In early March, as part of my “Innocent Explanation” series, I discussed what I called the Mailer Standard. You can read the full background here. But the gist is that sometimes people cover up not because they know they’re guilty but because they don’t know. They don’t know whether they’re guilty or not. So they don’t know what investigators might find. In that case it was about the Kennedy assassination and the almost endless list of bad guys, unreliables and unknowns the CIA was working with in the early 1960s. I have long thought that something similar might be at work with the Trump administration with respect to the campaign’s ties to Russia and possibly Russia’s election interference campaign.
It is important to remember that many of the people who now work in the Trump White House didn’t work on the campaign.The campaign was also almost comically disorganized. So if we were to posit the existence of a group of campaign staffers who were colluding with the Russian election interference campaign, I wouldn’t assume that other people on the campaign knew that was happening or knew the details.
A few moments ago Abby Phillip of The Washington Post was on CNN discussing the latest revelations about Michael Flynn and said something that rang very true to me.
Here’s the transcript …
It suggests to me that the White House doesn’t know where this goes. They didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what Michael Flynn was up to when he was working for the campaign, when he was in the transition, and even when he was in the white house. And so it’s not surprising that they’re trying to kind of limit the scope of how deep this investigation is going because if you don’t know what investigators are going to necessarily find or what they’re looking for, it’s hard to want to open the door to them. That’s why this is such a big problem. As this investigation goes on, there’s a limit to how much it seems the White House believes they have a handle on what’s going on. On what might be found. And that makes it a very dangerous political situation.
As I said, this rings very true to me.
Remember, who’s making these document production and compliance decisions? Probably the White House Counsel’s Office. That’s Donald McGahn. He wasn’t on the campaign. He’s a party loyalist GOP lawyer. Does he even know the full story on Flynn? I doubt it. Does he even know all the details about Trump himself? I wouldn’t assume that either.
Is the White House covering up? Of course they are. Maybe it’s because they know the truth is that explosive. Or maybe it’s because they simply don’t know what a real investigation would find.
The deeper point to remember is that we keep hearing that Flynn wasn’t vetted before being appointed National Security Advisor. This is true but also pretty much beside the point. He was toe to toe with Trump for seven or eight months before the election. He was not just his top foreign policy advisor but one of his top advisors period. His influence was profound. But it’s clear now and it was clear to many people at the time that Flynn was a totally unreliable character. We didn’t know quite how much. But plenty was known. But that didn’t stop Trump from hooking up with him. That also didn’t stop him from hooking up with Paul Manafort and making him his campaign manager. This notwithstanding the fact that even if we don’t assume any intelligence funny business with Russia, Manafort was still about as dirty as they come in that line of work.
If you assume Trump was a total naif through this process (something I by no means assume), the campaign was still an infiltrators nirvana: no vetting, utterly disorganized, a candidate who treated as gospel whatever he was hearing from the last hanger on who talked to him. Does this all worry the White House? They’d be crazy if it didn’t.
