Just what did President Trump say to Vladimir Putin about Russian interference in the 2016 President election? It is a fascinating question as an evidentiary matter, quite apart from the substantive question, since the four witnesses to the conversation are each either congenital liars or have situational incentives to deceive us regarding what happened. So how do we make sense of it? I have a post I’ll be sharing with you soon about critical textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, the Q’uran and the canonical writings which form the basis of the orthodox history of early Islam. I confess it may seem like a stretch. But this reminds me a bit of that subject since here we have multiple accounts, each of which merit high degrees of skepticism. We must look at each of them not so much to ascertain the truth of what actually happened – that’s likely impossible – but sketch out the range of plausible possibilities.
With that, let’s do this.
Shortly before the Trump-Putin meeting, President Trump answered press questions and again cast doubt on the existence of Russian campaign interference. He first cast doubt on the unanimity of US intelligence findings. He then conceded that Russia probably had played some role but also that he thought other countries did too. President Trump has made this last claim a number of times. There is no reason to think Russia would either need the assistance of other nation states or run the risks of collaborating with other nation states in its hacking and subversion campaign. At least according to public versions of US intelligence estimates, there is zero evidence of any other nation-states being involved. In other words, the entire suggestion is absurd. Taken together, while Trump at first concedes that some Russian role is likely, the overall thrust of his comments is to at least muddy if not reject outright any claims that Russia intervened in the election to help him win. Many press accounts have said that Trump finally accepted the US intelligence findings. He didn’t.
Let me excerpt the President’s key comments so you can read them directly (with a few passages highlighted) …
NBC’s Hallie Jackson: Mr. President, can you once and for all, yes or no, definitively say that Russia interfered in the 2016 election?
Trump: Well, I think it was Russia, and I think it could have been other people in other countries. Could have been a lot of people interfered… [Barack Obama] did nothing about it. The reason is, he thought Hillary was going to win. If he thought I was going to win, he would have plenty about it. So that’s the real question — why did he do nothing from August all the way to November 8th? His people said he choked. I don’t think he choked.
NBC’s Jackson: You again said you *think* it was Russia. Your intelligence agencies have been far more definitive. They say it was Russia. Why won’t you agree with them and say it was?
Trump: I agree, I think it was Russia, but I think it was probably other people and/or countries, and I see nothing wrong with that statement. Nobody really knows for sure. I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction. How everybody was 100 percent sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Guess what — that led to one big mess. They were wrong.
Given these comments, it certainly doesn’t seem like the President went into his meeting with an aggressive posture or with any expressed confidence the election tampering campaign even happened. In his exchange with Jackson, Trump first says Russia probably did it but then lists off a bunch of reasons to doubt that’s really true.
Trump certainly could have taken a very different tone in the meeting. But it seems much less than likely.
So what did he say? First out of the gate describing the meeting was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who said the President did raise the hacking campaign repeatedly. Here’s the key quote. “The President opened the meeting with President Putin by raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. They had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject. The President pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement. President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.”
Later Tillerson noted:”I think what the two Presidents, I think rightly, focused on is how do we move forward; how do we move forward from here. Because it’s not clear to me that we will ever come to some agreed-upon resolution of that question between the two nations … And so I think, again, the Presidents rightly focused on how do we move forward from what may be simply an intractable disagreement at this point.”
The gist here is that the President raised the issue, even “pressed” Putin on it more than once but also focused on the future rather than the past since there was no resolving what had become an “intractable disagreement”.
There’s an additional part of Tillerson’s quote that I haven’t seen many focus on. Tillerson said Trump raised “the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
This was from Tillerson’s introductory, seemingly prepared remarks. So presumably the words were chosen carefully rather than being an offhand and ill-chosen phrasing. Tillerson and thus Trump could have referred simply to the fact of Russian interference or the US Intelligence Community’s consensus judgment about Russian interference. But at least in Tillerson’s description he referred to the “concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference.”
This phrasing is a good deal softer and perhaps even softer than it appears on first blush. You don’t need any spycraft to know this is a major concern for the great majority of the American people. That’s demonstrably the case. The topic has consumed the country for months. What is in dispute, or what the White House disputes, is whether it actually happened or, if it did, whether its significance is being exaggerated. A reasonable read of Tillerson’s comment is that the President didn’t say “This happened. There has to be an accounting.” or “This happened. You need to admit it happened before we can move forward.” but something more like “Our public believes this happened. It’s a big obstacle to moving forward.”
It should go without saying that “the concerns of the American people” are not the same as Trump’s concerns. He could have said ‘my deep concerns about Russian interference’. According to Tillerson, he didn’t.
Things got more interesting when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters that President Trump had accepted President Putin’s denials. He even went on to claim that Trump had even said something to the effect that some people in America were spreading ‘fake news’ about Russian interference. Here’s the quotes from Lavrov: “President Trump said that he heard the clear statements of President Putin that this is not true, and that the Russian leadership did not interfere in these elections, and that he accepts these statements.” Lavrov later said that Trump “mentioned that certain circles in the U.S. are still exaggerating, although they cannot prove this, the topic of Russia’s interference with the U.S. election.”
So did Trump really toady to Putin in such an egregious fashion?
A “senior Trump administration official” quickly rejected Lavrov’s claim that Trump had accepted Putin’s denials. Then President Putin also said that he thought Trump accepted his denials. And then something quite notable happened. Both Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin and National Security Advisor McMaster, answering reporters questions on Air Force One, both declined to deny Lavrov’s claim that Trump had accepted Putin’s denials. In other words, an unnamed but senior administration officials denied Trump took Putin at his word. But on camera, two of the highest level officials, including McMaster, declined to do so. That speaks volumes.
So can we reconcile what seems to be contradictory claims about the meeting?
I think it may be easier than it looks on the surface. Let’s begin by noting that Lavrov and Putin have overlapping incentives to lie or at least distort what was discussed. They obviously will deny what was after all a covert program. But they also have an interest in continuing to provoke the deep suspicions many Americans (rightly) harbor about Trump’s relationship to Putin and Russia. Yet each side’s claims, those of both the Russians and the Americans, are at least partly bounded by the other sides’ ability to deny.
So where does that get us?
Putin and Lavrov both say that Trump appeared to accept Putin’s denials. The fact that Trump’s own National Security Advisor won’t contradict those claims adds a good deal of credibility to them, whatever motives Putin and Lavrov may have to deceive. But also note that accepting a denial needn’t necessarily mean accepting the underlying factual claim of the denial. It can mean something more like ‘I accept that you deny this happened. And we’ll move ahead on that basis.’ That is actually not far at all from what Tillerson said, which was that they agreed that they should be talking about the future and not the past and that it is not clear the two countries will “ever come to some agreed-upon resolution of that question between the two nations.”
They’re not identical. But they’re not far off. I would argue they’re close enough to be different interpretations, albeit perhaps tendentious ones, of the same words. Personally, I believe that President Trump probably did accept Putin’s denials. I base that on Trump’s history of kowtowing to Putin and his repeated refusals to accept that the Russian subversion campaign even happened. (Remember how Trump described it to Lester Holt the day after firing James Comey: “This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”) More important than what I think, though, is that both sides accounts are actually quite similar.
What about Lavrov’s suggestion that Trump said some people in the US were making “exaggerated” claims about Russian interference for which they have no proof? That’s really not that different from Tillerson’s summary which suggested that Trump pressed the issue of what many Americans think rather than a factual claim based on US intelligence. Not the same, no. But both seem like they could be plausible descriptions of the same conversation.
In this case, it’s very, very hard for me to believe that Trump didn’t say something like what Lavrov claims. Think how many times Trump has claimed the Russia story is “fake news” or a “made up story.” It’s a veritable obsession. Think too how frank and trash-talking Trump was in describing the firing of James Comey to Lavrov and Kislyak, according to a confidential White House transcript, when the three men met in the Oval Office in May. Is it really plausible that Trump and Tillerson met with Putin and Lavrov for over two hours in private and Trump didn’t once go off on his claims about the Russia probe being ‘fake news’ or driven by anti-Trump forces in the US? To me, that’s difficult to believe. But again, based just on each side’s descriptions, tendentious and even deceptive as they may be, they are simply not that different.
Indeed, I would argue that they are close enough to be reasonable interpretations of the same conversation. Quite simply, both sides descriptions of the conversations are pretty similar. And the conversation they describe is not good at all.
