Coming on the heels of the failed Russiagate probe, the Democrats’ impeachment strategy over a July 25 presidential phone call will most likely ensure the re-election of the President. Trump behaved like a transactional businessman on the phone to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Many of Trump’s problems have arisen because his opponents have used the media to allege he is using high office to achieve personal ends.
This was demonstrably false in Russiagate. The ABC’s Four Corners three-part investigation last year of what host Sarah Ferguson claimed was “the story of the century” tried to link various false allegations — many cooked up by a former British intelligence officer paid by the Democrats — to Trump’s desire to build a tower in Moscow.
The Mueller report released in April found what many expected. Russia did interfere in the 2016 US election but it was not at Trump’s request. To the extent people surrounding his campaign were involved with Russians they were on the periphery, often inexperienced and trying to make a buck for themselves.
Politically this has been payback for Trump’s prosecution of the Hillary Clinton emails saga and his involvement in the “birther” conspiracy against president Barack Obama. Even today, people defending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment moves point back to the Republican campaign against president Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
As Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald explained when the Mueller report was released, the idea that Trump was conspiring with Russia is stupid: “How can you say Donald Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin when ... he is trying to remove one of Putin’s client regime states in Venezuela ... when he’s trying to bully Angela Merkel out of buying Russian natural gas ... when he sold lethal arms to the Ukrainians ... when he bombed Putin’s client state in Syria ... This whole narrative that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin is idiocy.”
Despite the Mueller setback, the Democrats are still trying to prove Trump is prepared to betray US interests for personal benefit. They are determined to use a CIA whistleblower’s revelations about the call to the Ukrainian President to keep the impeachment bandwagon rolling. Trump was looking for information to damage potential presidential candidate Joe Biden over financial activities of his son, Hunter.
Politically it may have been wiser had Trump stayed away from this, but who can blame Trump for seeking to do to the Democrats what they have been doing to him since 2016?
Now Australia has been dragged into another prong of Trump’s strategy, the investigation by his Attorney-General, William Barr, into the origins of the Russiagate hoax. Much of the reporting was breathless here last Tuesday as journalists rehashed a piece from The New York Times revealing Trump had asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison for help in Barr’s probe of Australia’s role in the original FBI investigation of claims Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Parts of the story have long been known. It is based on a one- hour meeting former high commissioner to London Downer had over a single gin and tonic each in early 2016 with junior Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos. Last week’s news added little beyond the phone call between Trump and Morrison. It had already been reported our US ambassador, Joe Hockey, had written to Barr offering co-operation. Conspiracy theorists among Trump’s media supporters now claim Downer himself may have been used to warn US intelligence about Russian dirt on Clinton.
Papadopoulos even suggests Downer may be some sort of agent for the Clintons. This is beyond stupid. Downer is on the conservative side of the Coalition. Papadopoulos uses a round of DFAT funding to a Clinton Foundation medical project in PNG as the basis for impugning our longest- serving foreign minister. Downer says the funding was a departmental matter at arm’s length from him.
The most comprehensive exploration of the Downer-Papadopoulos meeting at The Kensington Wine Rooms is by the ABC’s Matt Bevan on the “Russia, If You’re Listening” podcast. It has been claimed on FoxNews and in Papadopoulos’s interviews that he did not tell Downer about the Russia emails. Downer tells Bevan he did not record the meeting, as a senior diplomat he would never consider doing so, and that Papadopoulos has admitted telling others of the emails only a fortnight after their drinks.
Downer says soon after the meeting he sent a short cable to Canberra mentioning Russia and the Clinton campaign.This is standard procedure. Andrew Bolt on Tuesday on SkyNews implied the decision of the Turnbull government to alert the FBI to Downer’s cable is worth looking at. But picking up Downer’s point about the media’s lack of forensic skill, a quick Google search reveals an alternative scenario.
A story in The Wall Street Journal, “The Curious Case of Mr Downer”, published a year before Mueller’s report — on May 31, 2018 — says Downer also alerted the US ambassador to the UK the day after the Papadopoulos meeting. It quotes Downer from this paper saying he reported the Papadopoulos meeting back to Australia “the following day or a day or two after” as it seemed “quite interesting”. Ambassador Hockey “passed the information on to Washington”, perhaps as much as two months later, the Journal says.
The WSJ then quotes a source saying “Mr Hockey neither transmitted any information to the FBI nor was approached by the US about the tip. Rather it was Mr Downer who ... decided to convey his information — to the US embassy in London”.The Journal says this was unusual because Five Eyes partners normally share any intelligence “through the intelligence system of the country that gathered it”. The WSJ says Australian intelligence did not alert the FBI and “the document that launched the FBI probe contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever”. The implication is the FBI was alerted by the Obama state department via the US embassy in London.
In the interests of good government it must be hoped the Barr investigation gets to the bottom of the politically motivated manipulation of media by partisan intelligence sources, many now working at US news networks.
While I don’t believe in conspiracies, reforming politicians understand bureaucracies resist change. This column has previously quoted president Dwight Eisenhower: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the rise of misplaced power exists ... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
Or as prominent civil libertarian lawyer Alan Dershowitz, an opponent of impeachment, has written, the legal and intelligence systems should never usurp the ballot box.
Why do I believe impeachment will benefit Trump? Because the Republican-controlled Senate will veto impeachment and in the process Trump’s lawyers will have the right to interview anyone they like connected to allegations investigated, including Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, James Clapper, John Brennan and James Comey. All under oath.
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History will judge the media’s reporting of the Trump years harshly, and not just for bias but for what former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer describes as its lack of forensic skill.