation such as the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy have noted. (Basically, the whole thing conflates Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election with nonexistent attacks on election infrastructure that changed votes.) But just as notable is that Gabbard’s move to cast doubt on Russia’s 2016 interference is wholly at odds with several top Trump administration officials, most especially [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio, along with a pair of congressional investigations spearheaded by Republicans.
In 2017, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee agreed that Russia targeted the U.S. elections. The same year, U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that Russia targeted the U.S. elections. Around the same time, Congress — with broad and bipartisan support — approved sanctions against Russia to punish the Kremlin for having targeted the U.S. elections.
In 2018, prosecutors in the Trump administration prosecuted 13 Russians over their role in targeting the U.S. elections.
In 2019, the Mueller report agreed that Russia targeted the U.S. elections. The same year, Fox News’ Sean Hannity told viewers, “I have zero doubt that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. … I’m certain they did.” A year later, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Rubio, documented the extent to which Russia targeted the U.S. elections. As recently as two weeks ago, Trump’s handpicked CIA director, John Ratcliffe, released the results of an investigation that endorsed the agency’s earlier conclusions about Russia targeting the U.S. elections. The DNI, leaning on discredited findings and claims that have been fairly characterized as “ludicrous,” is trying to convince the world that everyone, including Trump’s Republican allies, have gotten the entire story backwards, based on evidence that’s already collapsed. If she’d just stuck to “no collusion,” Gabbard wouldn’t look quite so ridiculous.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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