Missing The Forest Through The Trees In The Russia Scandal

David Corn at Mother Jones was one of the first reporters to break the story about the Steele dossier and perhaps to fully grasp the extent of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign, and his reporting has further moved that story along over the last year and half. So far be it from me to criticize him, but I will.

Corn had an extraordinary column the other day - extraordinary for its focus, extraordinary for its admission, and extraordinary for its continued blind spot. Corn begins his story with an admission. It starts with his appearance on a cable show discussing the various scandals du jour (and there are usually multiple ones almost every day) when he had an epiphany. He suddenly realized that the daily discussion of the each new set of scandals that added to the mountains of evidence that has already been revealed was actually burying the bigger story.

According to Corn, "Though it’s clear Trump’s presidency has been hobbled by the Russia scandal, the manner in which this matter plays out in the media has helped Trump...Almost every day, Trump pushes out a simple (and dishonest) narrative via tweets and public remarks: The Russia investigation is a…well, you know, a witch hunt...The Russia story, in Trump’s telling, is a black-and-white tale of evildoers persecuting a great man - him."

But then he properly focusses his attention on the core issue, namely that this narrative has allowed Trump to, so far, get away with "the biggest scandal in American history". Corn continues, "the other side—the accurate perspective—isn’t that complicated. In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s regime mounted information warfare against the United States, in part to help Trump become president. While this attack was underway, the Trump crew tried to collude covertly with Moscow, sought to set up a secret communications channel with Putin’s office, and repeatedly denied in public that this assault was happening, providing cover to the Russian operation. Trump and his lieutenants aligned themselves with and assisted a foreign adversary, as it was attacking the United States. The evidence is rock-solid: They committed a profound act of betrayal. That is the scandal."

But that scandal is rarely described in those succinct and precise terms and Corn deserves enormous credit for stating it. But Corn also gets to the crux of the problem when he says "But how often do you hear or see this fundamental point being made? The media coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal—which has merged with Cohen’s pay-to-play scandal, the Stormy Daniels scandal, and a wider foreign-intervention-in-the-2016-campaign scandal—has yielded a flood of revelations. Yet the news reporting tends to focus on specific components of an unwieldy and ever-expanding story". The media is so focused on the every new set of trees that it uncovers that it totally misses the forest. And the obsession with whether collusion can actually be proved distracts from the larger point that our country was being attacked and the Trump campaign assisted  and abetted that attack.

Of course this myopia is largely a result of the demands of the 24-hour news cycle and emergence of cable news and social media which requires daily, if not hourly, fixes of "news". An additional problem is that each new revelation requires putting it in context with the broader narrative of that act of betrayal. But sometimes it is not entirely clear what the context actually is. For instance, is George Nader part of the Russian collusion or part of an attempt to bribe Trump by the Gulf States or both? Other times, the context just goes missing entirely such as when it is mentioned that that the Trump teams had 80 plus contacts with Russian linked operatives without noting that this is totally unprecedented compared to any other campaign in modern history which each probably had a handful of contacts at most. A separate problem is that sometimes that "context" begins to look too partisan and the media won't go there.

Corn also rightly blames the Democrats for largely ceding the ground to Trump and instead relying on the Mueller investigation to produce a final verdict. This is clearly a political decision taken by the leadership of the party but it certainly hasn't immunized the Democrats from Trump's attacks as he continually claims that they are the ones who colluded and are trying to destroy him because they lost the election.

It does, however, boggle the mind that an experienced reporter like Corn could lose sight of the essential scandal and be required to have such an epiphany over eighteen months after the scandal broke in order to refocus attention to the fact that our country and our democracy was attacked. And, to his credit, it seems that Corn's admission has rippled through certain elements of the media as I've seen multiple stories over the last few days which reflected a similar revelation and a determination to focus on the broader story.

More distressingly, Corn misses focusing on the even bigger scandal that goes beyond just Trump. The fact of the matter is that the Republican party also refused to defend America from attack. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were briefed on the Russian attack in October 2016 and refused to defend America and instead decided to advance their own partisan political ends. Worse, McConnell, Ryan, and the GOP continually used material that they knew was illegally stolen from the DNC by the Russians. We also know that the GOP used that stolen data to attack down-ballot Democrats in critical swing districts and states. And the Republican National Committee's data operation remarkably overlapped with the Russian propaganda campaign.

In addition, Ryan and McConnell have allowed certain Congressional Republicans to try and sabotage the Mueller investigation and coordinate attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department in coordination with the White House. More importantly, the Republicans in Congress have done virtually nothing to ensure that a similar attack will not happen again.

Corn is absolutely correct when he states, "The Russia scandal is the most important scandal in the history of the United States...An overseas enemy struck at the core of the republic—and it succeeded. Trump and his minions helped and encouraged this attack by engaging in secret contacts with Moscow and publicly insisting no such assault was happening. This is far bigger than a bribe, a break-in, or a blow job. And, worse, the United States remains vulnerable to such a strike." But his refusal to identify those "minions" as the Congressional Republican party again misses the forest through the trees.

Besides Felix Sater, I sincerely doubt that the Russians actually believed that Trump would win the election. Perhaps their success in effecting the Brexit vote might have given the Russians some hope. But there is some indication that the Russians abandoned that hope after the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape. The real focus of the entire Russian attack on our democracy was to make sure the assumed new President, Hillary Clinton, was as weak as possible. That would only mean a stronger Republican party, preferably a Republican party that controlled the House and Senate. The reasons for the Russians to help Trump are equally valid reasons for the Russians to help Republicans in general. And while there may not be nearly as much evidence for their support of the GOP as there is for Trump, there is certainly some evidence of that effort. Just as it boggles the mind that Corn could lose sight of the essential fact of the Russian attack, it is equally boggling that he can not see that the Republican party is just as guilty as Trump in aiding and abetting that attack.