There are three big questions we don’t have answers for. First, what is Putin’s overall aim? It’s known that he believes the break up of the Soviet Union was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” as he told the Russian parliament in a kind of “state of the union” address in 2005. We know he has designs on Ukraine and has already annexed Crimea, which was Ukrainian territory. We know that like every Russian leader before him, he would like to see NATO weakened, if not broken up altogether, and he’d like to see the European Union come apart at the seams. If Putin wants NATO weakened, the New York Times reported yesterday that Trump repeatedly told aides in 2018 that he would like the U.S. to withdraw from the 70-year Atlantic alliance. If he wants more influence in Syria, Trump gave it to him when he recently announced the pullout of American troops.
The second question is, what will happen if Trump stops giving Putin what he wants? What will they do to him? Which immediately raises the third question: If Trump is actually working for Russia because Putin in effect owns him, how can he extricate himself? Better still, can he extricate himself? People who cross Vladimir Putin tend not to live long and healthy lives. Could Donald Trump be afraid not just for his fortune, but for the well-being of himself and his family if Putin turns on him?
When you start looking for the answers to questions like these, Trump’s lies about Russia appear in an entirely different light. Maybe all those lesser lies – nobody in my campaign ever met with a Russian, there is no collusion, I have nothing to do with Russia – have been in service of the biggest lie of them all, the lie we heard him utter on Monday afternoon on his way to address the farmers in New Orleans. “I never worked for Russia.” Maybe this is what he’s been afraid of all along. After asking us to believe all those other lies he’s had to backtrack on, now he needs us to believe the big one to survive. Maybe he’s fighting hard to stay in office not because he wants to be president so badly, but because he’s afraid of what Vladimir Putin will do to him if he’s ousted. Given Putin’s track record, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Would you?
A former chief of staff for both the CIA and Department of Defense says James Mattis left the Trump administration over the president’s troubling ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Jeremy Bash, who served in both agencies during the Obama administration, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Mattis was unable to tolerate Trump parroting Russian propaganda and aligning U.S. policy with Putin’s goals. “This is fundamentally what drove Gen. Mattis to leave the Pentagon as secretary of defense,” Bash said. “He watched how we were yielding to Russia on a variety of issues and he watched the way we announced this pullout of Syria, which was a total gift to the Kremlin.” “It emboldened Russia, emboldened Iran, emboldened (Bashar al-)Assad, who is of course Russia’s client,” he added, “and allowed the Iranians to build a land bridge from Teheran through northern Iran through Iraq, though Syria and ultimately through Lebanon. I think Jim Mattis and other foreign policy hawks, if you will, are looking at this and saying, ‘What has become American foreign policy in the age of Trump?’ We have ultimately yielded our national interests to the interests of Vladamir Putin.”
To defend himself from accusations of collusion or collaboration with Russian government officials during the 2016 presidential election and after, President Trump recently repeated a familiar claim: “I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President.” His statement might have been closer to the truth if he had referred to his administration rather than himself. The Trump administration has a tough policy on Russia, one that I mostly support. But Trump himself does not. For the past two years, he has consistently made it clear that he does not support his own administration’s policy toward Russia. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy states very bluntly that “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” Trump, however, has never expressed support for this approach. He has said the exact opposite, suggesting time and time again that he wants to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s friend, and that “getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
After Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration increased military spending in Europe and pushed for several enhancements of NATO capabilities, including new troop deployments closer to Russian borders. The Trump administration has supported and expanded this policy. As candidate and president, however, Trump has persistently berated, criticized and undermined NATO. Most recently, we have learned that Trump has even threatened to withdraw from the alliance. Even reports of these threats are a gift to Putin, since they undermine the credibility on which its deterrent effect depends. The Trump administration rightly has continued the Obama policy of sanctioning Russian officials and companies in response to Putin’s belligerent behavior. Trump, however, has never expressed support for these sanctions. When he signed into law Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), he made clear his disdain for the law. And then out of the blue, the Trump team has called for the lifting of sanctions on the companies controlled by Oleg Deripaska, even though Putin has not changed his belligerent behavior at all.
In November 2018, Putin detained two dozen Ukrainian sailors in international waters. The Trump administration has rightly criticized this criminal act. Trump has said very little: “Not good. Not happy about it at all … we do not like what’s happening either way.” “Either way”? As if the Ukrainians share fault for this crime? To date, the president has taken no public action to help secure the sailors’ release. The Trump administration seeks to contain Russian influence in the Middle East and place maximum pressure on Russia’s most important ally in the region, Iran. Trump, however, just announced his desire to withdrawAmerican soldiers and equipment from Syria, exactly what Putin and his Iranian allies seek. Both the American intelligence community and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation have released ample evidence that the Russian government violated U.S. sovereignty during the 2016 presidential election. Senior administration officials have endorsed these assessments; Trump has not. When offered the perfect opportunity to demonstrate toughness on this issue with Putin at his side at a news conference in Helsinki after their summit last summer, Trump did the exact opposite, explaining, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” He added: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
At that same summit, Putin told a crazy fairy tale to Trump, and then to the world, about how a dozen former U.S. government officials allegedly had helped to launder money from Russia and then transfer some of these funds to the Clinton campaign. Putin then asked Trump for the opportunity to interrogate these alleged criminals. (Putin included me among them.) Trump called the idea an “incredible offer.” Trump administration officials have occasionally — though not as often as they should — criticized repressive Putin policies inside Russia. Trump himself has never said a word about the importance of defending human rights in Russia. Not one word. On the contrary, he has repeatedly assigned moral equivalency between how the United States behaves around the world and how Russia behaves. When pressed to criticize Putin, Trump lambasted the United States, saying, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think, our country’s so innocent?” Even on small issues of little relevance to American national interests, Trump sides with Putin. Why is Trump defending the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan? Why is Trump expressing fear that the Montenegrins might spark World War III? These are Putin lines. Why is the president of the United States echoing them? I cannot remember a policy — be it toward Russia or any other country — in which there was such a wide gap between a presidential administration and the president himself. It is unprecedented. The important question, therefore, is not which U.S. president has been tougher on Russia, but why our current president has gone to such great lengths to distance himself from his own government’s Russia policy.
I believe that the public should care about these issues. I’ve dedicated my adult life to working on them, because I believe that there is nothing more important for the survival of our species and our planet. That being said, the lack of public attention, the lack of media attention to me shows that there’s much greater room for politicians to maneuver than they accept there is. The president and a Senate and a House that can reach agreement on a new nuclear strategy can implement that, and there will be little or no public reaction or implication. In fact, if you can demonstrate that there are real benefits in terms of cost savings or stability or security, you’re likely to get very broad public support for doing so. But the reality is that the American people don’t vote based on nuclear issues. They are not motivated to pick their leaders based on how they manage nuclear affairs. If they were, Donald Trump would get nowhere near the White House, because there has been no more dangerous or unstable person to occupy the White House than Donald Trump in the nuclear age.
In a normal administration, confirmation of Cabinet members would be a question of qualifications, temperament, and policy views. But with Trump, who has already been implicated in felonies by his former attorney, and who has sought on multiple occasions to stymie criminal investigations into his campaign and his associates, and who has flagrantly abused the powers of his office for personal and political gain, the main question of significance is whether a nominee would resist an order from the president to violate the law or the Constitution. That question takes on particular importance for a prospective attorney general, not only because it would be his responsibility to ensure equality under the law, but also because Trump views the office as key to protecting himself and his cohorts from legal consequences.
Here, Barr’s record and testimony are less reassuring than they might at first appear. There’s the 19-page memo describing the special-counsel inquiry as “fatally misconceived” that Barr wrote last June and personally sent to Trump’s attorneys. There’s the fact that Barr refused to commit to recusing himself from the Russia investigation if directed to do so by Justice Department ethics officials, as Sessions did once his misleading testimony to the Senate was exposed. This is no small question—Whitaker similarly refused to recuse himself after being advised to do so because of his prior attacks on the Mueller investigation, raising questions about whether his appointment was intended to provide the president and his defense attorneys with a window into Mueller’s work. But Whitaker’s ability to hamper the special-counsel inquiry was limited by his obvious lack of qualifications for the job, media scrutiny of his past, and the widespread perception that he was little more than a cat’s paw for the president.
There are fewer questions about Barr’s qualifications. After all, he used to be attorney general. Unlike Whitaker, he is well regarded as a civil servant by the bipartisan community of Justice Department alumni. And unlike Sessions, he was no Trump-campaign surrogate, and his hearing displayed none of the performative sycophancy that Trump demands from his advisers. That should be reassuring. But it also means that, should Barr decide to interfere with or otherwise hamper the investigations into the president, or order inquiries into the president’s political enemies, he will have far more legitimacy to do so. Barr told The New York Times in 2017 that the Justice Department could be “abdicating its responsibility” by not pursuing further investigations into Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, whom Trump publicly threatened to imprison. Elaborate conspiracy theories about Clintonian crimes remain a staple of Fox News programming, but there’s little evidence of any wrongdoing. Barr told the Senate Tuesday that he was merely saying that “whatever the standard is for launching an investigation, it should be dealt with evenhandedly.” In light of all the evidence that has emerged about the Trump team seeking the Russian government’s aid in defeating Clinton, Barr’s remarks don’t sound evenhanded at all. They sound like he’s justifying Trump’s using the Justice Department for political persecution.
Barr is also no stranger to helping presidents shield themselves from federal inquiries. In 1992, he supported President George H. W. Bush’s decision to pardon six people for crimes, including obstruction of justice, in the Iran-Contra investigation, which looked into whether the Reagan administration, in which Bush had served as vice president, illegally traded arms with Iran to fund right-wing paramilitaries in Central America. One of Bush’s justifications for the pardons was that the “common denominator of their motivation—whether their actions were right or wrong—was patriotism.” That is an odious rationale—patriotism as a blanket excuse for lawbreaking would condone any number of atrocities. It is hardly a stretch to imagine Trump using the same rationale to pardon loyalists for refusing to cooperate with Mueller. Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh said the pardons demonstrated “that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence.” The pardons were not merely rewards for “patriotism,” as the president insisted, Walsh said, but an attempt to prevent the investigation from implicating Bush himself.
Barr was asked during his confirmation hearing Tuesday whether a president could “lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient’s promise to not incriminate him.” Barr said that would “be a crime.” But the exact phrasing leaves open the possibility that Trump could abuse his pardon power to prevent associates from testifying against him—as long as no explicit promise was made. The template for that approach would be the Iran-Contra pardons that Barr himself supported. Taken as a whole, Barr’s testimony is less comforting than it seemed. Barr is a respected party elder who possesses the legitimacy, legal acumen, and ideological convictions to shield the president and undermine the rule of law without committing the sort of ham-handed errors that could turn the public or Congress further against Trump. If Trump’s aim was to choose an attorney general who would protect him without igniting a massive public backlash, he may have made the best possible choice. Barr has said he won’t be bullied into being a Trump crony. But that doesn’t mean he won’t do exactly what Trump wants him to do. It might just mean he doesn’t need to be bullied into it. For the sake of American democracy, and the rule of law, I hope that’s wrong.
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