....... For well over a year, Donald Trump has dodged the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential charges of collusion and obstruction of justice. It’s all “phony,” a “hoax,” “fake news,” a “witch hunt.” Last year, during a multilateral summit in Vietnam, Trump met briefly with Vladimir Putin and then told reporters that he had asked the Russian President about election meddling. Not to worry, he told reporters: “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”
Trump cannot really accept what his own intelligence leaders tell him about the election; he even directed his C.I.A. director to meet with a former operative turned conspiracy theorist who thought that the hack of the Democratic National Committee was an “inside job.” Only rarely, and begrudgingly, has Trump acknowledged Russian hacking, and, when he does, he hastens to emphasize its triviality, its meaninglessness.
The special counsel, Robert Mueller, has now charged thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian organizations with meddling in the election. Rod Rosenstein, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, told reporters on Friday that the people and entities charged intended “to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy.” The indictment focusses on the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia, which, beginning in 2014, allegedly carried out an expensive and intricate influence operation concentrated on highly contested battleground states, including Florida, Virginia, and Colorado. Some of the defendants, it said, posed as Americans and communicated with “unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.”
These indictments could, at least for the moment, allow Trump to believe that Mueller will not discover any knowing collusion in the President’s campaign. Nor do they demonstrate that Putin himself directed the operation.
And yet the indictments are unlikely to ease Trump’s sense of political embattlement even inside his own Administration. Earlier this week, a group of intelligence chiefs, including the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats; the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray; and the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo—all Trump Administration appointees—told a Senate panel that they were in accord with the findings of January, 2017, when the intelligence community asserted that Russia had meddled in the 2016 elections and did so to the detriment of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
As Coats told the senators, “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations.” The F.B.I. director added that President Trump had not directly ordered them to take measures to prevent meddling in the midterms.
Mueller’s indictment is in synch with the findings of the intelligence community—a collection of immense bureaucracies that Trump and his supporters have routinely denounced as a conspiratorial and establishmentarian “deep state” intent on undermining his Presidency. Trump has repeatedly expressed his fury with leaders of the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the Justice Department, a toxic dynamic that seems, by now, more a constant state of affairs than a matter of fleeting temper.
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