The Case for Donald Trump
It doesn’t take much to convince “the Resistance” that Donald Trump conspired with the Russian Government to “steal” the Presidency. Charges range from violations of the Federal Campaign Laws to laundering Russian money to breaking the Federal Espionage Act to committing Treason. And yet, the President, his supporters, and the Republicans in Congress continue to act as if all of this is merely a political move, and has nothing to do with legal fact.
The Resistance view is fueled by the same source that drove the election: social media. Read twitter: all of the evidence is already out there, and the removal of Trump is assured. We simply are waiting for the process to catch up with the facts. And while it is sometimes difficult to sort out the “crazies” from the “serious” (on a range from Louise Mensch to Eric Garland to Claude Taylor to Seth Abrahamson to Malcolm Nance) they all speak with a certainty of fact.
But Trump and his lawyers continue to raise multiple points to counter the swell of information. The President carries on as if nothing is out there, and the Administration continues to disassemble the “Deep State.”
The first, and probably most effective Trump defense, is that the entire “Russiagate” investigation is founded on an illegitimate source, and therefore is entirely invalid: the infamous Steele Dossier. Their argument is that the Dossier is actually the only evidence of campaign “collusion” with the Russian Government, but that it actually shows that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that was colluding! The logic is that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign (or firms acting on her behalf) to contact and gain information from Russian intelligence officers, gaining the benefit of information for the campaign. This violates the Federal Campaign Act prohibiting foreign contributions (in kind) to US campaigns.
The argument continues that the Russians passed disinformation about Trump to Steele, with the intent to disrupt the election, and that the Clinton campaign paid for it. When this disinformation reached the FBI, it served as the “probable cause” to begin all of the investigations into Trump, the campaign, and his family. Since that “probable cause” was, in their view, Russian disinformation, then the entire investigation is “tainted” and invalid. This also explains the intense interest of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans in the report, its author Christopher Steele, and GPS Fusion (the company that hired him.)
This weekend’s news (New York Times) that the FBI received the original information about possible Trump campaign infractions from an Australian intelligence source puts a dent in the “fruit of the poisonous tree” Trump defense, but doesn’t end it, yet. The article states that Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadoupolos informed an Australian diplomat (using the traditional intelligence gathering technique of getting the informant drunk) about the hacked Democratic emails long before it was public knowledge.
The second line of defense is that the investigation is really a conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States, led by the professional elite of the FBI with help from the other intelligence agencies. A quick look at a selected text between FBI agent Peter Storzk to Lisa Page, a Department of Justice attorney, reveals this gem:
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s (Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI] office—that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 … “
This bit of evidence, combined with the Obama’ era intelligence chiefs reporting Russian interference to Trump (the famous meeting when Comey told Trump about the “golden showers”) leads to the Trump ultimate conspiracy, the “Deep State” takeover. Intelligence agency interference in the election would explain why Comey violated Department of Justice protocols in announcing the results of the Clinton email investigation (the July, “there are no charges here” speech) then continued to violate with the October “surprises.” While to the “Resistance” this all seems to be outlandish conspiracy theory (both the term and the movie) from the Trump side it fits into their preconceived notions of our government.
The outcome will depend on Congress and specifically Speaker Ryan and Leader McConnell. If the evidence from the Mueller investigation (or the House or Senate investigations) doesn’t convince them of overarching criminal activity by the Trumps, then it will be easy to rise to the President’s defensive strategy. The evidence would have to be so damning, that it would be in the Republican self-interest to jettison the President (as was the 1974 evidence against Nixon.) It will have to be more than just twitter supposition, and it will require enough to overcome the conspiracy theories of both the left and the right.
