With the news that Donald Trump and his sometimes unpredictable lawyer Rudy Giuliani have made an interview offer to Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team that would include answering questions on “collusion” but not obstruction, it’s time to take a look back at some of the things Trump said and did that would have led the FBI and even Congressional investigators to believe that there was a conspiracy, if not outright collusion, between Trump and a foreign adversary to affect American democracy.
The obstruction will actually be the easy part for Mueller, who will need only to point to Trump’s May 2017 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, in which he publicly stated that “this Russia thing” was the impetus for his decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey.
But collusion is harder to prove, which is why Mueller may opt for the much more definitive charge of conspiracy. If he does so, it will likely stem from Trump’s call during the campaign for Russia to pursue the alleged 33,000 “missing” emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign servers:
Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
At the time, the statement was all anyone could talk about — it was unheard of for a presidential candidate to be sending any message to a hostile foreign adversary, let alone one in solidarity with the idea that they might undermine American democracy or justice through cyber warfare. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta blasted Trump and issued a warning:
I find those kinds of statements to be totally outrageous because you’ve got now a presidential candidate who is in fact asking the Russians to engage in American politics. I just think that’s beyond the pale. There’s a lot of concerns I have with his qualities of leadership or lack thereof and I think that kind of statement only reflects the fact that he truly is not qualified to be president of the United States.”
Watch Panetta’s brief commentary from an interview that July with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour:
Trump’s opponent’s campaign was justifiably baffled and infuriated. Hillary for America Senior Policy Advisor Jake Sullivan released this statement:
This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent. That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.”
Since Trump’s election, it’s much easier to see how he was confident enough to have made so bold a call for interference — we have, at this point, discovered that by the time he even made the proclamation, his son, son-in-law, and campaign manager had already met in Trump Tower to discuss exchanging “dirt” on Hillary Clinton for an eventual lifting of sanctions levied against Russian oligarchs after the government-sponsored killing of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky and the Kremlin’s subsequent invasion and occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.
It’s jarring to see footage of such a reasonable person from a high-level government position. Since January 2017, that type of public servant has become more and more scarce.
Featured image via screen capture
