For some inexplicable reason, the disgraced ex-president decided yesterday to stroll down memory lane and remind us of the time he licked Vladimir Putin’s shoes at the 2018 summit in Helsinki. On social media, he recalled that “a third rate reporter” asked him who he trusted more – “President Putin of Russia or our ‘intelligence’ lowlifes.” His “instinct,” he wrote yesterday, was to side against the “really bad people” in our intelligence community; as he put it, “Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?”
Hey, whatever. Once a traitor, still a traitor. But what got my attention was that he cited a guy named “McGonigal” as one of our “really bad people.” If that name doesn’t ring a bell, I’ll help you out: Charles McGonigal, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was tasked with investigating the 2016 Trump-Russia alliance, was arrested last week on charges of taking money from a Putin-allied oligarch who was a player in the 2016 scheme to boost candidate Trump.
You may be tempted to stop reading this. I get it. How many of us have the stomach to revisit the ’16 election, much less 2020? But, alas, the full history of the ’16 Russia plot has yet to be written, and how fascinating it was (at least to me) that Trump got McGonigal’s role exactly backwards. He sought to con his social media saps into believing that McGonigal had been working against him…whereas all the available evidence suggests that McGonigal was helping him by going soft on Russia.
James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, would’ve been hard-pressed to make up what we now know to be true:
In the fall of 2016, during the last weeks of the presidential campaign, veteran special FBI agent McGonigal supervised counterintelligence operations in the agency’s New York office – which was, by reputation, a hotbed of pro-Trump sentiment. Despite considerable evidence that Russia was conducting a massive cyber campaign on Trump’s behalf, the FBI conducted the narrowest possible probe into whether Trump and Putin had personally plotted together to influence voters. But there was no need for the principal players to do that. As Timothy Snyder, one of our top Trump-Russia scholars, reminds us, Trump and Putin had a “mutual understanding”. All Russia needed, for its massive influence campaign, was “social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state.” Also, while McGonigal was in charge, it was strongly suspected that the New York office was leaking anti-Hillary tidbits to Rudy Giuliani and hence the press.
And now, with McGonigal’s arrest and indictments, we have a clearer picture of what was really going on. Granted, we can’t connect all the dots, but consider this:
The FBI’s top expert in cyber counterintelligence, who was supposed to be investigating Trump’s ties to Russia and the extent of Russia’s campaign to get Trump elected, ultimately joined the payroll of Oleg Deripaska, a Putin oligarch and key coordinator of Russia’s foreign influence operations. (And one of Deripaska’s former business associaties was Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. Manafort owed Deripaska a lot of money; to work it off, Manafort fed him polling data about American voters. This was all documented in a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.)
Timothy Snyder, the aforementioned Trump-Russia scholar and American historian, writes: “It verges on inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia’s 2016 influence campaign on behalf of Trump. He knew the players; he is now alleged to have been employed by one of them.”
When the news of McGonigal’s arrest broke last week, The New York Times’ print edition buried it on page 20. A follow-up story landed on page 19. Those judgments struck me as wrong-headed, considering how, Hillary’s emails were hyped on page one back in 2016. That nothingburger seems especially insubstantial when measured against a nascent spy scandal.
It’s clearly incumbent on us to know more – especially now, with Trump roaming the land yet again. Snyder says it best: “We are still living under the specter of 2016, and we are closer to the beginning of the process of learning about it than we are to the end. Denying that it happened, or acting as though it did not happen, makes the United States vulnerable to Russian influence operations that are still ongoing…It is easy to forget about 2016, and human to want to do so. But democracy is about learning from mistakes, and this arrest makes it very clear that we still have much to learn.”
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And speaking of ’16 campaign scandals:
Trump’s pre-election payment of $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels is back in the news, as a New York grand jury hears evidence from the Manhattan DA. The fun part is what Trump insisted yesterday on social media (“NEVER HAD AN AFFAIR”), in contrast to what he said today on social media (“It is very old and happened a long time ago”).