By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
So Sean Spicer says he’s not sure whether President Trump
believes there was concerted Russian “interference” in the 2016 presidential
election. I’m not sure whether I believe there was, either.
If by “interference” we mean monkeying around with the
voting process itself, adding Trump votes and subtracting votes for Hillary
Rodham Clinton, then, no: No person or organization of any consequence seems
even to take seriously the possibility that this was the case. The votes were
counted as cast, and Donald J. Trump, strange though the fact may be, was
elected president of these United States, fair and square.
What the Democrats and the media seem to mean by
“interference” is an attempt to influence
the election through such means as establishing a Russian-run pro-Trump
social-media campaign, cooking up “fake news” meant to be damaging to Mrs.
Clinton, and, especially, stealing and releasing confidential e-mail
embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton and her allies in the Democratic-party apparatus.
Foreign powers attempting to influence U.S. elections is
not new. It is a normal part of politics, albeit one that ought to be resisted
and, where appropriate, policed.
Moscow-based attempts to influence U.S. elections far
predate the rule of Vladimir Putin — indeed, they predate the establishment of
the Russian Federation by many years. The most dramatic case in recent history
involved a proposal by Senator Edward Kennedy to collude with Russian
operatives to undermine President Reagan with the hopes of staging a successful
challenge against him in 1984. The quid pro quo proposal was communicated to
the Soviets by John Tunney, a longtime Kennedy family friend, and forwarded to
Yuri Andropov in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the head of the KGB. If Democrats
want an example of what collusion looks like, they needn’t look far.
But that was hardly the only attempt. The Communist Party
USA existed for almost no other reason than to act as Moscow’s cat’s-paw in
U.S. politics, and it enjoyed some success in that: It maintained a close
relationship with Henry Wallace, who served as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice
president and editor of The New Republic.
He was a good progressive who managed to convince himself that gulag
encampments were collective farms and spent a great deal of time discussing
sensitive government information with Soviet agents.
Turnabout, and all that: U.S. political operators regularly
attempt to influence elections abroad, as do, I suppose (and hope), our own
covert agencies.
That’s not to say that this is all legal or unremarkable,
or that it ought to be met with blasé indifference. It is perfectly legal for
Democratic operative Jeremy Bird to work to unseat Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. It is perfectly legal for Netanyahu to give a speech in the
United States that creates political difficulties for Democrats before an
election. And if our spooks are not working behind the scenes to do in the
government of Nicolás Maduro, then we need new spooks. On the other hand, if
Donald Trump or a member of his campaign were in fact shown to have been
working in secrecy with Russian authorities or mobsters to compromise
Democrats’ computers for political ends, then that would involve a couple dozen
prosecutable crimes.
But I wouldn’t bet on that.
Even if one assumes the very worst about President Trump
and the people around him (as I am inclined to do), it is unlikely that
evidence of collusion would be uncovered because — this is key — it almost
certainly is not there. I don’t expect to see any evidence of collusion between
Trump and the Russians for the same reason I did not expect to see any evidence
of collusion between Lois Lerner’s politicized IRS and President Obama: The
invisible hand of the corruption marketplace can do its work without a lot of
committee meetings. Lerner didn’t need to be told to persecute conservative
political groups, and the wild boys in Moscow weren’t waiting for the keen
thinking of Donald J. Trump before they got moving on whatever it is they were
actually up to. Contact between the two wouldn’t serve anybody’s interests — it
would have endangered both parties’ interests.
Which is to say: If you expect to find evidence of active
collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign, you would have to believe not
only that Trump is corrupt and immoral, which is easy enough, but also that
Russian intelligence operatives are both stupid and too timid to act without
approval from Trump or someone in his circle. That is a stretch.
Some Russia-watchers believe that the goal of the 2016
Russian campaign shenanigans was not to elect Trump but to damage Clinton
before her election. That would make a certain kind of sense: Putin does not
want a President Trump or a President Clinton — he wants an American president
so hamstrung by political rancor, personal weakness, and petty venality that
American leadership around the world is compromised.
Mission accomplished.
“Russia” is now shorthand for what will be an open-ended
investigation of Trump and everybody around him, one that probably will last
throughout his term. That may not have been part of Putin’s plan, but it
unquestionably serves Putin’s interests. That is something worth keeping in
mind.
It undeniably is the case that Moscow wants to have a
hand in influencing U.S. elections. But other than use this ordinary fact of
geopolitical life to bludgeon Donald Trump, what does anybody — Democrat or
Republican — propose to do about that?
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