I wanted to note briefly the news of this new Russia-related email in the news today. The email is from Rick Dearborn, a key Trump staffer, whose role in the drama we’ll return to in a moment. We don’t have the email itself but rather descriptions of it. And it appears to reference an effort by an individual from West Virginia (who knows?) to set up a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Vladimir Putin. Notably, the email dates from June 2016, around the time of the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr and just as Russian intelligence operatives were kicking their election disruption campaign into high gear.
Now, who is Rick Dearborn? This is the critical point. Dearborn was Senator Jeff Sessions’s right hand man. For a dozen years before the the 2016 campaign Dearborn had been Sessions’ Senate Chief of Staff. Those Senate chief of staff positions are extraordinarily powerful. If you’ve been in the job for a dozen years you’re a big deal – certainly with that senator and really in the entire world of capitol hill.
Remember, Sessions was a critical figure for Trump. He was far, far right in the Senate. But he was a sitting US senator who endorsed Trump when virtually no one of any standing in the GOP would back him. That was a big deal in symbolic terms. But almost as important it was a big deal in terms of having people on board who had some basic grasp of policy issues and how to run a real campaign. On this front, Sessions brought not just himself but his people. Rick Dearborn was the most important of those people. And he was quickly seconded to the campaign. The other key Sessions staffer? Stephen Miller. But we’ll return to him later.
For our present purposes what is important to note is that Dearborn was charged with putting together Trump’s policy shop and the armada of advisors and wonks who surround and work for every presidential campaign once it seems to have a real shot of winning a nomination. These people are critical not just because you need to generate positions on almost countless issues and start recruiting people who are likely to get appointments if you win the White House, but because doing these things is a key indicator for elite stakeholders – journalists, business, the foreign policy community, the think tank world, campaign donors, etc – that you’re really a serious campaign.
That was Dearborn’s job. And you’ll remember that of the five men Trump announced as his original foreign policy adviser team in March 2016, two have been identified as key figures in the Trump Russia probe. The five were Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. Carter Page you know about. Papadopoulos, we now know, spent most of his adviser time trying to connect Trump officials up with people from Russia. It’s been claimed that another guy, Sam Clovis, a right wing talk radio show host who Trump recently installed at the USDA, is actually the guy who chose Page. I don’t think we really know who did. I think it’s altogether possible that Dearborn did. But it all took place under Dearborn’s charge.
There’s also Jeff Sessions meeting with Russian officials, most notably the one he had in his Senate office. It’s never been quite clear how or why Sessions got tangled up in these Russia meetings. Dearborn would be an obvious explanation.
In any case, I would say this email is the rare case where the old cliche is true: it raises more questions than it answers. But Dearborn does connect together a number of the Russia threads through the 2016 Trump campaign. And this email – whatever the details behind it and whatever came of it – comes right in the critical period when Russian operatives appear to have been probing for multiple points of contact and entry into the Trump campaign.
I doubt we’ve heard the last of this.
