Charges are no smoking gun — nor is investigation a trivial pursuit
The charges announced Monday against three former officials of now President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign are the first, and almost certainly not the last, allegations of actual criminality from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in and manipulation of American political matters.
The crimes for which former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his longtime business partner Rick Gates and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos were indicted are serious, and sobering. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his foreign contacts allegedly connected to high-level Russians. Gates and Manafort are charged with multiple counts of conspiracy, money laundering and other charges related to contacts in Ukraine, and have pleaded not guilty.
As reported by the Washington Post, the Papadopoulos plea bargain made public Monday “described extensive efforts he made to try to broker connections with Russian officials and arrange a meeting between them and the Trump campaign.”
The operative word in that statement is “try.” White House attorney Ty Cobb said of the indictments, “The one thing that’s clear is there’s no reference to collusion, no reference to the president.”
And indeed there is not. That, along with something noncommittally statesmanlike about letting the investigation run its legal course, would probably be all we’d get at this stage, under similar circumstances, from any other White House.
Which this manifestly is not: A Trump Twitter blast, with the obligatory “Crooked Hillary” reference, all-caps emphasis and machine-gun punctuation, was a reminder, as if we needed one, that there apparently is no situation above which this president can be persuaded to rise.
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did say Trump has “no intention or plan to make any changes with regard to the special counsel,” which is indeed the better part of wisdom. And even two of the president’s harshest Republican critics seemed to agree. In separate comments to the Daily Beast, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, “I don’t think anybody in their right mind at the White House would think about replacing Mr. Mueller unless there was a very good reason,” and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said interfering with or firing Mueller “would be going a step further than I could possibly imagine.”
White House counsel Cobb also told the Post that the possibility of pardons for Gates or Manafort has “never come up and won’t come up.”
It’s dangerously simple (simpleminded, not to put too fine a point on it) at this stage to come to conclusions one way or the other. Commentators, cartoonists, bloggers and the like are already proclaiming either that this marks the end of the Trump presidency or that the whole Russia interference thing is political fiction. By digging themselves into such premature political, legal and moral certainty, they are really rolling the dice. They risk putting themselves on the record as fools — not for distant future generations they’ll never have to face, but just a few years hence. Maybe a lot sooner.
This story was originally published October 31, 2017 at 4:39 PM with the headline "Charges are no smoking gun — nor is investigation a trivial pursuit."