The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was in contact with WikiLeaks throughout the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is just the latest in a long catalog of leaks and discoveries about previously hidden contacts between surrogates of both the Trump campaign and Russia.
A media frenzy naturally follows each new disclosure, as observers look to dissect the details in a search for greater meaning. Each piece of correspondence is analyzed, placed in a timeline and parsed for relevance. What does it tell us about possible collusion?
From the correspondence made public so far about the contact with WikiLeaks, there are a few distinct concerns. Most importantly, it is clear that Donald Trump Jr. was willing to engage with WikiLeaks even though the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security had only recently implicated the organization in aiding the dissemination of stolen material from U.S. persons and institutions. Trump Jr. informed numerous senior campaign officials of the contact, none of whom apparently were troubled by the relationship. Of most interest, several observers have noted that then-candidate Trump tweeted about WikiLeaks only 15 minutes after his son had received a message from the organization asking that he do just that.
From the WikiLeaks side, the correspondence shows an organization that, although it claims to be an open, non-partisan platform for whistleblowers, actively engaged in soliciting information and offering advice. One of the direct messages to Trump Jr. suggested that the campaign promote a narrative of a rigged election in the case that Hillary Clinton won the election. While fomenting such chaos would be of clear interest to an adversary like Russia, it is hardly the expected behavior of a neutral whistleblower website.
Certainly, FBI investigators will marry the correspondence with their existing timelines and information to help build a coherent narrative of the campaign’s relationship with Russia and Russians. It’s another piece in the bigger puzzle.
However, each of these bombshell revelations has the effect of taking our attention away from the bigger picture. It is too easy to focus on the individual trees and not the forest. Worse, since much of the Russian effort to influence the U.S. election was secret, not every new piece of information is necessarily relevant.
Over the past months, we have scrutinized the arrest of George Papadopoulos, the travels of Carter Page, information that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was involved in negotiations with Moscow, Jared Kushner discussions to arrange a back-channel to Moscow, the indictment of former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and a variety of Russian contacts with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Also, the dossier produced by former British spy Christopher Steele has received attention from journalists, politicians and investigators alike.
There is no shortage of information on which to speculate. However, from my perspective, the importance of the latest disclosure is straightforward. The WikiLeaks contact fits the same pattern of the reported interaction with Russia. Over the many weeks and months of the campaign, nobody on the Trump team ever chose to do the right thing. Engaging with an organization dedicated to harming the United States was a bad idea.
WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of pages of classified reports from the CIA, NSA, State Department and U.S. military. Their odious reputation was no secret. CIA Director and former Republican Congressman Mike Pompeo has characterized WikiLeaks as a “non-State hostile intelligence service that is often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Someone in the campaign surely should have suggested that they contact the FBI or at the very least, discontinue contact.
Of course, this failure to do the right thing was even more pronounced as relates to Russia. Russia is a hostile country that seeks to harm U.S. interests around the world. Did nobody on the campaign team ever think that abetting the theft and disclosure of stolen material from American citizens was a bad idea? Did they even bother to ask their lawyers or security personnel?
More fundamentally, why would any Presidential campaign feel the need to have regular and sustained contacts with Russia – a hostile power? How does Russia help to win votes in Iowa and New Hampshire? Did any other campaign have similar contacts? Did the Trump campaign have similar contacts with officials from China, India, Britain or Japan? At the very least, it would seem to be a distraction or waste of time for a busy campaign trying to attract party delegates, media support and developing policies to appeal to voters. If there was an innocent reason, why hasn’t the Administration ever even tried to explain its rationale? At best, they simply tried to hide the contact and when exposed, explained that such contact was normal. It was not.
The failure to justify or disclose their activities all but insured that we would seek alternative explanations. From my perspective, while collusion or evidence of a conspiratorial relationship with Russian intelligence is yet unproven, the public disclosures at the very least display a willingness to collude. They signal intent.
It is hard to imagine that Donald Trump Jr. was savvy enough to pull off a secret relationship with Russia but less hard to contemplate Paul Manafort doing so. He had years of operating in the corrupt and quasi-legal world of Russian money and espionage. If you accept ill-intent, it is easy to see the WikiLeaks platform as a useful place for both the Russians and the Trump campaign to disclose information in a deniable manner.
So, while the revelation of a contact between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr. may not yet be a smoking gun, it is yet another tree in the forest of deception. It shows a willingness to break rules and fits into the narrative of a cover-up.
We will have to leave it to the professional investigators to determine if the WikiLeaks correspondence is truly relevant to the larger narrative of Russian efforts to attack the election of 2016. Nonetheless, the actions of the Trump campaign, taken together with the multi-faceted Russian attack that included cyber-attacks, cyber theft, propaganda, disinformation, attempted espionage, use of trolls, bots and non-attributable advertising and content creation, suggest that we need more than just a legal or partisan approach to face the challenge. Instead, we need to work with our foreign partners to develop a response, and a non-partisan 9/11-type Commission to look at how we can be better prepared in the future. We also need those seeking our highest offices to have a better conception of right and wrong.
