Remember that old salty story about a kid trying to shovel his way through a towering pile of horse manure, convinced there had to be a pony in there somewhere? It really captures the whole Russia/Trump/FBI brouhaha. Peel away the layers of dung – the Comey memos, the dueling claims of obstruction and vindication, the etymology of “hope” as a command – and there lies the nearly forgotten source of this mess: a foreign adversary’s attempt to sabotage our democracy.
A daily barrage of Trumpian subplots is distracting us from the compelling and frightening antecedent that started everything. That is mind boggling for those of us who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when, as kids, we were less concerned with the bogeyman than we were with a shoe-pounding Nikita Khrushchev and his promise to bury us. Fifty-some years later, Russia is caught screwing with our elections and the country gets all wrapped up in peripheral stuff, like whether the fired FBI director is a leaker.
Every U.S. intelligence agency has been unequivocal: Russia executed an extensive and elaborate plot to interfere with last year’s election. Not one cabinet secretary or member of Congress has disputed that assertion. In fact, most of them, including the Republican House speaker and Senate majority leader, have publically acknowledged Russia’s tampering. There is only one office holder in Washington who refuses to accept this reality: President Donald J. Trump. This president has not only consistently pooh-poohed the growing mountain of evidence that Russia interfered in our election, he has denigrated all of the Congressional and FBI investigations on the matter, calling them “witch hunts”.
Asha Rangappa is a former FBI agent and currently an associate dean at Yale Law School. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, she offered a singularly unique take on James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The real bombshell, she wrote, had nothing to do with Trump’s attempt to stop an investigation or Comey releasing his notes to the media. Instead, Rangappa argued, it was the president’s unwillingness “to preserve, protect and defend” the country from Russia’s attack on our free elections.
“In the nine times Trump met with or called Comey,” she wrote, “it was always to discuss how the investigation into Russia’s election interference was affecting him personally, rather than the security of the country. He apparently cared little about understanding either the magnitude of the Russian intelligence threat, or how the FBI might be able to prevent another attack in future elections.”
This is a president who has not lifted a finger to protect our democratic elections from an outside attack. This is huge, and we should never, for a moment, lose sight of it. The accusation of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians is speculative and unproven right now. Thanks to Comey’s testimony and recent news reports, we know a little more about a possible obstruction of justice charge against Trump, but it remains a close and unsettled question. Yet, by refusing to even acknowledge a foreign adversary’s interference in our election, the president has placed his personal ego needs above his sworn duty to protect this country.
Trump’s repeated refusal to deal constructively with the Russian election threat grows more acute with every revelation of the depth and breadth of the 2016 intrusion. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Russia’s cyber-attacks on our electoral system were much more extensive than originally thought. According to that reporting, Russian hackers made their way into the official voting records of 39 states. Bloomerg quoted a senior intelligence official who expressed fear that the 2016 foray into local election systems gives the Russians three years to use that knowledge in plotting an attack for 2020. Comey echoed that concern in his testimony last week. “They’re coming after America,” he said. “They will be back.”
Donald Trump is doing absolutely nothing to protect us from that attack. That, it seems to me, needs to be part of the Resistance’s messaging in the days ahead. There is no need to prove collusion or obstruction to make this patently obvious charge stick. The Russians are coming after us, and our president is doing nothing about it. If any of the pending investigations subsequently reveal evidence of collusion or obstruction, then his despicable nonfeasance becomes all the more aggravated.
Trump’s obstinate insistence on giving Russia a pass on its attack on our electoral system has the potential to transcend partisanship, even in this bitterly divided country. Just yesterday, in a remarkable rebuke of the White House, the Senate voted 97 to 2 to block any efforts by Trump to scale back sanctions against Russia. That a Republican-controlled Senate doesn’t trust this president on a critical matter of national security is a ready-made lightening rod for changing some minds in Trumpville.
If this nightmare is going to end before 2020, those minds need to be changed. Forget all that nuanced legal analysis about grounds for impeachment. The process is political, not legal. Even if Democrats won back the House and Senate in 2018, an incredibly heavy lift, a two-thirds Senate vote is required for removing a president. An impeachment has to be bipartisan. Congressional Republicans have never been comfortable with Trump, but they have no appetite for incurring the wrath of his base in their own elections. As that base deflates, however, the whole dynamic changes. Trump’s approval rating has been slipping by a percent or two each week and is currently at 37 percent. Since February, a third of that group downgraded from “strongly supports” to “supports”. The momentum is slow but steady. All the more reason to shine the spotlight on the unassailable narrative of Russia’s plot to sabotage America’s elections, and Trump’s refusal to do anything about it. After all, protecting the country from an enemy attack has always been a bedrock value of conservatism.