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11 tweets,
3 min read
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1. This is presumably a rhetorical question - and I'd sworn not to tweet about Mueller stuff (largely because I've never spent much time tweeting about it) - but it may be a question worth answering, so here's breaking my vow to myself.
2. I come to this as someone who was initially very skeptical that we would see any strong evidence of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russians or others - not because I didn't think that there might not have been such cooperation, but because I presumed if there were,
3. the parties involved would have had the minimal common sense to cover their shit up. I didn't expect political principals to take the Coen Brothers' movie "Burn After Reading" as a 'how-to' manual. I was wrong. Oh boy I was wrong.
4. The evidence of multiple contacts, and repeated efforts at back and forward coordination, is voluminous. @emptywheel has the goods on this. What isn't clear - and has never been clear - is whether this rises to the level of criminality, and which charges would be appropriate.
5. Put differently, the problem with the United States approach to democracy is _how much_ is legal - how much everyday corruption, sweetheart deals, tacit collusion, bribes-that-aren't-quite-overtly-bribes and so on are part of the system of everyday politics.
6. That makes it hard to indict people for doing bad shit - whether with Russians, whether with Saudis, whether with ... take your pick. People like e.g. Tom Barrack are equal opportunity sleazes. But that also means that the standard that Glenn is applying here is a bad one.
7. If you are promoting a "no indictments: therefore nothing to see here" standard, you are undercutting the left's ability to criticize what is by any reasonable measure an extraordinarily corrupt administration - even by the ordinary standards of US politics.
8. Again, the scandal is what you can get away with _without_ being indicted. This is something that I imagine that Glenn would acknowledge is true with respect to e.g. Saudi/UAE influence on US politics. But if it's true of the Saudis, it is just as true of Russia.
9. I can appreciate how Glenn has particular sensitivities wrt Russia. Being accused of being a Russian plant by 10,000 Internet frothers cannot be pleasant (and there may be legal or other issues that I am completely unaware of). But the apparent lack of further indictments
10. seems to me to be largely unconnected to the question of whether lots of people in the Trump campaign were using Russian intelligence through cutouts with surface deniability, playing footsie with Russian oligarchs etc, since we know that yes, they were doing all these things
11. Suggesting that they were not seems to me to be a terrible strategy. There aren't any plans that I'm aware of to indict the principals in the UAE's influence campaign. But using that fact to dismiss their campaign as a nothing would be a category error. Finis.
