A Counter-Conspiracy, Debunked

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/feinstein-fusion-russia.html

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It can get exhausting to keep track of all of the counter-conspiracy theories that keep coming from President Trump’s allies (many of them in the employ of Rupert Murdoch). But some of those theories get enough traction that they are worth debunking.

To that end, the release of the transcript of Glenn Simpson’s Senate testimony yesterday is important. Republicans initially opposed the release, but Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, ultimately made it happen.

The key part of Simpson’s testimony, as The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent notes: The F.B.I. was already investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia when it received additional information from Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer working with Simpson’s firm, Fusion GPS. (Various Fox News commentators and others have tried to spin a tale in which the Clinton campaign effectively started the F.B.I. investigation, via Steele and Fusion.)

We still don’t know how much of the information in Steele’s infamous Trump dossier is accurate. Either way, Steele and Fusion are only supporting players in this story. The main questions are about Trump’s campaign and Russia — not the people trying to figure out what was happening between the campaign and Russia.

Related: In The Times, Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, defends its decision to publish the Steele dossier one year ago today.

Perspective. The story of Russian collusion is devilishly complicated. Susan Hennessey — a legal expert whose work I’ve often cited in this newsletter — offered an especially clear summary in a recent podcast with Vox’s Ezra Klein. She described two scenarios — one more innocent, one less so. Here are the basics:

The innocent explanation: Amateurish Trump officials unwittingly blundered into a campaign by Russia to influence American policy and create chaos. The Trump officials cooperated with Russian nationals because they didn’t know they shouldn’t. They then lied about their contacts because those contacts were embarrassing, not because they were part of a sophisticated conspiracy. As Hennessey puts it, “the cover up is worse than the crime.”

The less-innocent explanation: Top Trump officials understood that they were doing something wrong. Perhaps they were trying to help their campaign with tactics they understood were wrong. Or perhaps they were working to advance the interests of a foreign power, because of financial entanglements between those officials — maybe including Trump — and Russia. These officials, and others who were aware of the entanglements, then lied about the contacts. In that case, Hennessey explains, “the decision making at the top of the executive branch is not in any meaningful way being guided by the best interests of the American people.”

Last year, I walked through five possible motivations for the Trump team’s strange friendliness with Russia, including some of the possibilities mentioned here. If you’re a podcast fan, you may enjoy the full Hennessey-Klein discussion.