Thread by @nycsouthpaw

For my sins, I was listening to a slate podcast today and I heard David Plotz ask:

“There’s nothing that we’ve heard that draws in the President ... there’s not an implication that Manafort and the president are acting in concert here, is there?”

Plotz was asking, ofc, about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort sharing poll data with suspected GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik. And Emily Bazelon answered “no” — there’s nothing to tie the president to his campaign manager sharing his campaign’s data with a Russian cut-out.

And after I finished banging my head against my desk, it occurred to me that it might be useful to go over a few concepts from agency law that could aid public discussion of this matter.

The translation of the latin principle at the heart of agency law, respondeat superior, is “let the master answer.” It reflects centuries of legal tradition that a person is responsible for the acts of a person he employs if those acts are taken in the course of the employment.

Of course, the mere fact that Paul Manafort was Trump’s chief lieutenant in the campaign, empowered by him to make all sorts of decisions including wrt the use of internal polling data, doesn’t end the inquiry about Trump’s responsibility for what Manafort did.

But the fact that one man employed the other, with express notice of Manafort’s past work and on terms that obviously called his motives and incentives into question, clear “draws in” Trump and creates “implications.”

The exchange between Plotz and Bazelon is emblematic of an broader obtuseness—from Manafort to Cohen to Flynn to Papadopoulos to Stone to Don Jr to Page. Their entanglements with Russians and Russian cut-outs are treated as isolated happenstances. Yet they all worked for Trump.

And they’ve all lied for Trump, concealing their secret entanglements as long as they could. Trump is the one, apropos tonight’s news, who ties the whole room together. Yet the great and the good of our media ecosystem still talk about him like he probably wasn’t involved.

Oh, Kushner and Prince too