Monday
Two weeks ago I had an interesting interchange with reader Josh Grumet about which narrative would emerge once Robert Mueller submitted his report. While I said that liberals and NeverTrumpers were rooting for a Sherlock Holmes ending, I feared we would end up with a Samuel Beckett non-conclusion.
Josh, meanwhile, compared Trump supporters to Lenny in Of Mice and Men, allowing themselves to be consoled by stories of some mythical rabbit farm while the world falls apart around them.
Although we only have Attorney General William Barr’s word that the report exonerates the president, Trump supporters are already claiming a fourth narrative: the innocent man falsely accused. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Texas senator John Cornyn compared the justice to Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, so maybe the GOP will dust that one off again. Or they could choose a novel that people don’t read much anymore, Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s western The Oxbow Incident (1940), where a man is hanged by a vigilante posse for a murder that didn’t happen. If he hadn’t chosen to call the Mueller investigation a witch hunt, I could imagine Trump characterizing it as a lynching.
Or given how Sen. Lindsay Graham and other vengeful Republicans are threatening to investigate the investigation, maybe Trump Republicans would prefer the Count of Monte Cristo, who wreaks vengeance on the people who framed him.
To buy such comparisons, however, one has to close one’s eyes to the evidence that is in plain sight—which is that Trump was indeed aided by the Russians and that he tried to obstruct investigations into it. New York Magazine’s Jon Chait reminds us that we’ve known this for a long time. First, collusion:
Of course Trump colluded with Russia. He literally went on camera and asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, promising that Russia would be rewarded by the American media, and Russia responded to this request by attempting a hack to steal Clinton’s emails that very day. Trump’s campaign aides repeatedly welcomed and sought out Russian assistance. His campaign manager passed on 75 pages of intricate polling data to a Russian operative during the campaign. And he did all this while secretly pursuing a lucrative business deal with Russia.
To define this nexus of communication and shared mission as something other than “collusion” is to define the term in a way that nobody would have accepted before this scandal began.
And now obstruction:
Barr’s summary does not detail all the obstruction (or perhaps, obstruction-like) steps Trump has taken, but it does note many took place in public. The most damning was his repeated encouragement of his campaign lieutenants not to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation. His lawyer reportedly dangled pardons for Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, and there is almost no doubt the prospect of a pardon encouraged Roger Stone to stay strong.
People who want to demonstrate their innocence make displays of cooperation with investigators. They promise to tell them everything they know, and encourage their subordinates to do the same. Trump did the opposite. He refused to give the special counsel an interview. He used his pardon power to encourage his subordinates to withhold cooperation.
Chait doesn’t even include Trump explaining to the NBC’s Lester Holt and a visiting Russia delegation that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russian investigation.
The Beckett scenario I feared appears to be playing out, at least so far. Here’s what I wrote:
[W]hat if we get no more than what we’ve known all along—which is that Trump rooted for the Russians to intervene and the Russians did so and Trump won and Trump goes on being Trump and nothing changes? In that case, we are in the position of the characters in Endgame, who long for a resolution but never get one: “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
More than Beckett, however, we may be in a Kafkaesque labyrinth where truth is never established. Right now Trump’s attorney general, who got the job by trashing the special investigation, is telling us what Mueller supposedly discovered but, in the process, is using legalistic evasions that leave us baffled. I’m not going to venture into the legal weeds myself—my head starts hurting after a while—but to give an example or two, here’s a tweet from the very smart Brian Beutler:
Can’t think of a more important occasion for close reading, but almost nobody is doing it. Barr’s letter asserts only that Trump associates did not participate in the specific crimes charged in the IRA and GRU indictments. Not that they didn’t “work [ ] w/Russia.”
Slate’s William Saletan makes a similar point, noting the various “weasel words” that Barr uses to exonerate Trump. “The letter,” Saletan writes, “says the Justice Department won’t prosecute Trump, but it reaches that conclusion by tailoring legal standards to protect the president.” Here’s an example:
The letter quotes a sentence from Mueller’s report. In that sentence, Mueller says his investigation didn’t prove that members of the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The sentence specifies Russia’s government. It says nothing about coordination with other Russians. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate who has been linked to Russian intelligence. Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met secretly in Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected lawyer. But neither Kilimnik nor Veselnitskaya is part of the Russian government. They seem to be excluded from Barr’s analysis.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber, meanwhile, observed,
Every single quoted sentence from The Mueller Report is chopped up. The only quote “about obstruction” is quite negative for Trump – not exonerated – while the positive case for Trump on obstruction are Barr’s words, not Mueller’s.
Barr’s legal stratagems and lawyerly responses to those stratagems do not provide a stimulating narrative, just as The Trial is not a stimulating novel. It may reflect our present reality, however.