It’s now clear that the Russians offered
help and members of the Trump campaign accepted. But the real scandal may be
money laundering.
The discussion of the Russia file these
days sounds like the review of a fast-food restaurant. Echoing that infamous
catchphrase of Wendy’s that became a political meme in the 1984 presidential
elections — “Where’s the Beef?” — the charges of cooperation between the
Kremlin and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have either been dismissed as
a “nothingburger” or embraced as a “somethingburger” with all the fixings.
It’s an odd characterization. The beef is
obviously right there on the bun.
Russia engaged in various efforts to
influence or disrupt the 2016 presidential elections. Trump campaign staffers
met with Russian officials and discussed the election. The president’s own son
convened a meeting, attended by campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law
Jared Kushner, with a Russian lawyer who promised compromising material on
Hillary Clinton.
After the election, various appointees and
administration officials — National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Attorney
General Jeff Sessions — then lied about their Russian contacts.
So, the only question is whether the
burger is a run-of-the-mill cheeseburger or a XXXL Fatburger that gets caught
in the throat of a president who sure loves him some fast food. I lean toward
the latter. But that’s going to require a closer look at the ingredients. Brace
yourself: It’s never a pretty picture behind the scenes at a burger joint.
FIRST: READ THE FINE PRINT
The connections between Trump and Russia
go well beyond anything that transfixed the nation in scandals of the past,
including Watergate. They fall into three categories. There’s the
election-related cooperation. There are the subsequent national-security
breaches. Then there’s the cover-up.
But let’s start with the latest
controversy: the Nunes memo. This memo, released by the House Intelligence
Committee, is only important because it signals the true end of bipartisanship
in Congress. For decades, this committee and its counterpart in the Senate were
largely above politics. Their deliberations often took place in secret, as
befit the subject matter.
But committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA),
in true Trumpian manner, has overturned the applecart. Against the advice of
the FBI and some of his Republican colleagues — not to mention the Democrats on
the committee — Nunes pushed for the publication of a memo critical of the FBI
and its ongoing investigations of Russiagate. In this way, Nunes released
classified information with the obvious purpose of impeding the investigation.
Okay, I’m not a big fan of the FBI, or
even necessarily of bipartisanship (like, for instance, when both parties
backed the invasion of Iraq). But I am a fan of the rule of law. And at a time
when a president places himself above the law, I strongly support all
institutions and processes that can cage the autocrat, and that includes the
FBI and what remains of bipartisanship in Congress.
As for the particular claims of the memo,
they don’t hold up to scrutiny. Nunes claims, for instance, that the FBI
pursued surveillance of a Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, based on faulty,
politicized intelligence. Nunes argues further that this intelligence — the
dossier of opposition research collected by former British spook Christopher
Steele — was compromised because of its connections to the Democratic Party and
the Hillary Clinton campaign. Finally, the whole enterprise was further tainted
by the involvement of FBI agent Peter Strzok, who made no bones about his
dislike of Trump in private texts to his secret lover.
Everything hangs on the role of the Steele
dossier. The FBI contends that the dossier was not the most important reason it
decided to put Page under surveillance. After all, Page was under suspicion
before Trump ever ran for president: In 2013, three Russian businessmen later
charged with being spies tried to recruit Page. Also, the dossier was initially
commissioned by Republicans eager to counter Trump during the primaries and
only later picked up by the Dems. The addition of Strzok, whose only offense
that we know of was to express what half the country was thinking, was simply a
hook to make the whole memo more newsworthy, particularly for Fox-like outlets.
So, on the fast-food burger spectrum, the
Nunes memo isn’t even a sandwich. It amounts to a ketchup packet, or perhaps a
used straw.
NEXT: THE MEAT OF THE MATTER
Despite the obsessions of the Nunes memo,
the FBI’s investigation into election tampering goes well beyond Carter Page
and the Steele dossier. The source of the information that really prompted the
FBI to open up an investigation in July 2016 came from an altogether different
source. It came from the Australians.
Back in May 2016, Australia’s top diplomat
in the UK, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, had a late-night convo
with a Trump campaign advisor about a cache of opposition research on Hillary
Clinton. He relayed the info back to his colleagues, who then passed it on to
the FBI. The Trump advisor in question was “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos,
actually a foreign policy advisor with enough influence to edit Trump’s first
foreign policy speech in April 2016. Papadopoulos picked up the scent of the
thousands of emails that apparently contained dirt on Hillary Clinton and that,
thanks to some remarkably successful hacks, were in the possession of the
Russian government.
Oh, perhaps you still believe the canard
that it wasn’t the Russians who hacked the DNC and vacuumed up all those
emails? Well, then you haven’t kept up with the news. First of all, the Dutch
intelligence service actually watched the hack happen and could pinpoint the
very room in Moscow where Cozy Bear was operating. The Dutch spooks even hacked
into the security camera in the corridor outside the room so that they could
identify the people involved.
Don’t believe the Dutch? Okay, how about
one of the Russian hackers themselves, testifying in, of all places, a Russian
courtroom. Back in August, Konstantin Kozlovsky was on trial for stealing money
from banks through a cyber scam. But he had more to say about some of his other
activities. According to Fortune magazine:
Kozlovsky said he reported to Dmitry
Dokuchayev, a major-general in the FSB, for various tasks since 2008. In 2016,
Dokuchayev had instructed him to attack the DNC’s servers for the purpose of
manipulating the U.S. electoral process, Kozlovsky testified.
Dokuchayev is himself now in prison on
charges of treason, accused of passing similar information to U.S. intelligence
agencies. In other words, Dokuchayev appears to be one of the main sources for
the information on which joint U.S. agencies, in a report released by the
director of national intelligence in January, argued that the Russian state had
directed a campaign designed to polarize public opinion and broadly discredit
the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
So, the Russians had the goods and the
Trump team was interested in the goods — did they actually coordinate or
conspire? These are actionable offenses, at least under the Federal Election
Campaign Act. Conspiracy is an agreement to commit an offense. Coordination
would be if the Trump campaign relied on Russian sources of campaign finance.
The oft-used charge of “collusion” certainly sounds ominous, but it doesn’t
have legal standing.
That’s the heart of the inquiry — or
inquiries, since it’s really five separate investigations — that special
counsel Robert Mueller is currently pursuing. It’s impossible to know exactly
what evidence Mueller has. But Wired broke it down recently: 400,000 documents
related to possible money-laundering, the extensive activities of the Russian
trolls on social media, specific hacking operations (like Cozy Bear), meetings
between Russians and members of Trump’s team, and the cover-up.
Mueller is playing a patient middle game.
He has turned two key players: Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. And he’s
preparing to interview the big kahuna himself, Donald Trump. According to Rep.
Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, “We do
know this: The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help, the Russians
gave help, and the president made full use of that help.” If in fact the
committee does know that the “campaign accepted help,” that’s proof of
conspiracy as opposed to mere parallel play. If Mueller can prove that, it’s
game over.
SUPER-SIZE ME!
Russiagate goes way beyond Watergate,
where the abuse of power seems almost parochial in retrospect. Whatever
allegedly took place before the elections, Trump has only super-sized the
problem as president. Although contacts with the Russians no longer fall in the
category of election tampering, they are no less serious. In fact, in terms of
overall national security, they are far graver. The first post-election
maneuver came before the Trump administration was even inaugurated. Future
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn talked by phone with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak about the sanctions the Obama administration had imposed on
Russia because of its election interference.
The criminal charges associated with money
laundering are more serious than any penalties connected with cooperating with
a foreign power to undermine an election. That would explain not only Trump’s
consistently friendly policy toward Putin and his refusal to release his tax
returns.
It wasn’t just that Flynn promised to rip
up the sanctions in order to avoid a resumption of a Cold War between the two
countries. Flynn was in a business partnership that was going to make him a lot
of money from an upturn in US-Russian relations. He later lied to the FBI about
his conversations with Kislyak, which was the proximate reason for his
departure from the administration after only three weeks. (Flynn also didn’t
disclose his connections to the Turkish government, which also involved large
sums of money and may even have extended to involvement in a plot to kidnap a
Turkish dissident and send him back to Turkey).
But that was only the beginning. In May,
at the White House, Trump himself met with Kislyak — and Russian Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov — and proceeded to give them highly classified
intelligence on an Israeli operation in Syria. The Israeli government was
furious. And so was the US intelligence community. Former director of national
intelligence James Clapper, noting that Putin was a former KGB case officer,
called the American president essentially an “asset” of the Russians. Trump
followed up with various fawning meetings with Putin where he accepted at face
value the Russian president’s denials of cyberattacks and election meddling.
The cooperation has extended to other
foreign policy realms. Although the Trump administration’s more hostile
approaches to Iran and North Korea have diverged from the Kremlin’s
preferences, Washington has largely given Russia a free hand in Syria. That’s
preferable to a direct clash of interests, but it has also allowed Russia to
prop up a murderous regime and continue its own share of relentless air
strikes.
Of course, US-Russian relations have not
been exactly rosy of late. Congress has pursued additional sanctions against
the Kremlin. The administration’s aggressive push on energy exports sharpens
competition with Russia, whose economy depends on its oil and gas production.
Trump, like his predecessors, continues to oppose the Nord Stream 2 pipeline
between Russia and Germany.
Partly this failure to reset relations has
been a function of pushback from Congress, partly fallout from the Mueller
investigations. But as with the Flynn imbroglio, the issue is not really about
national security. Trump is primarily interested in money, and that may be the
issue that ultimately brings him down.
FINALLY: THE SPECIAL SAUCE
Trump famously refused to release his tax
returns. There might be any number of reasons why a billionaire who likes to
cut corners would want to conceal his personal financial dealings from the
public. But it’s also possible that he wanted to conceal evidence of money
laundering. A number of intriguing clues have appeared recently that, added
together, look rather damning. Last March, Reuters broke the story of Russian
investors sinking nearly $100 million into Trump properties, despite the
president’s insistence that he had no deals with Russia. Given the difficulty
of tracing ownership for some properties, Russian investments in Trump projects
are likely much greater.
Russian investors aren’t just looking to
diversify their holdings. They want to launder money obtained illegally.
Consider the case of Prevezon, a Russian holding company that has laundered
huge amounts of money through properties in New York City. It’s also part of
the tax fraud case that accountant Sergei Magnitsky discovered that got him thrown
into a Russian jail, where he died under mysterious circumstances. The US
Attorney’s Office in New York was preparing to throw the book at Prevezon.
Then, a couple months after the Trump
administration took office, the case magically disappeared. The Trump
administration dismissed the US attorney who was pursuing the case, and the
Sessions Justice Department rushed to settle the case for an absurdly low
$6-million penalty (the Attorney’s Office was seeking $230 million) and without
any admission of wrongdoing. The Russian lawyer representing Prevezon was
delighted, calling the Justice Department decision “an apology from the
government.”
And the name of the Russian lawyer?
Natalia Veselnitskaya. Sound familiar? She’s the one who promised Donald Trump
Jr. some dirt on Clinton and participated in the infamous meeting at Trump
Tower in June 2016.
Evidence of a quid pro quo would be
extraordinarily damaging for the Trump administration. Does Mueller already
have the smoking gun and only waiting to catch Trump himself in a lie regarding
money laundering? Intriguingly, some financial connections between Prevezon and
Trump circles — through a real-estate deal brokered by Jared Kushner — have
already surfaced.
Trump “has no strong ideological
commitments,” Russia expert Seva Gunitsky explains. “We’ve seen that painfully
over and over during the last few months. But if his financial interests are
tied up with Russian oligarchs, who in turn are tied up with the Kremlin and
thus have parallel interests, then Trump’s ‘consistency’ becomes much more
explainable. And if we emphasize this financial angle a bit more, it also makes
a lot of sense that he would not want to release his tax returns. Because that
would expose just how deeply embedded he is with Russian money.”
The criminal charges associated with money
laundering are more serious than any penalties connected with cooperating with
a foreign power to undermine an election. That would explain not only Trump’s
consistently friendly policy toward Putin, but also his refusal to release his
tax returns.
It would also explain the extra efforts
Trump and his colleagues have made to cover up whatever they’ve done. The
president fired FBI Director James Comey and threatened to fire Sessions as
well as Mueller. By authorizing the release of the Nunes memo, he seems to be
building a case to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Also as part of
the cover-up, a number of Trump officials have “misremembered” their contacts
with the Russians.
Of course, much of what the Trump
administration does on any given day can be attributable to sheer incompetence.
This isn’t reassuring, but it isn’t necessarily illegal. But greed is the
through line in the Russia story, the plot that holds everything together — the
special sauce that gives the burger its zing.
If Mueller can identify exactly how Trump
and his cronies broke the law to swell their bank accounts — never mind the
tainted elections or the compromised national security — then the president
will be hoist by his own pecuniary petard.
*[This article was originally published by
Foreign Policy in Focus.]
The views expressed in this article are
the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial
policy.