by Craig Unger
“Among FBI people I know, the worst job to have right now is to be Russia counterintelligence in DC,” says national security analyst Clint Watts, the author of Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News.16 “That’s because if you find something, you’re going to get told to ignore it; and if you advance it, then you’re going to be smeared publicly by someone. Especially if it touches the election, it’s just a terrible assignment to get.”
And by installing John Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence in May 2020, Trump took over the Department of Intelligence as completely as he had taken over Justice with William Barr. And it is hard to imagine agents in the CIA or FBI bothering the president with additional reports that were critical of Putin’s Russia. How could the FBI, the CIA, or our military possibly protect us from our gravest national security threat when it came from the man they had pledged to serve?
Meanwhile, Trump did whatever he could to exculpate Russia from its role in the 2016 election attack, reverting to an oft-debunked conspiracy theory falsely suggesting that Ukraine was behind the attack on the Democratic National Committee server. Just as Trump had taken out newspaper ads in 1987 to promote KGB talking points, he was now using the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to do the same thing.
At the same time, with Barr’s assistance, Trump took the opportunity to strip the federal government of its internal watchdogs. On April 3, 2020, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who had received the whistleblower complaint that had led to his impeachment. Throughout the entire administration, inspectors general, the officials who are in charge of oversight of specific institutions and provide some of the checks and balances to guard against corruption, became an endangered species. In addition to the intelligence community inspector general, Trump fired IGs in the Department of Transportation, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services.17 Five were gone within a period of six weeks.
Loyalty replaced expertise throughout the entire administration. That was nowhere truer than in the intelligence sector, where Ratcliffe was appointed director of national intelligence, overseeing the CIA and sixteen other intelligence agencies, and became widely known as the least qualified director of national intelligence in history.
In a job whose previous applicants had been Rhodes Scholars, served on the National Security Council, run the National Security Agency, headed Pacific Command, served as ambassador to the United Nations, held decades of intelligence experience, and generally attained a career full of celebrated accomplishments, Ratcliffe had distinguished himself in Congress as a Republican who was known for his unswerving loyalty to Trump and for having served as mayor of Heath, Texas—population 7,590.
“We saw him dance around direct questions,” Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said on the Senate floor shortly before the confirmation vote. “If you’re John Ratcliffe, the intelligence really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he makes Donald Trump happy. And if Donald Trump doesn’t want to acknowledge that the Russians helped him, then those are John Ratcliffe’s marching orders.”
With the watchdogs out of the way, Trump and Barr continued inventing richly detailed but fictitious narratives that absolved Putin and Russia of interference with the 2016 election. For Barr, it wasn’t enough that he had buried the entire counterintelligence investigation and released material only on criminal prosecutions. Now Barr set about helping out even those who had been convicted by investigations stemming from Mueller’s probe. In February 2020, when Trump friend and consultant Roger Stone, the bad boy of political consulting, was given a sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years, Barr’s Justice Department intervened to lessen the sentence. (In July, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.) Barr dropped charges against former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI—only to be rebuffed later by a federal appeals court, which reinstated them. After the coronavirus pandemic struck, Barr let Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who had been sentenced to seven and a half years, out on home confinement. Similarly, Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who had been allowed to serve time at home because of the pandemic, was briefly sent back for refusing to agree not to write a book about Trump. However, a federal judge soon overruled the order.
Meanwhile, Trump continued developing a narrative that blamed President Obama for “spying” on Trump’s 2016 candidacy, that cast Trump not as a villain but as a victim of pro-Hillary Democrats in the FBI, the fake news, the liberal elites. Led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump proxies shuttled back and forth to Ukraine to generate sham investigations and disinformation they hoped would torpedo Joe Biden.
These false narratives had begun almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration with an assertion—a tweet, naturally, on March 4, 2017, just over six weeks after his inauguration—in which Trump wrote, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Donald Trump was the victim!
A key problem with making that case, of course, was that the facts didn’t quite mesh with the theory, and they would have to be changed to make it work. That included much of the Mueller Report, thousands of newspaper articles, and the conclusion—shared by all US intelligence agencies—that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.18 So as each component of the Trump-Russia scandal came to light, it would be turned on its head by Trump, Putin, and company through extensive operations that spanned the globe from Moscow to Kiev to Washington and that cast pro-Putin operatives as heroes in the fight against corruption and depicted FBI investigators as diabolical Democratic operatives in a massive multifaceted disinformation operation.
To that end, in May 2019, just two months after taking office, Attorney General Barr had designated John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to investigate whether the FBI or other officials in any way engaged in misconduct during their probe, code named “Crossfire Hurricane,” into Trump’s ties to Russia. Its goal was to assert that the Obama administration had illegally spied on Trump.
The next month, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani got together two pro-Putin Ukrainian operatives, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to share back-channel “information” that, according to Giuliani, included “enormous allegations of criminality by the Biden family.”19
Thus Ukrainegate, the scam for which Trump had already been impeached, was reborn. Before Biden even nailed down the Democratic nomination, Trump had set out to destroy him. At the heart of Trump’s impeachment was the infamous phone call—“the perfect phone call,” as he called it—in which President Trump threatened to withhold previously authorized and desperately needed military aid to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensky put together a sham investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter. In his phone call, Trump explicitly asked Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 election in a way that would benefit Trump. According to the New York Times, no fewer than ten former White House chiefs of staff, both Republican and Democratic, said it was unprecedented for an incumbent president to “personally apply pressure to foreign powers to damage political opponents.”20
Of course, Trump was summarily acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate—in a trial in which the Republicans refused to allow a single witness. But from Russia’s point of view, Trump had already aided Putin by undermining and endangering Ukraine, and by making clear to President Zelensky that he couldn’t count on American support as long as Donald Trump was in power.
During impeachment, former White House adviser Fiona Hill noted, “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by Russian security services themselves.”
But Tru
mp and his allies were not about to abandon their narrative. Giuliani had opened the door to making more charges against Biden, who, as vice president, had fought corruption in Ukraine by taking a stand against Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, an ally of pro-Putin oligarchs who was widely seen as an obstacle against fighting corruption—and whose two fellow prosecutors had been caught with heaps of diamonds, cash, and other treasures in their homes.21 As a result, Biden had pushed for Shokin’s firing in coordination with anti-corruption reforms supported by the US State Department, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Union.22
In February 2020, just after Trump was acquitted, Giuliani went to Kiev, where former prosecutor general Shokin opened a criminal case against Joe Biden for his role in getting Shokin fired.23 By March, websites such as TheSaker,24 said to be a GRU front, were retailing wild conspiracies about how the FBI conspired with Ukrainian hackers to hack the Democratic National Committee and blame the break-in on Trump-Russian collusion.
And so it went, one disinformation scam after another, stitched together with the help of a dizzying array of Putin operatives and promoted heavily by Fox News and the right-wing press, but with diminishing efficacy as the toll from COVID-19 mounted.
Then, as the coronavirus spread throughout the country in spring 2020, the new amorphous, fluid, ever-changing narrative known as Obamagate began to emerge. “You know what the crime is,” Trump said. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.”25
“It was the greatest political crime in the history of our country,” Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in May. “It is a disgrace what’s happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani continued making the case against Biden, with the help of Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian official and Giuliani ally who asserted that he might testify before the US Senate prior to the November elections and drop major bombshells against Biden in the form of secret recordings involving him and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
By May, several websites of dubious provenance had sprung up, citing unauthenticated recordings of then vice president Biden in conversation with Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, with Poroshenko essentially taking orders from Biden—to fire Prosecutor General Shokin and squash the investigation against his son, Hunter; to sign over a billion-dollar loan guarantee to Ukraine; and more. “The smoking gun has just been found,” said a pro-Trump site called Creative Destruction Media.26
But that was clearly not the case. As the Washington Post reported, the recordings show, as Biden has previously said publicly, that as vice president, he linked loan guarantees to Ukraine to firing Shokin. But the tapes that have been released thus far don’t corroborate Giuliani’s charge that Biden’s motive was to stop an investigation of Burisma Holdings, which had hired Hunter Biden.27
Secret recordings, videos, a criminal complaint against Biden, phony websites, disinformation—all raised the possibility of dramatic last-minute preelection show trials against Biden in the Senate, with testimony from pro-Kremlin witnesses and documentation, recordings, and videos of questionable provenance.
Biden foreign policy adviser Michael Carpenter in the Washington Post called the tape clips that were being released “a KGB-style disinformation operation tied to pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, whose chief aim is to make deceptive noise in the U.S. election campaign to advance the interests of their oligarchic backers, the Kremlin, and the faltering Trump campaign.”28
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These were dark times. Trump, remember, had campaigned in 2016 on insults and fear—taking aim at women, Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, Gold Star mothers and fathers, and others. He had started his administration with an inaugural address that put forth a dark dystopian vision of “American carnage,” as he put it—that is, an America he saw with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
Unlike any other inaugural addresses, which generally have tried to project visions of unity after divisive campaigns, Trump spoke solely to his base of aggrieved white supporters. Where past Republican presidents had evoked “a city on a hill” or “a thousand points of light” as images, Trump’s vision of American carnage was so dark that Hillary Clinton, in an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, recounted the remarks of former president George W. Bush.
“Well,” he said, “that’s some weird shit.”29
But that was just been the beginning. After more than three years in office, thanks to impeachment, to the pandemic, and to the racial justice movement, for all his obstinacy, the curtain had gradually been pulled back to reveal more and more of Trump. Of course politicians lied, but Trump was a sociopath, who, by the count of Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” had given false or misleading statements more than twenty thousand times in office through July 2020—and he hadn’t even started campaigning yet (that’s an average of twelve false or misleading claims a day).
By this time, Trump’s assault on reality and his somewhat demented self-aggrandizing tweets were widely discounted by most Americans—fewer than three in ten believed his false claims, according to the Post’s “Fact Checker” poll.30 Nevertheless, he had cultivated tens of millions of unwaveringly fervent supporters who were cultlike in their suspension of disbelief.
And as the 2020 presidential campaign got under way, Trump, having brushed off impeachment, now confronted presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. In fact, Trump’s acquittal by the Senate gave him even more latitude to exercise his basest impulses. But he also now faced the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic disaster.
Perhaps the most salutary effect of the pandemic was that the curtain had been pulled back on the Wizard of Oz, revealing a doughy reality-TV host well past his prime, playing at being president in an infantile way, making up lies, saying whatever came into his head, changing his version of reality on a whim, as if he alone determined reality for all of us. But by now, millions of Americans had begun to see past the buffoonery and clownlike behavior that masked a real tyrant, a real demagogue, a force of evil on a mythic level, a Shakespearean evil, a dictator in waiting who would intentionally allow hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens to die so long as it helped him stay in power.
Even though the pandemic was clearly hurting Trump’s chances at reelection, the White House response to it essentially boiled down to this: Let people die and hope no one minds. Let’s hope they become numb.
As one former administration official told the Washington Post, the White House’s thinking was that Americans will “live with the virus being a threat.” Another added, “They’re of the belief that people will get over it or if we stop highlighting it, the base will move on and the public will learn to accept 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a day.”31
Refusing to wear a mask, taunting those who did as being “politically correct,” Trump and his supporters occasionally paid the price, as did former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who attended Trump’s indoor rally in Tulsa and died from COVID-19 a bit more than a month later.
Trump had banned immigrants, separated families, put children in cages, and acted as if he were above the rule of law, as if he had monarchical powers. And for Trump, staying in power was an existential crisis because, more likely than not, he would end up in jail if he lost. As a result, it was clear he would stop at nothing. But the election was approaching. He was sinking in the polls, and his campaign embodied a murderous stupidity that defied common sense and magnified the risk of grave illness and death for his supporters by politicizing the most benign commonsense safety measures, such as
wearing protective masks.
A train wreck was coming. But no one knew how it would play out.
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Geopolitics is sometimes—too often, perhaps—compared to three-dimensional chess. In this case, it would be more accurate to say that to the extent the cascading forces at play—Trump’s tyranny, the forthcoming election, the Trump-Russia scandal, the pandemic, the economic crisis, the assault on American democracy—resembled three-dimensional chess, it was the end game of a blitz chess match, with ferocious assaults coming in from every direction at blinding speed.
By early fall, conventional wisdom had it that Trump would lose a free and fair election—in the highly unlikely event that such an event took place. The pandemic took center stage, and as it raged throughout the summer, Trump insisted that parents send their kids back to school in the fall—a potential super-spreader event at a time when a second wave was expected to strike. Eschewing protective masks, staging super-spreader events, encouraging the entire country to get back to work, no matter how unsafe the conditions, Trump appeared to be deliberately fueling the pandemic so much that voting would be unsafe, and the curtailed postal service would undermine the integrity of the election.
It is hard to top America’s greatest health crisis and racial justice as enormously powerful and important issues, but for both Donald Trump and America, something even bigger was at stake. As long as he was in office, and William Barr’s generous interpretation of the unitary executive prevailed, he was, for all effective purposes, beyond the reach of the law.
