The anti-Trump plotters had a perfect scapegoat in Gen. Michael Flynn, a former Democrat who had publicly joined the calls for Hillary Clinton to be prosecuted. Having served in the Obama administration, Flynn was a traitor in his former colleagues’ eyes and had to be punished severely. His crime was merely behaving as Washingtonians always do once out of office: he wanted to monetize his time in a new way after exiting the military.
With Flynn as the primary target, the man putting the Russia hoax into action was FBI Director James Comey, who Trump—depicted as partisan and paranoid by Democrats—was trusting enough to keep around until May 2017. Trump thought, like many Americans, that the nation’s police and intelligence agencies had a certain code of honor that helped them rise above politics and methodically seek the truth. No such luck, as Trump increasingly grew aware. A disinterested, professional government doesn’t exist.
I suspect that even a political brawler like Trump found it hard to believe, prior to his first term in office, that the Democrats and deep state agencies would disgrace themselves with the kind of dirty tricks they were deploying. At its heart, starting slightly before Trump won the election, the plan was to use thinly sourced or outright fictitious accusations of collusion between his staff and Russia as a pretext to further investigate the Trump campaign. The investigation would then go right on into the new president’s first term. There would be no “honeymoon period” for this president, but there would be plenty of acrimony.
If you thought the president’s marriage to Marla Maples was bumpy, his presidency would prove to be a very wild ride. It was as if a spying maid had been left in the household by a disgruntled ex-wife to dig up dirt on her successor—including any contact, however trivial, between Team Trump and anyone with current or former ties to Russia. Thus Dr. Carter Page was gussied up as a potential Russian agent to enable otherwise baseless surveillance, despite the fact that our own intelligence community was debriefing a cooperative Page following contacts with Russians.
But once Team Trump was under the Obama/Comey spying regime, any forgotten or half-remembered brush with an Eastern European would now be twisted into a verdict of treason—with an obliging press braying its Putin paranoia each night.
Americans tend to trust the federal agencies tasked with enforcing the law, and it became an easy strategy for the Democrats to paint themselves as patient people who just wanted to see what the investigation turned up, even as they fanned the flames of anti-Trump hatred, encouraging the narrative that a man who might be a double agent in thrall to a foreign power was now sitting in the Oval Office.
On May 9, 2018, Trump carved a cancer out of the FBI when he fired James Comey. I got the news while in the Balkans with a bipartisan delegation of the Judiciary Committee. It felt odd lecturing new nations on the importance of a professional and fair judicial system as our president was having to fire the FBI director.
I spent most of the trip with David Cicilline (D-RI). David is a gay former mob lawyer who served as mayor of Providence before entering Congress. One must be smart and tough to be a gay mob lawyer, I figured. David is both. Everyone else on the trip brought a spouse, so David was my platonic travel buddy. We both understood that upon returning to Washington, the fight over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency would be on, and we would each be called to it. Despite our fiery ways and opposing views, we remain friends.
In the days and weeks that followed, Trump’s fellow Republicans could have risen to his defense. Canning Comey was delivering on the promise to “drain the swamp!” It turns out, though, some of the alligators were going to miss him.
The calm, above-the-fray posture of some establishment Republicans made it easier for them to wait instead of pressing the strategic advantage. For those of us who were frustrated, chomping at the bit to make good on our promise of a populist rebellion, it looked as if party leadership might be just as happy if Trump were removed. The only thing permanent in Washington is sloth.
Media and establishment figures on both sides extolled Mueller’s professionalism and low-key objectivity. His biography was endlessly covered so that you didn’t look too closely at what he was doing. Meanwhile, Mueller’s team was shaking down Gen. Flynn, who had briefly become Trump’s national security advisor, threatening to prosecute his son for minor offenses unless Flynn himself pled guilty to “lying” to investigators. The goal of such moves was never justice but the creation of pressure on Trump’s associates to get them to “roll” on their boss.
While I’ve never met Flynn, it’s clear he’s a fan of my work. On several occasions, he would send me direct messages via Twitter with cryptic slogans and images that seemingly encouraged me to keep fighting.
Meanwhile, as media leftists like Rachel Maddow warned nightly that the republic was imperiled, establishment Republicans judiciously “waited to see” what Mueller’s team—stacked with partisan Democrats—would turn up.
Russiagate was a pivotal example of that passive Beltway conservatism that turns, inevitably, into the maintenance of business as usual. Just as many members would rather let an executive agency promulgate a new rule to avoid actual lawmaking, so could play-it-safe Republicans claim they were “waiting to see the results of Mueller’s
