The newly confirmed National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, had brushed off reports in the Washington Post about a conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. It was a simple meet and greet, he said. He assured the transition team—among others, Vice President-elect Pence—that there were no discussions of Obama administration sanctions against the Russians, an assurance Pence publicly repeated.
Yates now told the White House that Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak had actually been captured as part of an “incidental collection” of authorized wiretaps. That is, a wiretap had presumably been authorized on the Russian ambassador by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and, incidentally, picked up Flynn.
The FISA court had achieved a moment of notoriety after the Edward Snowden revelations briefly made it a bête noire for liberals who were angry about privacy incursions. Now it was achieving another moment, but this time as the friend of liberals, who hoped to use these “incidental” wiretaps as a way to tie the Trump camp to a wide-ranging conspiracy with Russia.
In short order, McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon, each with prior doubts about Flynn’s reliability and judgment—“a fuck-up,” according to Bannon—conferred about the Yates message. Flynn was asked again about his call with Kislyak; he was also told that a recording might exist. Again he scoffed at any suggestion that this was a meaningful conversation about anything.
In one White House view, Yates’s tattling was little more than “like she found out her girlfriend’s husband flirted with somebody else and, standing on principle, had to tell on him.”
Of more alarm to the White House was how, in an incidental collection wherein the names of American citizens are supposedly “masked”—with complicated procedures required to “unmask” them—had Yates so handily and conveniently picked up Flynn? Her report would also seem to confirm that the leak to the Post about these recordings came from the FBI, DOJ, or Obama White House sources—part of the growing river of leaks, with the Times and the Post the leakers’ favored destinations.
The White House in its assessment of the Yates message ended up seeing this as less a problem with an always hard-to-handle Flynn than as a problem with Yates, even as a threat from her: the Justice Department, with its vast staff of career and Obama-inclined prosecutors, had ears on the Trump team.
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“It’s unfair,” said Kellyanne Conway, sitting in her yet undecorated second-floor office while representing the president’s hurt feelings. “It’s obviously unfair. It’s very unfair. They lost. They didn’t win. This is so unfair. So POTUS just doesn’t want to talk about it.”
There was nobody in the White House who wanted to talk about—or even anyone who had been officially delegated to talk about—Russia, the story that, evident to most, even before they entered the White House, was certain to overwhelm the first year of the Trump administration at the very least. Nobody was prepared to deal with it.
“There’s no reason to even talk about it,” said Sean Spicer, sitting on the couch in his office, firmly crossing his arms. “There’s no reason to even talk about it,” he said again, stubbornly.
For his part, the president did not use, though he might have, the word “Kafkaesque.” He regarded the Russia story as senseless and inexplicable and having no basis in reality. They were just being sucked in.
They had survived scandal during the campaign—the Billy Bush weekend—which virtually no one in Trump’s inner circle had thought they could survive, only to be hit by the Russia scandal. Compared to Pussy-gate, Russia seemed like the only-desperate-thing-left-gate. What seemed unfair now was that the issue still wasn’t going away, and that, incomprehensibly, people took it seriously. When at best it was . . . nothing.
It was the media.
The White House had quickly become accustomed to media-led scandals, but they were also used to their passing. But now this one was, frustratingly, holding on.
If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the media to do anything it could to undermine this president, it was—in the view of the Trump circle—this, the Russia story, what the Washington Post termed “Russia’s attack on our political system.” (“So terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed,” according to Conway.) It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn’t put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater, Benghazi, Email-gate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers.
When the comparison to Whitewater was made to Conway, she, rather proving the point about obsessions, immediately began to argue the particulars involving Webster Hubbell, a mostly forgotten figure in the Whitewater affair, and the culpability of the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was a partner. Everybody believed their side’s conspiracies, while utterly, and righteously, rejecting the conspiracies leveled at them. To call something a conspiracy was to dismiss it.
As for Bannon, who had himself promoted many conspiracies, he dismissed the Russia story in textbook fashion: “It’s just a conspiracy theory.” And, he added, the Trump team wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything.
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The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.
The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.
If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.
The congressional Democrats had everything to gain by insisting, Benghazi-like, that where there was smoke (even if they were desperately working the bellows) there was fire, and by using investigations as a forum to promote their minority opinion (and for members to promote themselves).
For Republicans in Congress, the investigations were a card to play against Trump’s vengefulness and unpredictability. Defending him—or something less than defending him and, indeed, possibly pursuing him—offered Republicans a new source of leverage in their dealings with him.
The intelligence community—with its myriad separate fiefdoms as suspicious of Trump as of any incoming president in memory—would, at will, have the threat of drip-drip-drip leaks to protect its own interests.
The FBI and DOJ would evaluate the evidence—and the opportunity—through their own lenses of righteousness and careerism. (“The DOJ is filled with women prosecutors like Yates who hate him,” said a Trump aide, with a curiously gender-biased view of the growing challenge.)
If all politics is a test of your opponent’s strength, acumen, and forbearance, then this, regardless of the empirical facts, was quite a clever test, with many traps that many people might fall into. Indeed, in many ways the issue was not Russia but, in fact, strength, acumen, and forbearance, the qualities Trump seemed clearly to lack. The constant harping about a possible crime, even if there wasn’t an actual crime—and no one was yet pointing to a specific act of criminal collusion, or in fact any other clear violation of the law—could force a cover-up which might then turn into a crime. Or turn up a perfect storm of stupidity and cupidity.