Russians wishing to share secrets is latest minefield for Donald Trump

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Hamburg last week, where a joint ‘impenetrable cyber cell’ may have been discussed. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump and Russia. Sleazy music publicists. Donald Trump Jr and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Azerbaijani pop star and Russian oligarch offspring Emin Agalarov. Mysterious Moscow lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Sacked Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort with his shady business background in Ukraine.

This is the cast that brought about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower at which Veselnit­skaya was to tell Trump Jr, Kushner and Manafort incriminating secrets about Hillary Clinton, but apparently produced nothing.

The music publicist setting the meeting up had in an email promised Trump Jr the information as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”.

This is the smoking gun, the Trump haters screamed in unison. The New York Times and CNN went into hyper-drive. CNN in particular cast off all pretence at objectivity or being straight about the news.

No less a figure than Virginia senator Tim Kaine, Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate, ­intoned that now the law enforcement agencies were dealing with a possible case of treason against the Trumps.

The T-word was echoed by countless commentators, even in Australia. This is an acute case of Trump derangement syndrome.

Treason is a crime that involves aiding and abetting the enemy. And the enemy means a nation with which the US is at war. And at war means a declaration of war. In the 1950s, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of transmitting American nuclear ­secrets to the Russians. They could not be charged with treason ­because the US was not at war with the Soviet Union.

If it is not treason to sell nuclear secrets to Moscow at the height of the Cold War, it cannot be treason to have a 20-minute meeting with a private Moscow lawyer in which nothing of substance happens, at Trump Tower in New York.

But some of the defenders of Trump are almost as deranged as some of his attackers. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh ­declared that there is “a silent coup” taking place in Washington in which the media, the “deep state”, and sundry other grey-zone villainous actors are ­attempting to overturn the democratic election of a wholly innocent Donald Trump.

There is something seriously wrong in America just now. It would be a mistake to exaggerate it or panic about it. America has suffered serious divisions before.

As ever, John Howard offered the most sage advice this week. Have some patience with the Trump administration, he sug­gested. It’s not as bad as Trump’s campaign rhetoric suggested it would be; some of the things it’s doing are good.

This is the sober judgment of mainstream statesmen around the world. France’s new President, Emmanuel Macron, the very darling of political correctness, climate change piety and earnest globalism, lavishly hosted Trump in Paris this week, complimenting him, drawing attention to the many shared goals and values of the US and France, and having the US President as the guest of honour at Bastille Day.

The facts of the June 2016 meeting so far seem clear enough. Rob Goldstone, a former tabloid journalist and music publicist who knows the Trumps from such high end ventures as staging Miss Universe in Moscow in 2013, emailed Donald Trump Jr to say he had a Russian contact who had damaging information about Clinton.

In a passage that greatly excites the Trump haters, Goldstone wrote that this was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”.

Trump Jr replied with a kind of jejune klutziness: “I love it.”

The very artlessness, and ­indeed odiousness, of the Trump Jr-Goldstone email exchange tends to support a non-sinister ­interpretation. The other key fact is that the meeting took place ­before it became widely believed that the Russians had hacked the emails of top Democratic Party officials and released these through the useful idiots at WikiLeaks to damage Clinton, or perhaps more generally just to cause havoc in the US political system.

In the event, Trump Jr brought Kushner and Manafort, then the Trump campaign manager, to the meeting. According to all the participants, Kushner left after a few minutes and the Russian provided no information at all on Clinton.

The New York Post, a generally pro-Trump newspaper, declared out of all that: “Donald Trump jnr is an idiot!” — a conclusion with which it is hard to disagree.

According to the shrillest Trump haters, the meeting shows that the Trump campaign col­luded illegally with the Russians in their attack on US democracy and will result in criminal pro­secutions.

Of course, the meeting proves nothing of the kind. The fact that a chancer such as Goldstone said Veselnitskaya was de facto operating on behalf of the Russian government neither proves that she was doing so, nor does it prove that Trump Jr believed her to be doing so.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US have been piously declaring that if anyone with an ­alleged connection to a foreign government offered them information about a political opponent they would immediately go to the FBI.

To which the only proper ­response is: pull the other one, it plays Jingle Bells.

Four decades in journalism have taught me that you never say no to any potential source of information until you see what it’s got.

Journalists are perhaps different from politicians. The politicians are much more ruthless. I have lived in Washington on four different occasions as a correspondent or think tank resident. The exchange of information, gossip, titbits and more between diplomats, politicians, staff members, analysts, corporate players, political activists, journalists, chancers of every type and anyone who can find their way into an office on K Street or the Capitol or even the Starbucks opposite the National Security Council is endemic, routine, ubiquitous and the very stuff of a vibrant capital city.

Sometimes, very rarely, this is all pretty naked.

Trump defenders were pointing out that Jimmy Carter’s people asked Moscow to release some Jewish refuseniks and give him the credit for it in order to help Carter with the Jewish vote against ­Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.

Democrats have always claimed that in the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon told the South Vietnamese not to go too far with a proposed peace agreement with North Vietnam sponsored by Lyndon Johnson because they’d get a better deal from Nixon after the election.

Nothing could compare to the gothic complexity and conflicted motives of the countless ­nations — Russia among them — that had dealings with the Clinton Foundation, which massively ­enriched the Clintons with associated speaking engagements at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop for Bill, while Hillary was conducting official business with them as secretary of state.

Trump’s defenders are right to point out the massive double standard in the mainstream media not having a core meltdown or moral panic over these countless Clinton misdemeanours, yet treating Trump Jr’s dopey emails as something more odious than the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (look it up).

Yet Trump and his entourage are neither innocent nor yet out of the woods legally. Trump’s ­approval rating stands at 41 per cent, which is low for a president at this stage of the cycle. His disapproval rating is high. Yet his disapproval ratings were high when he won the presidency. Forty-one per cent probably means he’s holding his base. And he won the presidency by firing up his base. And Republicans keep winning the special congressional elections (by-elections in our terms).

This drives Democrats and the media mad, who double down on their exaggerated criticism of genuine Trump failings. That in turn means that Trump’s most ­effective response is not reasoned rebuttal but to stoke ever greater hostility among his base against his accusers. But Trump and his entourage are guilty of serious moral, ethical and political failures. He has picked a good cabinet but constantly undermines it with wild and undisciplined tweets that range from demeaning insults to women to flat contradictions of American policy.

After all the grief Trump has had with Russia, he met Vladimir Putin in Hamburg and then tweeted that he and Putin were contemplating an “impenetrable cyber cell” that would keep both nations secure. When the adults in his administration got hold of Trump, he walked away from this madness. But what value consistency or ­reliability in American policy?

Every one of the US intelligence chiefs whom Trump has personally appointed has attested to the fact that the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails and engaged in other serious cyber ­interference in the US election process, through a huge campaign of fake news disguised as American originated stories. Yet Trump still says he does not know ­whether it was the Russians or the Chinese or someone else. In which case, if we are to take him seri­ously, what confidence can we have in the appointments that he himself has made to the intelligence agencies?

Nor is the Trump team out of the woods legally. As in Watergate, it’s not the crime but the cover-up that gets people sacked, convicted and sent to jail in Washington. Kushner is an official White House adviser. In his security clearance form, the SF 86, he ­either lied about or astonishingly forgot more than 100 foreign contacts, including spicy Russian contacts, that he had and was obliged by law to disclose.

Even more important than the cover-up is the investigation. Now that there is a special prosecutor with forensic zeal and unlimited resources, who knows where this will end up. And more than once relatively trivial lapses have been conflated into either obstruction of justice charges or charges of lying to the special prosecutor, a powerful tool for criminalising politics in recent years in the US.

Almost everyone is at fault here, including Trump who has set an appalling tone right from the start. But appalling is not criminal.

At least not yet.