Attorney General Jeff Sessions advanced a new defense at Tuesday's House Judiciary hearing about his extraordinary memory loss when it comes to all things Russia. The Washington Post's Paul Waldman sums it up nicely:
Its essence is that the Trump campaign was such an ungodly, bumbling mess that it was simply incapable of colluding with the Russians in their campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton, help Donald Trump get elected, and generally disrupt and discredit the American electoral system.
As weaselly a defense as that may seem, it contains a good bit of truth. With each new revelation about the campaign’s contacts with Russia, a picture is filling out. It’s one not of a well-organized collusion conspiracy, but instead of a bunch of nincompoops engaging in a kind of ongoing, ad hoc, fitful sort-of-collusion, one that involved lots of meetings, lots of emails, and lots of contacts between various Russians with Kremlin connections and people at different levels of the campaign.
During his testimony, Sessions called the campaign “a form of chaos every day” and said the national security team he led was “not a very effective group, really.” In essence, he said that he couldn’t possibly remember everything that happened on the campaign because it was such a disaster.
First of all, just because Trump's campaign was stacked with a battalion of rogue "nincompoops" doesn't relieve them of culpability. Whether or not a conspiracy succeeds is inconsequential, it's the intent of the actions they took that matter.
And where intent is concerned, what's fascinating is how Russia was the glue that held the whole blundering enterprise together. Regardless of how muddled the campaign hierarchy was, it was riddled with attempts to connect with Russian operatives. Just look at this cursory list:
- Trump repeatedly heaped praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin, openly begged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and declared his "love" for Wikileaks (a "hostile intelligence service" that was often abetted by "state actors like Russia"), mentioning the site 145 times during the final month of the campaign.
- Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chair Paul Manafort all met with several Russians at Trump Tower, including a Kremlin-linked lawyer and a former Russian counterintelligence officer.
- Don Jr. further communicated and coordinated with Wikileaks, the service that was distributing the emails Russian hackers stole from the Clinton campaign.
- Jeff Sessions talked with Russian Ambassador Surgey Kislyak—twice, and reportedly was informed of the Russian contacts of both Papadopoulos and Page, regardless of his faltering memory.
- Mike Flynn had repeated contacts with Kislyak during the campaign and transition; he also received a payment in 2015 from the Russian state media company, RT.
- Carter Page made a speech in Moscow in 2016 and spoke with Russian government officials while he was there; he also met with Ambassador Kislyak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
- George Papadopoulos had multiple contacts with Russians, some of whom were connected to Putin; he told campaign aides Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Sam Clovis, and Stephen Miller about those contacts.
These are just the top lines of what we in the public know; more is sure to come out as Robert Mueller's investigation proceeds and more indictments come down. But even the basics reveal an extraordinary amount of contact with operatives of a heretofore hostile foreign power by a U.S. presidential campaign trying to win over American voters.
Chaotic? Maybe. But that has no bearing on the fact that multiple Trump aides were communicating with Russians with the same basic intent of advancing Trump's candidacy, and many of those contacts were specifically aimed at getting "dirt" on Clinton.