Time to Revisit Trump-Russia Collusion

Donald Trump Jr. and his friends and relatives at his wedding celebration underwritten by a Russian oligarch. Laura Gordon photography via Instagram A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. The recent news from ProPublica that a Russian oligarch attended Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration on a private island in the Bahamas and covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for the lavish affair was not a surprise to anyone familiar with the main thrust of my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. The book chronicles the decade-long covert operation Putin has waged against the United States to sow discord, influence elections (to benefit Trump), and court Trump and his crew. An important fact in the wedding story is that Umar Kremlev, this oh-so generous oligarch, is not just another Russian billionaire who has to make nice with Putin to keep his fortune; he has been a key member of Putin’s security apparatus—truly the inner circle—and became an oligarch (and head of a corrupt international boxing organization) because of that. In essence, a Putin operative infiltrated deep into the Trump clan. This is not the first time Russia has attempted to squirm its way into Trump Jr.’s world. During the 2016 campaign, Junior received a message from an associate who worked with the son of another Russian oligarch. That contact informed Don Jr. that Moscow was plotting to secretly help Trump and wanted to send an emissary who had dirt on Hillary Clinton to meet with the Trump campaign. Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” The meeting soon happened, with Trump Jr., campaign chair Paul Manafort, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner present. When the meeting was revealed—eight months after the election—Trump Jr. first lied about it, saying it was not related to the campaign, and then later claimed the emissary (who was tied to Russian intelligence) provided no useful derogatory information on Clinton. Trump and his minions have contended that there was no collusion and, thus, no scandal, meaning the whole Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a Deep State “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy Trump. What was most important about the meeting was that it signaled to Moscow that the Trump camp was a-okay with Putin meddling in the election and that it made the Trump gang aware that the Kremlin intended to covertly mess in American politics to assist Trump. Still, Trump, Trump Jr., Manafort, and other Trumpers would loudly assert throughout the campaign and in the years afterward that Putin had not interfered. That is, they knowingly lied. Which brings us to collusion. Collusion has been the buzzword at the center of the Trump-Russia scandal for 10 years. Trump and his minions have contended that there was no collusion and, thus, no scandal, meaning the whole Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a Deep State “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy Trump. Their definition of collusion basically rested on whether Trump or his lieutenants were in the same room with Russian hackers as they pilfered the documents from Democrats that would later be made public by WikiLeaks. No evidence of such collaboration emerged. So, they have vociferously argued ever since, there was no collusion. And, therefore, no scandal. The issue of collusion, naturally, has come up, as I’ve been doing media interviews about the new book. It has long seemed to me that the meeting Trump Jr. set up and the subsequent denials from him and other Trump players—which echoed and affirmed Putin’s denials of interfering in the election—were a form of collusion. Team Trump was colluding with Putin’s attempted cover-up. Maybe Trump and his lieutenants weren’t involved in the hack-and-leak operation. But they deliberately lied and provided cover for Putin. Smells like collusion. In the stretch following the 2016 election, Democrats and Trump critics were too fixated on collusion. But it was the complicity, stupid. As I’ve been discussing all this in media interviews, I’ve made the point that perhaps the better term is complicity. For 10 years, not just in 2016, Putin has been attacking US elections—the book details all this—and throughout that time, Trump has incessantly maintained that Moscow was doing nothing and that all claims otherwise were part of the Deep State’s bogus “Russia, Russia, Russia” conspiracy against him. Consequently, Trump has been complicit in Putin’s ongoing information war against the United States. That’s an act of profound betrayal. In the stretch following the 2016 election, Democrats and Trump critics were too fixated on collusion. But it was the complicity, stupid. Now let’s go back to collusion. My book does have a chapter titled “Collusion,” and it digs into a 966-page bipartisan report on the Russian attack on the 2016 election that was produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee and released in August 2020. This investigation offers the most comprehensive account of what transpired in 2016. One of the most intriguing portions of the report zeroes in on Manafort. (Another very interesting section looks at whether the Kremlin obtained any compromising material on Trump. Read the book for that.) In the Manafort passages, the committee—led at the time by a Republican senator named Marco Rubio—revealed that while he was chairing the Trump campaign, Manafort was interacting with and passing sensitive internal campaign data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a close business associate who was also a Russian intelligence officer. And, the report noted, Kilimnik had connections to the Russian military intelligence unit that ran the hack-and-leak operation that targeted the Clinton campaign. Moreover, the report noted that committee investigators had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations.” It appears there’s a chance that there was indeed collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operation via Manafort. The report’s description of this information was redacted, as was much text about Kilimnik. In my reporting for the book, I learned that the redacted portions disclosed that Kilimnik was an agent for the GRU, the Russian intelligence outfit that ran the hack-and-leak attack—a fact buttressing the possibility that Kilimnik was involved in or aware of that operation when he was in communication with Manafort. Because of all the redactions—the intelligence community did not want to reveal too much of what it knew about the Manafort-Kilimnik connection to protect sources and methods—the public has never learned the full story. It appears there’s a chance that there was indeed collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operation via Manafort. In any event, the fact that Trump’s campaign chair was in direct contact with a Russian agent—they communicated through means that left no traces—ought to have triggered a major scandal. Yet this Republican-backed report—which affirmed that Moscow intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump and that Trump actively exploited the Russian attack and “publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia”—had little impact on the public view of the Trump-Russia affair. It was released during the Covid pandemic in the summertime, when the two political parties were holding their presidential conventions. By then, most of the political-and-media world had moved on from all that Russia business, particularly after the final report of special counsel Robert Mueller noted he had found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. (He did point out he had amassed plenty of evidence that Trump committed multiple acts of obstruction of justice.) So Trump and those within MAGA-land could continue to peddle the narrative that collusion was a bogus charge that had been concocted by the Deep State, the media, and nefarious Democrats. Trump Jr.’s wedding should prompt a reappraisal of the collusion question, as it illuminates what I try to convey in the book: Putin has been running an extensive covert action against the United States for a decade, and Trump and his crew have both colluded and been complicit.