Within about an hour after Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his latest indictment in the ongoing investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, President Trump was taking to Twitter to claim exoneration by this latest development. Specifically, in a tweet posted late yesterday afternoon, Trump acknowledged the indictment and proceeded to argue that it proves that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians and that the Russian impact didn’t have an impact on the election results:
Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2018
Amusingly enough, this tweet comes just under a year after Trump said this about the investigation, at a time before Robert Mueller was appointed to head the investigation:
Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 26, 2017
Trump continued to use his Twitter account to push this idea later in the day:
Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein stated at the News Conference: “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018
“Charges Deal Don A Big Win,” written by Michael Goodwin of the @nypost, succinctly states that “the Russians had no impact on the election results.” There was no Collusion with the Trump Campaign. “She lost the old-fashioned way, by being a terrible candidate. Case closed.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018
Funny how the Fake News Media doesn’t want to say that the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for President. Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn’t know!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018
As I noted in my post yesterday afternoon regarding the indictments, the truth is that the indictment does no such thing. Instead, it opens the door to far more questions than it answers and seems to demonstrate quite clearly that Mueller’s investigation is far from over. In fact, it seems clear that what we’re seeing here is, at the most, the beginning of the end of the behind the scenes work that Mueller and his team have been doing and the slow transition into a more public phase of the investigation that is likely to include further legal developments, witness interviews, and other steps that will likely last for a considerable period of time. That conclusion is based on a number of facts that can be adduced just by looking at the indictment and the public statements made about it.
First of all, of course, there’s the fact that the focus of this indictment is clearly focused solely on one aspect of what is likely a multi-pronged and multi-faceted campaign that Russian authorities engaged in to disrupt the American political process. Primarily, of course, it is focused on the efforts to utilize social media and contacts with individuals who supported specific candidates in the race but weren’t necessarily connected with those campaigns. Toward that end, the named Defendants are alleged to have utilized information obtained via travels they made around the United States under false pretenses to gather information and make contacts that would later prove useful in a widespread effort to exploit the divisions in American politics to advance their agenda that included both spreading misinformation and propaganda promoting one candidate or the other on social media and using social media to persuade others, mostly unwittingly but perhaps in some cases wittingly, do the same.
What’s missing from this indictment is any mention of other activities that we already know Russia utilized in support of what was clearly a widespread, well-organized campaign. There’s no mention in the indictment of any electronic hacking that may have been done in support of the Russian operation. Past reports from the nation’s top intelligence agencies have implicated Russians or Russian-backed hackers for the incidents that led to the release of thousands of emails from both the Democratic National Committee and Clinton confidante Tony Podesta, most of which to have clearly been released in a purposeful manner that was designed both to undermine the Clinton campaign and to create chaos within both the race for the Democratic nomination, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and in the General Election race between Clinton and President Trump. Based on those reports, it appears that the Russian operation depended for this part of its campaign primarily on the apparently unwitting assistance of hackers around the globe and on Wikileaks, which was the source for the release of many of the DNC emails that were made public during the course of the campaign. The fact that these elements of the campaign were not mentioned in the indictment doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen, or that Mueller and his team of investigators have not been looking into them. At most all it means that the Defendants named in the indictment were responsible for just one discrete aspect of the Russian operation, meaning that the other aspects were likely being handled by other actors and parties that we have yet to learn about.
Added to all of this is the fact that, during his brief press statement announcing the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was clear to differentiate between the issues covered in this indictment from those covered by past indictments such as those against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates, and the plea agreements entered into by former Trump associates George Papadopoulos and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Instead, Rosenstein was careful to state that the issue of collusion was not alleged in this specific indictment. He didn’t say that there was no collusion, nor did he have any comment on the issue of potential obstruction of justice, which is also now clearly a subject matter that Mueller’s investigation is looking into.
So, far from indicating that the Russia investigation is nearly an end, or even at the beginning to an end, it’s clear that, at best, we’re at what could probably be called the end of the beginning. There’s likely to be much more to come, and it doesn’t seem like any of it is going to be good for the Trump Administration. President Trump may be refusing to acknowledge this reality, but that doesn’t make it any less real.’
Update: The post was updated to include the President’s afternoon tweets, which were posted while this post was being written.
