Democrats, Russia, Trump and nuclear disarmament

California Sen. Kamala Harris attracted a good bit of attention in 2016 as a possible corporate Democratic candidate for President in 2020. Here position in the liberal/progressive continuum is not entirely clear, even after serving as California's Attorney General for six years before entering the Senate in 2017.

She appear in this Morning Joe segment talking about the Nunes Memo, potential Constitutional crisis, and the Dreamers Senate Intel Committee Member Kamala Harris Criticizes Nunes Memo 02/05/2018:

Harris' comments about the Trump-Russia affair and about the upcoming budget deadline were sensible. And nothing that would gives Democratic progressives any particular cause for concern.

But I'm also concerned about what the Democrats are not saying about Russia. They need to bee making this a major issue: Ben Doherty, US's new nuclear policy 'a blueprint for war', Nobel peace laureate says Guardian 02/05/2018. Tilman Ruff, the chair of the Australia-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warns that the Trump Administration's new nuclear policy increases the risk of nuclear war. And that policy doesn't look sound like one that Russia should especially like:

Last Friday the release of Donald Trump’s nuclear posture review revealed a significantly more aggressive stance towards Russia, saying Vladimir Putin’s regime must be convinced it would face “unacceptably dire costs” if it were to threaten even a limited nuclear attack in Europe. ...

The Pentagon-led review of the US nuclear arsenal and the policies that govern it was ordered by Trump a year ago. Such reviews are customarily done at the outset of a new US administration. ...

[Ruff says,] “The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons has disappeared from that document. It’s been described as a blueprint for nuclear war, and I don’t think that’s too extreme a characterisation.”

Ruff said on myriad indicators the risk of global nuclear war was increasing. “The continued reliance on nuclear weapons; the continued massive investments on keeping them indefinitely; making them more usable and more deadly; the lack of talks about disarmament, the increasingly belligerent postures and extraordinarily specific threats to use nuclear weapons by multiple leaders in multiple parts of the world,” he said.

The US position has also been criticised – predictably – by China, Iran and Russia.

Russia’s foreign ministry said the Trump administration’s policy statement was both “confrontational” and “unscrupulous” while Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said it risked “bringing humankind closer to annihilation”. [my emphasis]

Not having a nuclear war is a good thing. Peace is a good thing. Peace is also popular. And Democrats need to be advocating it.

Listen carefully to see if you hear any hint of such a thing in the comments Democrats make about Russia these days, including Kamala Harris' appearance above.

The antiwar critics who accuse the Democrats of using the "Russiagate" issue to promote hawkish foreign policies and bigger military budgets are right, so far as that goes. We need a pragmatic Russia policies with reducing the nuclear threat at the heart of it.

Of course, Russian interference in the 2016 election has to be seriously addressed. So do Russia-NATO tensions, trade relations, climate change, and a variety of other issues. The Democrats should be building a political program for a practical approach to Russia and nuclear disarmament, not simply an anti-Russia policy, which they are pretty doing presently.

And this is another reminder that the Dems need to be careful about accusing the Trump Administration of being a "puppet" of Russia or the like. Because when we look at policies like the critically important nuclear posture, we don't see anything close to an across-the-board "pro-Russia" policy.

Russia-gate at the end of 2017

Sharon LaFraniere et al have reported a story that may save the Democrats from complications over the "Steele dossier": How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt New York Times 12/30/2017:

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. ...

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.

How this might get the Dems off the hook for a misstep in pressing the investigation of Russian election interference is explained in the post by Marcy Wheeler linked below.

The following two segments provide a good summary of what I think of as the reality-based spectrum on Russia-gate as of now. One is this segment from the conservative-leaning Morning Joe program on MSNBC, Definitive Timeline Of The Trump-Russia Connections 12/27/2017:

The Real News is a left-leaning website that has maintained a particularly skeptical position. In this segment, TRN's Aaron Maté interviews the Guardian's Luke Harding, whose book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win was published this year. Where's the 'Collusion'? 12/23/2017:

This segment provides some insights, perhaps despite the efforts of the two participants in the discussion. Maté is too argumentative in his role as the interviewer. And Harding apparently expected a softball interview and doesn't appear to be fully prepared to respond to some objections that have long been part of the discussion and gets unnecessarily punchy at moments. He comes off as a bit of a twit when Maté challenges him on particular points.

But what emerges is that Harding's defenses of his points does involved more assumptions than his initial statement of them might imply. And he's right to argue that the international pattern of Russian political intervention needs to be taken into account. But Maté is also asking appropriately skeptical questions. He's not just repeating hack Republican talking points.

And Maté has a particularly good point about how journalists and the public (and, by implication, the Democrats) should be handling the infamous Steele dossier, starting around 15:00 in the segment. And I give him credit for introducing the separate but related issue of Israeli influence operations into the interview.

But Maté also plays the game that other antiwar critics of the case against Trump on his Russian connection in using very narrow definitions of proof and evidence. Harding is right in his responses to Maté when he says that we have to look not only at larger patterns but the circumstantial evidence about collusion.

Having said that, it's also important to keep in mind that the specific charge of the Trump campaign illegally colluding with the Russian government on illegal Russian assistance in the campaign has always been a long shot. Even actors as arrogant and careless as several major figures in the Trump campaign have shown themselves to be may have been cautious enough to not leave blatantly incriminating evidence of that particular violation of the law. But whether or not there was such specific collusion, the various acts of inaccurate reporting of meetings with Russian nationals connected to the Putin government by officials getting security clearances, perjury in testimony to Congress, illegal business dealings with Russian entities, obstruction of justice in connection with official investigations, lying to the FBI, all of those can be legitimately considered as crimes in themselves.

Congress' power of impeachment gives them a lot of latitude (for better or worse) in deciding what sort of acts constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors." My understanding of the history of that centuries-old concept embedded in the US Constitution is that it doesn't have to be something specifically outlawed by statute. One item that might fall into such a gray area would be Trump's decision to leave Michael Flynn in his post as National Security Adviser with his top security clearance for three weeks after the Acting Attorney General had directly informed Trump that the Justice Department believed Flynn to have been compromised by Russian intelligence.

Marcy Wheeler has been following the Steele dossier story closely. And she is particularly critical of how the Democrats have been using that issue, as in this post of 10/25/2017 (Reasons Why Dems Have Been Fucking Stupid on the Steele Dossier: A Long Essay Emptywheel):

I have no doubt Russia tampered with the election, and if the full truth comes out I think it will be more damning than people now imagine.

But the Democrats have really really really fucked things up with their failures to maintain better ethical distance between the candidate [Hillary Clinton] and the [Steele] dossier, and between the party and the FBI sharing. They’ve made things worse by waiting so long to reveal this, rather that pitching it as normal sleazy political oppo research a year ago.

The case of Russian preference for Trump is solid. The evidence his top aides were happy to serve as Russian agents is strong.

But rather than let FBI make the case for that, Democrats instead tried to make their own case, and they did in such a way as to make the very solid case against Trump dependent on their defense of the dosser, rather than on better backed claims released since then.

Boy it seems sadly familiar, Democrats committing own goals like this. And all that’s before where the lawfare on this dossier is going to go. [my emphasis]

The Russia-gate story is one in which we all need to try to focus on the evidence, keeping in mind that circumstantial evidence is also evidence.

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.