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June 11, 2023

With John Durham and his report now pretty well closing the book on one of the most sordid episodes in American politics, one angle never pursued — not even by Durham himself — was to consider the illogic of the allegations against Donald Trump of “collusion” with Russia.  While the Durham report does afford the nation a more detailed and complete account of the machinations set in motion to foist “collusion” deceptions and fabrications on the 2016 election and the American people, absent was any earnest effort to examine Russian motivations to corroborate the accusations of “collusion.”  After all, “it takes two to tango.”

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We all have watched enough reruns of the long-running TV series Law & Order to know that District Attorney Jack McCoy and TV’s NYPD detectives always tried to establish motive for a crime.  Motive goes a long way to explain “who done it” and, more importantly, “why.” With Russia and “collusion,” Jack and the detectives would have been at a loss to make a case against President Trump, because right from the start, the whole idea of Russia “colluding” with the Trump campaign never made sense.

In one word, what would be the Russians’ — i.e., Vladimir Putin’s — “motive” for colluding with Donald Trump?  What did Russia stand to gain by “colluding” with Donald Trump?  Had someone in authority thought it through and asked some pointed questions out loud — and early on — it may have spared the nation two-plus years of hyperpolitical intrigue and instead exposed the real culprits with their political dirty tricks.

To this day, no one among the many who sought to mortally wound President Trump politically with collusion allegations ever provided the American public convincing rationale for why the Russians would have wanted a President Trump instead of a President Clinton.  The mere accusation of “collusion” was to be a fait accompli.

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Stop for a moment to consider: Russia could have obtained most anything it wanted — more easily and at less cost — from a more pliable, soft, internationalist President Hillary Clinton.  In reality, every international autocrat, dictator, and warlord almost certainly wanted a more malleable President Clinton over the nationalistic and assertive President Trump — and a number spoke out saying so — alarmed from the start that President Trump had openly adopted a more aggressive “America first” leadership approach to foreign and defense policy.

Questions about motive become further compelling given the Trump Administration’s more uncompromising U.S. policy vis-à-vis Russia.  Russia felt, in the Trump administration’s first year alone, consequences of more assertive U.S. defense and foreign policy.  In November 2017, the U.S. approved the $10.5-billion sale of Patriot anti-missile systems to NATO ally Poland in the face of perceived Russian aggression.  In December that same year, the U.S. authorized transfer of lethal anti-tank weapons to Ukraine to help that nation fight off Russian-backed separatists. U.S. troop presence in Eastern Europe increased over Obama-era levels to bolster European defenses against Russia, and the U.S. imposed monetary sanctions targeting bad individual Russian actors and companies instead of sanctioning that nation’s sovereign debt.

Further, the Trump administration pushed U.S. NATO allies to increase defense spending.  In even more direct confrontations, Russian mercenaries and other pro-Syrian regime forces attacking U.S. troops in Syria were killed, while the U.S. under President Trump sanctioned Russian President Putin’s largest geo-economic project, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe (which Biden then reversed).

In hindsight, the Trump tenure, with its more forceful stance, likely cost President Putin a four-year-plus delay in his plan to invade Ukraine until after he saw the harried, chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden Administration as his green light to invade without major concerns over consequences or interference from the U.S.

In contrast, Russia remembered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the Obama administration.  The clumsy “reset button” episode set the tone. The U.S. obliged the Kremlin by canceling missile defense systems for Central Europe. An Obama Administration’s fuzzy line in the sand indecisiveness over Syrian chemical weapons made way for Russia’s effective military intervention in Syria.  President Putin had to approve of President Obama’s concessions to Iran for the nuclear deal, and it was Obama who notably told former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that Vladimir Putin should give him more “space” and that “after [his] election, [he] would have more flexibility.”  Putin noted U.S. facilitation of the transfer of large uranium assets to Russia and had surveyed the Hillary Clinton of Benghazi infamy.

So why would Russia want a President Trump when actual events suggest it could achieve its objectives more easily with a President Clinton in office, whose actions, predilections, and temperament Russia had observed and benefited from while she was President Obama’s secretary of state?  In Hillary Clinton, Russia likely assessed a candidate more interested in globalists’ demands from Davos, Paris, and Glasgow than tough issues like Middle East proxy wars, Russian adventurism, nuclear proliferation, or solidarity of the NATO alliance.  Albeit speculative, Vladimir Putin was arguably as surprised as CNN to wake up that November Wednesday morning to learn that the “impossible” had happened.  Two days before the election, pollsters and statisticians gave Hillary Clinton odds of between 75 and 99 percent of winning the election.  Given such overwhelming pre-election global political and media consensus, a Clinton victory was likely a foregone conclusion in Kremlin hallways.  Donald Trump was never the Kremlin’s preferred candidate.