Eli Lake, who takes a much more critical view of the FBI investigation in Commentary, argues that “when it comes to Russia, Trump was both framed and guilty,” since the FBI relied too much on the now-discredited Steele dossier in pursuing its case and extending surveillance over the Trump campaign. Rauch may be too easy on the FBI, which he portrays as the victim of deceptions associated with the Steele dossier; Lake is correct that there is evidence the Bureau failed to disclose all relevant details about the source of some of the information in surveillance warrant applications. (Whether this corner-cutting was unique to the Trump/Russia investigation is another matter.) But I think Rauch makes a very strong case—which Lake doesn’t really contradict—that there were solid, intelligence-based reasons to investigate Trump’s Russia connections. It wasn’t a “hoax.” It wasn’t a partisan “witch-hunt.” If Trump was “both framed and guilty,” one may also say that the FBI committed improprieties but investigating these connections was proper and necessary.
(While I don’t want to rehash the entire Trump/Russia story, I also think Lake gives Trump too much credit for tough policies with regard to Russia despite his verbal lovefest with Vladimir Putin. Some of those policies almost certainly happened in spite of Trump. For example, he was reportedly very reluctant to approve the sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, and then he blocked the weapons transfer to pressure the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. The Trump White House also repeatedly tried to weaken and spike sanctions against the Kremlin, despite strong bipartisan support for such measures in Congress.)
But here is the real heart of the difference between Russiagate and “Stop the Steal”:
There was no serious attempt by any major Democratic players to use Russiagate to derail the transition in 2016.
Yes, there were half a dozen House Democrats (plus a few loud protesters) who tried to object to the certification of Trump’s victory on January 6, 2017. They found no backing from any Senators. Neither Barack Obama (who hosted Trump at the White House as president-elect two days after the 2016 election) nor Hillary Clinton (who called Trump to concede shortly after her defeat was finalized at 2:30 a.m. and gave a gracious concession speech the next morning) gave any support to any effort to stop Trump from becoming president.
“We’re going to let this guy become president and then use the Russia investigation to make his life miserable and undercut his credibility” really doesn’t seem like much of a plan.
Likewise, the notion that the FBI was carrying out an anti-Trump plot on behalf of the Democrats and the “Deep State” during the 2016 campaign ultimately founders on the fact that the FBI investigation was not used to damage Trump before the election. On the contrary: After then-FBI director James Comey’s October 28, 2016 letter to Congress about new emails pertinent to the probe into Clinton’s email server dealt a palpable hit to the Clinton campaign, many of her supporters were frustrated because the FBI wasn’t talking about the Trump investigation. On October 31, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that intelligence agencies saw no “clear link” between Trump and the Kremlin; FBI and intel officials even said that they believed the email hack “was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” (Notably, the Mueller investigation eventually came to the opposite conclusion: that the Kremlin operation was intended, “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” to help Trump and undermine Clinton.)
Some plot.
Obviously, Buzzfeed’s publication of the Steele dossier—after the certification of Trump’s victory—was a game-changer as far as media coverage of the Trump/Russia scandal. Many Democrats did seize on it to question Trump’s legitimacy. Things got to the point where two-thirds of Democrats believed Russia had “definitely” or “probably” tampered with actual vote tallies to hand Trump the victory, even though there is no evidence of such tampering. (It is worth noting that while this belief suggests high levels of conspiratorial thinking, it is not as toxic for democracy as GOP voter fraud claims. The Democratic myth posits a foreign adversary that conducted a big intelligence operation to manipulate the 2016 election went further and changed vote totals; the Republican one posits rampant cheating by Americans, including both officials and voters.
Yet even after the Steele dossier would-be bombshell, there was no effort at the top of the Democratic Party—certainly not from Obama or Clinton—to use this to derail or delay the transition. And while the Russia scandals undoubtedly hurt the Trump presidency, much of that damage was self-inflicted. No conspiracy forced Trump, in May 2017, to tell NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired James Comey because of the “Russia thing”—or, far more shockingly, to brag about the firing to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during a White House meeting, a conversation in which the president of the United States described the ex-FBI chief as “a real nut job” and suggested that his departure would take off the pressure regarding Russia.
Yes, as Trumpers and anti-antis are fond of pointing out, Clinton did eventually call Trump an “illegitimate president”—nearly three years after the election, in September 2019, when Trump was already facing the Ukraine scandal that led to his first impeachment. It’s hardly the same thing as the scramble by Team Trump to help Trump stay in office after losing the election. It’s not even in the same ballpark.
One can criticize the Democrats, the media, and the FBI for their handling of certain aspects of the Trump/Russia investigation. One can agree that many progressive commentators took the Trump/Russia story and ran with it all the way to conspiracy-theory crazyland. But there is no comparison to Trump’s and his minions’ attempted coup and systematic attack on American democracy. Even if we buy the whataboutist logic that two wrongs make a right (or at least an okay), there’s no way “Russiagate” zeroes out Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stay in power after losing reelection. One of these things is not at all like the other.