It’s a story that John le Carré should appreciate. The great British spy novelist was a master at creating mysteries that flowed out of the great craft of espionage that was so prevalent during the Cold War. But the mystery surrounding Donald Trump and the Russian attempt to hack into and disrupt the 2016 presidential election is even more complicated and unfathomable than some of le Carré’s most impenetrable fiction.
The Trump tale starts in the campaign, when U.S. intelligence agencies were alerting then-president Obama that the Russians were trying to influence, interfere with, and hack into the presidential election. At the same time, candidate Trump was denying the validity of that intelligence, except when he was urging the Russians to “find the missing e-mails” (referring to the e-mails deleted by Hillary Clinton from those she kept on her private server when she was secretary of State).
But at that point, it was just a campaign, and candidates will sometimes assert positions that they deem necessary to win votes, irrespective of whether those positions truly represent their views or beliefs or, indeed, comport with reality. Still, the candidate did have advisors who had significant ties to Russia, most notably his campaign manager (Paul Manafort) and his principal foreign policy advisor (Michael Flynn), along with guys like Carter Page and Roger Stone who had long-standing business relationships with Russian companies and the Russian government, not to mention his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And so, even during the campaign, questions began to form about Trump and a Russian connection, albeit all the while Mr. Trump countered that he either had never met Putin or had no business with Russia (or, alternatively, admired the Russian leader and bragged about the Miss Universe pageant he had held there).
But the intrigue increased notably after the election, when the then-president-elect continued to reject intelligence reports of Russian meddling in the election. His attitude seemed intent on disparaging those reports as if to accept them would put the legitimacy of his election in doubt. And then he announced that Mr. Flynn would be his national security director in spite of strong indications that Flynn’s Russia connection was significant and perhaps even on-going. (Also, in December, Mr. Kushner had a mysterious meeting with an executive from a major Russian bank. That meeting has never been fully explained.)
Flynn only lasted 24 days in the post after Trump was inaugurated. But that was a full two weeks after then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates (herself about to be fired for refusing to honor the travel ban Trump had announced) had warned Trump that Flynn had lied to Vice-President Pence about his meetings with Russia’s ambassador Kislyak. (Flynn had presumably kept knowledge of that that meeting from the president-elect – unless, of course, Mr. Trump had been fully aware of it, or perhaps had even directed Flynn to seek the meeting in the first place. Yes, that’s pure conjecture, but it isn’t idle conjecture.) Why did Trump keep Flynn in the position until the press revealed his lie? Why did he then seem intent on protecting Flynn from claims of wrong-doing? Why does he still persist in doing so?
The questions about Donald Trump’s apparent fealty for Russia would be puzzling even without the claims of Russian meddling in the election. Russia, after all, is a U.S. adversary in international affairs. Putin is an autocratic ruler who is a throw-back to the dark days of the Kremlin and the KGB, where he cut his teeth as a Soviet agent. One would expect any U.S. president to deal warily with him and his government.
Trump took office with the entire intelligence community firmly committed to the view that Russia had hacked into and otherwise had sought to disrupt the presidential election. The evidence clearly pointed to a form of cyberwarfare that Russia had engaged in against the United States. And the new president reacted with disbelief, even excoriating the CIA in an early rant. How can this attitude be explained? How can he be so adamant?
The mystery has only become more confounding in the six-plus months that Trump has been in office. Yes, Flynn is gone, but Trump’s apparent efforts to protect him have only continued. James Comey claims that Trump sought to pressure the then-FBI director to refrain from investigating Flynn. He then fired Comey when the director refused and instead pursued the Russia-gate probe. His latest fury is directed at Jeff Sessions for Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation. He says that had he known Sessions intended to recuse himself, he would not have appointed him, and that he regards Sessions’ failure to be forthcoming as a betrayal of his loyalty to him and to the presidency. (Does he really not understand the proper role of the Attorney General in our constitutional system? All the evidence indicates that he doesn’t. Think about that for a moment: the sitting president of the U.S. does not understand the role of the Attorney General in his own government.)
At this point in a le Carré novel, someone would reveal something in the nature of a smoking gun, and the truth would come out. (Usually, the denouement in his novels would be a mix of pathos and disenchantment, with heroes hard to identify and villains vanquished only until the next battle.) But the very real story that we are witnessing with Donald Trump and the Russian election-meddling is still a mystery with few hard clues as to what is really going on.
Robert Mueller is at work as the appointed Special Counsel, and the assumption is that he is unravelling the many threads. But he is a rarity in Washington in that he doesn’t leak what his office has uncovered. And so we know precious little of what he has uncovered and where his investigation is going. Instead, the working press keeps at it, confirming leaked information and reporting it, only to have Trump and his legal team call it all “fake news.” And his base of political support believes him, and his poll numbers stay in the high 30s and low 40s, even as the latest news indicates that Trump drafted a false narrative for his son that attempted to explain that weird meeting that his Don, Jr., Jared and Manafort had during the campaign with Russians who had said in an e-mail that they had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, the rest of us wonder what we have in our president and how bad whatever we ultimately learn is going to be for him, his administration, and for our country. Is he truly ignorant and naïve about the details of governing the nation and thus unable to appreciate the peril represented to his country by the Russian-election meddling? Another relatively benign possibility is that he is perhaps just a narcissistic autocrat who is bent on building a lasting personal empire. In that case, he would never acknowledge Russian interference in his election or any involvement with Russian interests, lest his image be permanently soiled and the legitimacy of his election questioned.
Or is he something worse? Might he be so heavily indebted to Russian banks (as some reports indicate) or so open to Russian blackmail (as one scandalous DVD purports to suggest) or so engaged in business deals with Russian enterprises (as he may have been in the past) that he dare not put himself at risk of letting any of that come out?
Or, is it just possible that this man is the true Manchurian Candidate, the ultimate traitor to his country who is intent on securing a Russian-dominated world in which the United States is just another puppet state following the party line?
That last possibility still sounds like conspiracy paranoia, but as the mystery surrounding this president and his aversion to a probe of Russia’s meddling in the election continues, it becomes ever more difficult to ignore.