The indictments of 12 Russian military officers who engaged in a coordinated attack on the United States to try to make their preferred candidate our president are a vital reminder that the Mueller investigation cannot and must not be seen as a political issue.
The fact that yesterday also heard from our Director of National Intelligence, a conservative GOP former Senator from Indiana, that the cyber offensive of which the GRU attacks were part is on-going and that "we are at a critical point" in which "the warning signs are there"...
...is also salient. It is not an accident that both these strong statements were made as the president prepared for his ill-considered and unnecessary private meeting with Vladimir Putin--the man who certainly approved, oversaw and continues to oversee these attacks.
It is clear that the intelligence and law enforcement communities of the United States--adhering to the principles of patriotism enumerated by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein yesterday--felt that a message needed to be sent to the Russians that we were on to them.
Typically that message would be delivered by the president in such a meeting but this president has proven to be the staunchest defender of Putin and the most active advocate of covering up or denying these attacks. He did it again this week even while knowing of the indictments.
Do the indictments and the Coats statement (again, both delivered by Republicans) also send a message that they do not fully trust the president to deliver that message or to press the Russians on it? I believe they do.
The White House response to the indictments--which again does not deal with the on-going threat to our democracy posed by the Russians but instead (wrongly) seeks to exonerate the president from his involvement in this affair--confirms the wisdom of their actions.
This is an extraordinary moment. It is without equal not only in American history but in modern history. A hostile foreign power intervened in our election to help elect a man president who has since actively served their interests and has defended them at every turn.
He may deny collusion. But given that this is an on-going attack, denying it is collusion, distracting from it is collusion, obstructing the investigation of it is collusion--because all these things enable it to continue.
That the president is abetted in his aid for the Russians--again, in the midst of this on-going attack--by the leadership of the Republican Party makes the situation all the more extraordinary and dangerous. As they seek to undermine the investigation, they serve Russia...
...as directly as if each were officers of the GRU. Some now reportedly seek to impeach Rosenstein on trumped up charges. To attack one of the leaders of our national defense as we are being attacked and to do so to benefit our foreign adversary is textbook treason.
That is strong language. But consider this: If we updated our definitions of war to include cyberwar then aided a foreign power engaged in such a war against us would literally meet the Constitutional definition of treason.
When only semantics protect our president and our ruling party from the harsh sentences treason demands, we need to recognize the severity of the situation. But more importantly, we need to recognize one of the most important implications of yesterday:
That while we who watch or chat on cable news have lost the plot here, while GOP makes it about personal attacks on FBI officers, while the President makes it about him, while many of us make it about partisan politics, Mueller and Rosenstein have kept their eye on the ball.
They recognize as does Coats and as do the leaders of our intelligence community and as does every law enforcement and national security expert with whom I have spoken that this is, above all and most urgently, a national security crisis for the United States.
We have been the target of the most successful cyber & information warfare operation in history & that operation is on-going. We have great capabilities to defend ourselves as the indictments bravura act of naming names revealed. But the Russians are gaining know-how daily too.
At stake are the results in our 2018 and 2020 elections and the integrity of our political system. This enemy seeks not only to put puppets or weak or deficient leaders in place, it seeks to gain leverage over them as they come to realize they are advertently or not...,
...the beneficiaries of the Russian attacks. (We now know clearly how that works.) They seek to advance their interests (consider their success in achieving this goal thus far in this administration...you need look back no further than this last week's NATO Summit.)
If they succeed, America will be profoundly weakened, our standing, our alliances and the international system we built may be irreversibly damaged. What is more, at this point, given the success the Russians have had to date and the power of their defenders w/in our system...
...we simply do not know whether this ambitious campaign of theirs will succeed. Their collaborators could kill the investigation that is revealing the scope and nature of their plans. Their colluders could win victory after victory. They can win.
If you doubt it, remember that they have certainly achieved far more than Putin could have hoped when he originally approved launching this attack. Then do what is right. Set aside politics. As Rosenstein urged, put patriotism first.
America is under attack. Let this not be the first time in our history that we ignore the threats posed by our adversaries or that we give in to them. This is the first cyberwar. It is in the open now. How we respond to it will determine whether America as we knew it can survive.
I redid this thread as a column for @thedailybeast. It's here: thedailybeast.com/the-way-trump-…
