Rethinking Russia--Part Two

By David K. Shipler

                Donald Trump certainly acted like a guilty man when it came to accusations that he and his campaign had cooperated with Russia in promoting his candidacy. If a playwright had created such a character, he would have been considered too obvious.

                This is the fourth key question in assessing Russia’s actions during the 2016 campaign. The first three—whether the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails, whether the Russians impersonated Americans online to exacerbate fissures in the society, and whether those activities helped elect Trump—were examined in Part One. Now we look at numbers 4 through 6.

                4. Based on Trump’s display of anxiety about the Russia investigation, his attempts to stop it, his aides’ interactions with Russians, and the lies some told to Congress and FBI agents, the assumption of a cover-up seemed reasonable. Trump and some of his people acted as if they were hiding something illicit or illegal.

Furthermore, the Mueller report said, dozens of Russian tweets and posts were cited or retweeted by campaign officials, including Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Michael T. Flynn. But there is no evidence that they knew of the Russian origins. And the investigation didn’t find cooperation or coordination or conspiracy. Rather, the evidence it lays out portrays a haphazard array of contacts among Americans and Russians in erratic pursuit of two apparent goals: profitable business opportunities and improved superpower relations.

Several Trump associates and campaign advisors, such as Carter Page, overstated their closeness to Trump, evidently to impress Russian businessmen, some of whom may have exaggerated their connections to the Kremlin. Because of encrypted messaging, vanished digital communications, and refusal by some to talk to investigators, many gaps pockmark the picture. But what’s there seems less sinister than it appeared in the context of Russia’s program of hacking and disinformation. Without those cyber intrusions into the American political debate, the Trump-Russian contacts would have been regarded as unorthodox but probably not especially worrisome.

It’s not uncommon for various countries’ officials to reach out to presidential candidates and their staffs, both to gauge future foreign policy and, they hope, promote friendly dialogue. But mixing aspirations for personal financial profit into governmental policy is unusual and problematic. It raises the specter of graft and corruption. President Vladimir Putin cleverly employs Russian oligarchs as tools of foreign affairs, and he surely sees Trump as a willing player on that field. Trump hardly ever divorces business from international policy—even promising North Korean Kim Jung-un that denuclearization would bring an economic boom to his country, courtesy of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Mueller report portrays the Trump campaign as mostly passive and uninterested when Russians and their hopeful American contacts tried to set up meetings and discussions. One exception was Donald Trump Jr.’s eager response to a supposed Russian offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton, which never materialized.

Another was campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s move, through a middleman, to end a business dispute by giving internal polling data to a Russian billionaire, who may or may not have received it. Manafort had received huge sums (plus a $30,000-to-$40,000 jar of black caviar) from Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-Russian party for political consulting. On Aug. 2, 2016, at the height of the campaign, Manafort met “with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence,” according to the Mueller report. “Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel's Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump 's assent to succeed (were he to be elected President).” Two weeks later, after news reports of his Ukraine connections, Manafort left the campaign but continued to give advice.

Manafort also provided Kilimnik with information on the campaign’s strategy, which might have aided Russia’s disinformation efforts in targeting wedge issues to help Trump. The censored version of the Mueller report, however, contains no evidence that Manafort knew that Russians were masquerading as Americans online.

More generally, the lack of substantive contact became apparent when Putin and other Kremlin officials floundered around after the election, trying to set up channels of discussion with the transition team and the incoming president.

The prominent goal, according to the report, was improving relations, hardly an evil plan as long as US security interests weren’t compromised. Given that the country has only one president at a time, it’s customary during transitions for the incoming administration to defer on policy until after the inauguration, or at least to communicate on policy matters through the outgoing White House and the State Department’s established diplomatic channels.

The Trump transition team departed from that protocol, most dramatically after Obama imposed new sanctions in late December 2016 to punish Russia for its election interference.

The main conduit was Michael Flynn, in line to become Trump’s national security adviser. As head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, he had been keen to improve counter-terrorism cooperation with Russia. I recall hearing him wax ecstatic about being invited to visit Moscow by the head of Russian military intelligence, the same GRU that later hacked the Democrats’ emails, to discuss swapping intelligence on terrorists.

Years later, after Obama’s sanctions three weeks beforeTrump’s inauguration, Flynn requested through Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “that Russia not escalate the situation, not get into a ‘tit for tat,’ and only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner,” according to the Mueller report.

The appeal was successful, and a good thing, too. But Flynn inexplicably lied to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, other transition officials, and FBI agents about the nature of his conversation. Perhaps he worried that he’d violated the 1799 Logan Act, which prohibits an unauthorized citizen from attempting to influence a foreign government in “any disputes or controversies with the United States.” But nobody has ever been prosecuted under the law (there was one indictment in 1803), and the probability that an incoming national security adviser would be charged seems very remote.
More worrisome was this: The FBI knew that Flynn had lied, perhaps based on intercepts of Russian communications, creating "a compromise situation for Flynn because the Department of Justice assessed that the Russian government could prove Flynn lied," the Mueller report stated. So,  the crime that got Flynn indicted was not the conversation with Kislyak but the lie. He pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing.

The Flynn-Kislyak conversation was legitimate, according to Jack Matlock, a veteran diplomat and former ambassador to the Soviet Union. “As the person in charge of our embassy in Moscow during several political campaigns,” he wrote, “I would often set up meetings of candidates and their staffs with Soviet officials. Such contacts are certainly ethical so long as they do not involve disclosure of classified information or attempts to negotiate specific issues.”

5. The suspicion that Putin had compromising material on Trump laced much of the post-election discussion. Representative Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has raised the question of money-laundering, but he has no answer to date. “If the Russians were laundering money through the Trump Organization,” he said, “the Russians would know it, the president would know it, and that could be very powerful leverage.”

Mueller found no such evidence that has made public, although the report refers to twelve ongoing criminal prosecutions whose nature has not been disclosed. The paragraphs were blacked out.

The principal known source of speculation on what Russians call “kompromat” is a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent with extensive experience and contacts in Russia. The dossier nearly evaporated in Mueller’s report. His investigators spent two days interviewing Steele in London, according to The New York Times, and found and interviewed at least one of his sources, but apparently failed to verify the unsavory allegations of illicit and kinky sex, questionable financial dealings, or other behavior that could have made Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

Late in the campaign, a Russian businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, texted Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, “Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else.” The supposedly compromising tapes were fake, Rtskhiladze said he’d been told.

It would have been very unlike Russian intelligence to neglect an opportunity to entrap a prominent American businessman like Trump. Such attempts were standard on the KGB’s checklist during the Soviet era, and it’s hard to imagine the practice having been abandoned under Putin. Given Trump’s obvious proclivities toward extramarital sex, the allegation struck Trump critics as credible. But Mueller’s report gives no account of the team’s efforts to check out any elements in the Steele dossier, and the lack of confirmation seems to put the matter to rest.

6. The notion that Putin is embarked on a grand strategy “to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order,” as US intelligence agencies put it, has many adherents among experts, pundits and politicians across the spectrum. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the intelligence report of January 2017 declared.

 But the theory seems illogical to Stephen F. Cohen, a retired professor of Russian history at Princeton and NYU who writes frequently on Russia. In his recent book, War With Russia?, he notes that from 2000, when Putin took over a country in chaos and poverty, “until the Ukrainian crisis erupted in 2014, much of Putin’s success and domestic popularity was based on an unprecedented expansion of Russia’s economic relations with Europe and, to a lesser extent, with the United States. Russia provided a third or more of the energy needs of several European Union countries while thousands of European producers, from farmers to manufacturers, found large new markets in Russia, as did scores of US corporations.

“Why, then, would Putin want to destabilize Western democracies that were substantially funding Russia’s rebirth at home and as a great power abroad? . . . Putin never expressed such a goal or had such a motive.”

A different appraisal comes from Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia under Obama. He sees what he calls Putin’s “assault on Western democracy” as a driving strategy. “The worldwide ideological struggle between capitalism and communism is history,” he writes, “but Russian President Vladimir Putin has anointed himself the leader of a renewed nationalist, conservative movement fighting a decadent West. . . . Putin believes he is fighting an ideological war with the West, and he has devoted tremendous resources to expanding the reach of his propaganda platforms in order to win.”

McFaul calls for a mixture of containment and cooperation akin to the Cold War. He sees prospects for agreement where overlapping interests prevail, as in reducing nuclear arms and nuclear proliferation, combating terrorism, and limiting cyberattacks. To those could be added the goal of inducing North Korea to relinquish its burgeoning nuclear arsenal, a topic of discussion in recent days between Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jung-un.

Cohen worries that the demonization of Putin precludes his being regarded as a national-security partner. In any event, there seems little prospect for a containment-cooperation approach without the kind of canny skill now absent in Washington. As long as Trump is in office overseeing an administration with thin expertise and sophistication, and devoid of orderly process to construct or implement coherent policy, Russia and the United States seem destined to hurtle along dangerously, hopefully not to an affirmative answer to the title of Cohen’s book, War With Russia?