.. the suggestion that Mr. Stone knew in advance, or predicted, that John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman of the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, would be hacked or his emails released. Not long before Mr. Podesta’s emails were released last fall, Mr. Stone wrote on Twitter that “it will soon” be the chairman’s “time in the barrel.”
His prepared remarks, however, said that Mr. Stone was merely referring to his expectation that Mr. Podesta’s business connections to Ukraine would soon come to light, based in part on opposition research.
.. Mr. Stone is also expected to tell the House panel that he was never in direct communication with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and therefore did not know in advance about emails that were stolen from the Democratic National Committee during the campaign. Rather, according to Mr. Stone’s prepared remarks, he learned about them on Twitter and later asked a journalist who knew Mr. Assange to confirm the report.
.. The statement does not dispute that Mr. Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona who American officials believe was a front in the Russian hacking efforts. But it does say he believed that the interactions were entirely “benign,” and it casts doubt on American intelligence concluding that the online account was a Russian intelligence front.
Oh, Wait. Maybe It Was Collusion.
We like to think of ourselves as fair-minded and knowledgeable, having between us many years of experience with the C.I.A. dealing with Russian intelligence services. It is our view not only that the Russian government was running some sort of intelligence operation involving the Trump campaign, but also that it is impossible to rule out the possibility of collusion between the two.
.. The goal of the Russian spy game is to nudge a person to step over the line into an increasingly conspiratorial relationship. First, for a Russian intelligence recruitment operation to work, they would have had some sense that Donald Trump Jr. was a promising target. Next, as the Russians often do, they made a “soft” approach, setting the bait for their target via the June email sent by Rob Goldstone, a British publicist, on behalf of a Russian pop star, Emin Agalarov.
.. They then employed a cover story — adoptions — to make it believable to the outside world that there was nothing amiss with the proposed meetings. They bolstered this idea by using cutouts, nonofficial Russians, for the actual meeting, enabling the Trump team to claim — truthfully — that there were no Russian government employees at the meeting and that it was just former business contacts of the Trump empire who were present.
.. A month after the June meeting at Trump Tower, WikiLeaks, a veritable Russian front, released a dump of stolen D.N.C. emails. The candidate and campaign surrogates increasingly mouthed talking points that seemed taken directly from Russian propaganda outlets, such as that there had been a terrorist attack on a Turkish military base, when no such attack had occurred.
Also, at this time United States intelligence reportedly received indications from European intelligence counterparts about odd meetings between Russians and Trump campaign representatives overseas.
.. Only after the Russian intelligence officer develops a level of control can the relationship be moved out of the public eye. John Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., recently testified, “Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.”
.. If the fish didn’t take the bait, the Russians would always have had the option to weaponize the information later to embarrass the Trump team. In addition, if the Russians’ first objective was chaos and disruption, the best way to accomplish that would have been to have someone on the inside helping. It is unlikely that the Russians would not use all the traditional espionage tools available to them.
.. the most telling piece of information may be the most obvious. Donald Trump himself made numerous statements in support of Russia, Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks during the campaign. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his team have gone out of their way to hide contacts with Russians and lied to the public about it. Likewise, Mr. Trump has attacked those people and institutions that could get to the bottom of the affair. He fired his F.B.I. director James Comey, criticized and bullied his attorney general and deputy attorney general, denigrated the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and assails the news media, labeling anything he dislikes “fake news.” Innocent people don’t tend to behave this way.
The Facts of the Seth Rich Murder That Don’t Support Conspiracy Theories
The conspiracy is based on a true event — the terrible and unsolved murder of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer. Early the morning on July 10, an unidentified assailant shot Rich in the back. The police haven’t solved the crime, and their current best theory is that the attack occurred as part of a botched or interrupted robbery. Rich’s valuables, however, were still on his body, and the police (so far as we know) have no leads…
For the theory to be true, its believers have to demonstrate that Rich leaked to WikiLeaks, that someone in the DNC (or the Clinton camp) in turn had Rich murdered, that the D.C. police are intentionally slow-walking the investigation, that the major intelligence agencies (namely the CIA, FBI, and NSA) are together either deliberately concocting a story about Russian interference or too stupid to recognize an inside job, and finally, that the remainder of official Washington is either oblivious to or colluding with conspirators who’ve damaged relations with Russia in hopes of bringing down a president. Oh, and did I mention that the family of the slain young man is also either in on the conspiracy or unaware of its existence?
On the Comey Firing, a Race to the Bottom
Yet, the manner of the firing was ham-handed: The president’s bodyguard was dispatched to deliver the termination documents to what turned out to be an empty office, the White House having failed to check on the director’s whereabouts (he was on FBI business in California). And, as has become ever clearer over the last few days, the justifications for the action from the White House have been deceptive.
.. In a nutshell, Trump wanted to be rid of Comey but deflect responsibility for removing an FBI director less than four years into a ten-year term. So he directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein to prepare a memo explaining the grounds of termination. Then, his team spun the firing as if it were the Justice Department’s idea, occurring now only because Rosenstein just started on the job. (Sessions has recused himself from aspects of the Russia inquiry, though the scope of the recusal is uncertain.) The White House tried to make it appear as if the president were merely concurring in the decision. Only when Rosenstein reportedly protested did Trump own up.
.. He also, disturbingly, said that he was thinking of Russia when he made the decision, contradicting everyone in the White House who said that had nothing to do with it.
.. It is understandable that Democrats are screaming bloody murder about events of the last few days — certainly Republicans would be doing the same if a Democrat were in the White House and axed an FBI director the way Trump has. But the analogies to Watergate — ubiquitous in the media — are overwrought
.. The objective of a foreign counterintelligence investigation is not to gather evidence of a specific violation of law in order to build a prosecutable criminal case against a suspect. It is to determine the actions and intentions of foreign powers to the extent they bear on American interests.
.. There have been reports that the FBI has been scrutinizing business dealings former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had with Kremlin-connected Ukrainian politicians between 2005 and 2014, and business conducted in Russia by Carter Page, whose connection to the Trump campaign — which listed him as an adviser — appears remote. Trump’s shady longtime crony Roger Stone has boasted of a relationship with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, and there are suspicions he may have had prior knowledge that WikiLeaks would publish e-mails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
.. In short, it may be that this investigation really does have nothing to do with Donald Trump directly. That makes his petulant and self-destructive response to it all the more mystifying — except against the backdrop of his entire adult life, which has involved bullying and blustering his way to fame and fortune.
.. The more he complains and lashes out, the more the opposition turns up the heat. The race to the bottom may have just begun.