Cautions on "Russia-gate"

Stephen Cohen is one left-leaning expert on Russia who has been cautioning about politicians, journalists, policy analysis and others jumping to conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump campaign collaboration before clear evidence is available in the public record.

In The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate Consortium News 12/15/2017, he gives us an update. Including this concern:

... the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to “contacts with Russia” — political, financial, social, etc. — on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these “contacts” were criminal or potentially so.

This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy’s search for “Communist” connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise.

More to the point, advisers to U.S. policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must have many and various contacts with Russia if they are to understand anything about the dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. I myself, to take an individual example, was an adviser to two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered my wide-ranging and longstanding “contacts” with Russia to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president whom I advised.

To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post, in an editorial. This is one reason why I have, in a previous commentary, argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security. [my emphasis]

But Cohen, like some other skeptics who make important points, is also being a bit disingenuous when he argues that "no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced" for the "charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this 'attack on American democracy.'"

This requires a very narrow concept of what constitutes "actual evidence." But the FBI, the CIA and the NSA all did conclude with high confidence that the Russian government was behind the hacks. And also (with somewhat less confidence on the part of the NSA) that Russia had them transmitted to Wikileaks. Russian officials, and Putin in particular, had rational reasons for trying to cause problems for Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, even if most Americans might think they were bad reasons. And, of course, that doesn't justify interference in American elections. Nor should any American government, including Trump's, take that interference less than extremely seriously.

The charges are credible. But it's true that no court or other independent official investigation has vetted the evidence for the hacking. And that no one from Trump's campaign has yet been convicted of or pleaded guilty to collusion with the Russians in the legal sense.

On the latter point, I would say that the circumstantial evidence that collusion took place looks pretty strong. On the other hand, a conviction on direct charges of actual collusion with the Russians by campaign officials has always been less likely than most Democrats would prefer to assume. We'll see what emerges from the special counsel's investigation. And it's entirely possible. But the actual charges related to collusion (or near-collusion) are more likely to have to do with efforts to cover up contacts with the Russians by lying to the FBI or under oath, or from failing to comply with legally required disclosures of financial connections with Russian entities. And there's also a strong possibility Mueller's investigation will uncover illegal business dealings with the Russians or others that aren't involved with collusion on illegal Russian operations around the 2016 election.