Thread by @DrewHolden360

What Frum does here is a good representation of what the Russian Collusion narrative has always been and continues to be: huge allegations drawn from smoke without any actual evidence of fire.

🧵breaking down this piece.⤵️

Before we get to Frum’s points, it’s important to remember what this debate is about. Dems & media insisted that Trump worked w/ our enemies to influence an election.

You’ll remember that an extensive investigation already failed to find evidence of this. americanbar.org/news/abanews/a…

But suspending disbelief, let’s get to the case.

First, we’ve got Trump’s pre-existing, publicly known business ties to Russia. There are a lot of them.

While we should be conscientious of who the leader of the free world owes, this isn’t, of course, evidence of wrongdoing.

The next two points are also important pieces of context: Russia wanted Clinton to look bad, and Trump’s team knew that.

Again, inferential, but obviously not evidence of Trump having done what has been alleged.

I want to pause here to remind folks what had been alleged. Dems + the corporate press advanced a theory that Trump was a Russian stooge, perhaps had been one since the 80s, and was actively working with them to steal an election.

We’ll come back to this, because it’s important.

Anyway, into the meat of the allegations. We get to the famous 2016 meeting. Much has been drawn from this interaction but as even Frum concludes: “[t]he Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for.”

So the hunt for a smoking gun continues.

Next, Wikileaks. Frum provides compelling evidence that Wikileaks advanced a Russian misinfo operation.

If Trump were Wikileaks, this would surely be damning. Alas, Trump is not Wikileaks. So the Trump-specific search continues.

Next, again, we get back to the circumstantial: Trump & co denied Russian involvement in the election.

We’ve got really compelling evidence that Russia did try to influence the election (as has become habit).

But, again, rejecting that consensus isn’t collusion.

Now we get to Manafort. As has been made pretty clear, Manafort gave internal polling data to someone later IDed as a Russian intel asset.

But does this amount to collusion? Mueller (and I would argue common sense) says no. We aren’t given explanation here for why it could be.

Next, my personal favorite: somehow, Trump handling foreign policy differently than Frum would like is evidence of collusion, because Trump didn’t like NATO or Germany but liked Brexit.

Hard to call that a smoking gun.

And, finally, we get to the lying by Trump and others about all of this stuff.

Again, not good! But lying - even to Congress or the FBI or whomever - does not constitute collusion.

Do these stories add up to something? Sure! There’s smoke here. Trump & co did bad things, often out in the open, often tied to Russia.

But do they actually add up to our original claims? No. It doesn’t even come close.

Again: we’ve known this since the Mueller Report.

But because a) that conclusion is inconvenient for those who have pushed this story as the foundational myth of Trump for years and, in fairness, b) there is obviously smoke here, the narrative persists.

But the entire case is just an emotionally laden bait-and-switch.

Frum almost seems to get there himself in this piece. He throws “criminal” out as a qualifier, but this is is again a sleight-of-hand trick.

The press narrative & Dem allegations weren’t that Trump was bad on Russia: it was that he had done something horrible & impeachable.

But Frum’s point about cooperation is *precisely* where his argument is wrong. Mueller never found the causality that Frum implies. That’s the conclusion of the Mueller report!

That cooperation - working together - is exactly what’s been missing.

Can a reasonable person read these inferences & agree w/ Frum about what they think probably happened? Sure. But this narrative has always been advanced as something indisputable because lots of people shared Frum’s belief that surely the worst parts didn’t make it onto the page.

And it’s worth pointing out that, when people criticize “Russian Collusion,” it also includes the many outlandish claims made by media and Dems - the pee tape, Steele, the idea that Trump was a Manchurian candidate installed by Putin.

These were all common allegations.

So when people - myself included - talk about a “Russia hoax,” that’s it.

The media (including Frum) & Dems constructed a narrative to remove a POTUS but, even spending millions of dollars & upending the gov’t, they couldn’t actually substantiate it.

Yet they keep repeating it.

Frum’s contention is that too many media types are helping Trump b/c they are insufficiently aware of how bad Trump is.

But this is the same category of error as the Russia hoax. It begins from a belief - Trump is bad - and works backward to build a case w/ whatever is on hand.

This is the “journalism” of a witch hunt, not an investigation, which had been the beating heart of the Russia hoax all along, and the thing (I think) that offends so many of its present critics across the political spectrum.

It’s certainly what offends me, anyway.