https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... -one-cares
If this happens, then the country is truly broken, in a much deeper way than we thought, and even if Trump gets kicked out (maybe the economy implodes and he loses reelection, for example), this will likely just happen again. Even armed resistance would be a pointless endeavour if most of the public simply doesn't care that Trump is a traitor and a despot. That would truly mark the end of the American experiment, and is one of the few things that could make me genuinely question my faith in democracy.This past week, we saw the first concrete evidence that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia — and it seemed as if no one cared. That’s a reason to ask a disturbing question: What if the slow burn of Robert Mueller’s investigation ends with a fizzle, not an explosion?
What if Mueller, in his role as special counsel, uncovers meaningful proof that the Trump campaign for president knowingly and actively cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected — and the public treats the news as completely unremarkable? That would mark a radical transformation in the nature of contemporary U.S. politics.
Of course, it’s far from certain that Democratic efforts to draw attention to the shocking facts would fail. But the fizzle outcome now looks genuinely possible, not because Mueller won’t get the goods, but because of a combination of Trump’s talent at changing the subject, his Republican supporters’ ho-hum attitude toward campaign wrongdoing, and public fatigue at the duration of the investigation.
To understand this potential scenario in which Mueller strikes pay dirt and Trump nevertheless emerges unscathed, the place to start is with the latest revelation about Paul Manafort.
The astonishing and entirely new fact revealed last week is that, according to Mueller, Manafort, while chairman of the Trump campaign, sent polling data to a Russian associate with close ties to Russian intelligence.
Until now, Mueller’s investigation and reporting by the news media have established two things: that Russian intelligence actively tried to influence the outcome of the election, and that Russian intelligence used numerous pathways to reach out to members of the Trump campaign and inner circle.
Lacking so far is any direct proof that the Trump campaign took up these overtures in a way that actively constituted cooperation or collusion.
If it can be substantiated — and Mueller almost certainly wouldn’t be alleging it if it couldn’t — the Manafort revelation is that proof. This cooperation with Russia didn’t come from some minor figure in the campaign, but from the chairman himself. This is a hugely significant development.
Sharing campaign research in the form of proprietary polling data has one obvious explanation: Manafort was giving the Russians data they could use to try to influence the campaign.
Proof that the Trump campaign cooperated with the Russians would close the evidentiary circle by connecting Russian outreach with Russian efforts to use social media to affect the vote. Proof that Manafort sent data to the Russians would not be just a step toward proof of collusion. It would itself be proof of collusion.
Yet this development, which should have dominated the news cycle, fell distantly behind the topics of the government shutdown, Trump’s prime-time address on border security, and the president’s threat to invoke emergency powers to build the Mexican border wall that Congress has denied him.
Why did the Manafort news get so little attention? Several factors probably contributed.
One explanation is that the revelation didn’t come from prosecutors or from leaks to a news organization. Instead, the information was unintentionally revealed by Manafort’s lawyers when they failed to successfully redact a document they submitted to court in connection with Manafort’s sentencing.
This strange mechanism of hitting the news made the original story one about cutting and pasting a word-processing document, not about the content of what was revealed.
A second explanation is that the news media and the public had already given up on Manafort as a source of meaningful Trump-related revelations. After all, Manafort pleaded guilty to a series of crimes that long predated his involvement with the Trump campaign. And based on the length of the sentence Manafort got and prosecutors’ insistence that he was still lying even after agreeing to cooperate, many of us had begun to think that Manafort wasn’t going to be the subject of any major campaign-related breakthroughs.
In retrospect, that conclusion seems to have been premature — maybe even spectacularly wrong. Mueller, it would seem, can prove that Manafort brought the Trump campaign into cooperation with Russia.
The third and most troubling possibility is that, as the Mueller investigation has proceeded, fatigue and acceptance have set in. Trump’s supporters and opponents alike may have more or less come to think that there was some sort of collusion with Russia. The supporters, arguably, don’t much care. The opponents increasingly think that no matter what Mueller finds, it won’t be enough to convict and remove Trump from office in impeachment proceedings.
The upshot would be that Mueller’s report could turn out to be a kind of historical afterthought — even if Mueller is able to demonstrate collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the central component of his mission.
Sure, the Democratic House would hold hearings. Some members of Congress would call for impeachment. But if Republicans held firm, many Democrats would probably decide not to impeach because of the unlikelihood of success.
In that scenario, it’s possible to imagine that even if Trump was aware of the Russian collusion, his supporters would maintain that the Russian efforts had no impact, and that Trump had no idea the cooperation with Russia was irregular, let alone illegal.
Let me be clear that I consider this scenario a disaster for democracy. If one candidate for office colludes with a foreign power to affect an election, that is an existential crisis for the principle of popular self-determination. I would much rather that Mueller find no evidence of collusion than that he prove his case in the face of an uncaring public and an inactive Congress.
But given reaction to the Manafort news, the disaster scenario is no longer unthinkable. I’m not even sure it’s unlikely.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Noah Feldman at nfeldman7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net
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Trump, Putin, Fox News and a Test of Presidential Power
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Politics & Policy
Trump, Putin and a Test of Presidential Power
The FBI worried that Trump was serving Russia’s interests. Turns out, Trump’s been burying records of his conversations with Putin. And he won’t give even Fox News a straight answer about any of it.
By Timothy L. O'Brien
January 13, 2019, 6:45 AM PST
Keeping the details fuzzy. Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
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The president of the United States phoned into Fox News on Saturday night for a non-interview interview about the non-emergency emergency along the southern border.
About eight minutes into the 22-minute bit of stagecraft, the Fox host, Jeanine Pirro, changed topics and asked President Donald Trump about a New York Times article from the night before that revealed new details about federal probes into his possible links to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Times disclosed that after Trump fired the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, who was analyzing Russian efforts to sabotage the 2016 presidential campaign, the FBI was so alarmed it began examining whether Trump himself had been “working on behalf of Russia against American interests.”
Pirro embraced the moment, chuckling slightly and teeing up what should have been a softball question. “So, I’m going to ask you: Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?”
Trump had a number of routes he might have taken in response to Pirro. The best would have been simply saying “no.” Instead, he bobbed, weaved and never answered the question directly.
"I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” Trump said. “I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written and if you read the article, you’d see that they found absolutely nothing."
Trump had already spent Saturday morning using his Twitter feed to slag the Times, Comey, the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Democrats for orchestrating groundless investigations, and he continued his food fight on Pirro’s show — lobbing insult after insult but never answering a straightforward question in a straightforward way.
Later in their conversation, Pirro and Trump chatted about another piece of hard-won reporting the Washington Post published Saturday morning. The Post disclosed that Trump had “gone to extraordinary lengths” to bury details of conversations he had with Putin, including “on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.” The net effect of Trump’s maneuvers, the Post noted, is that there now isn’t a detailed record — even in the federal government’s classified files — of his personal conversations with Putin at five locations over the past two years.
A reasonable person might wonder if the president has been going out of his way to hide something. The president was less concerned. "I’m not keeping anything under wraps. I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “I mean, it’s so ridiculous, these people make it up."
Trump also told Pirro that there’s no reason to be unduly alarmed by his various intersections with Russia’s leader. “Think of it: I have a one-on-one meeting with Putin like I do with every other leader, I have many one-on-one, nobody ever says anything about it. But with Putin they say, ‘Oh, what did they talk about?’ We talked about very positive things.”
Trump would prefer, of course, to continue interacting with Putin unsupervised. He also would prefer the broader public to adopt his view of investigations of his conduct as “witch hunts.” All of that would also involve the country accepting an imperial understanding of presidential powers. That’s why one of the great tests of the Trump presidency involves seeing how ready the Republican Party and voters are to accommodate themselves to executive overreach or malfeasance.
Trump and his advocates have argued that Comey’s firing can’t be construed as obstruction of justice because, under Article II of the Constitution, the president was merely exercising the powers of his office as he saw fit. Comey worked for him, after all. A similar argument has surfaced around the voluminous body of critical or meddlesome tweets Trump has directed at federal investigators and defendants in various legal probes that might circle back to him. Trump can tweet whatever he wants because it’s free speech, say his defenders.
But the law allows no one, including the president, to try to upend the justice system or disrupt governmental proceedings in the service of their own interests. In that context, it really isn’t about thinking of it as someone just doing their job when a senior law enforcement official gets canned, or just speaking their mind when they seek to influence witnesses by lashing out or praising them on Twitter (especially if national security and the rule of law are at stake).
There isn’t settled agreement about the boundaries of presidential immunity and executive privilege, so we may end up seeing some of this adjudicated and settled by the Supreme Court depending on how events unfold. In the interim, the House of Representatives is likely to fill the void.
U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Saturday that it was “unprecedented” that the FBI felt it needed to investigate a sitting president’s “possible cooptation by a hostile foreign government.” He said that his committee will “take steps to better understand both the President’s actions and the FBI’s response to that behavior, and to make certain that these career investigators are protected from President Trump’s increasingly unhinged attacks."
U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, also said on Saturday that he wants to know more about Trump’s meetings with Putin. He said his committee plans to hold hearings on the “mysteries swirling” around the Trump-Putin relationship. “Every time Trump meets with Putin, the country is told nothing,” he said. “The Foreign Affairs Committee will seek to get to the bottom of it.”
Whether any of that looms large in the president’s mind — or whether he completely understands the potential threats of the various probes surrounding him — is unclear. An open season of House probes is set to kick off publicly next month in Washington when the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testifies in a hearing about his experiences working for Trump. Pirro asked the president on Saturday night if he had concerns about Cohen’s testimony.
“You know, you’re supposed to have lawyer-client privilege, but it doesn’t matter ’cause I’m a very honest person, frankly,” Trump responded.
