Trump alone can clear suspicion over Russia

Source: Washington Examiner | January 13, 2017 | Washington Examiner

President-elect Trump was correct to criticize the website BuzzFeed for violating journalistic standards in publishing an unverified, salacious and at times provably false memo. But he goes further and seems to chastise anyone who asks about his views of, or ties to, Russia.

While some charges against Trump relating to Russia have been proven bogus, others are plausible enough to have piqued the interest of intelligence agencies, law enforcement and Republican senators. Trump and his team cannot wave all questions away as “speculation” and “unverifiable.” Those are the arguments of a defendant in a court of law, and they do not remove the cloud of suspicion in the court of public opinion.

Trump needs to do more because at the moment, it’s hard to shake an uneasiness about Trump and Russia.

He has lost the benefit of the doubt on this matter. He and his allies, in telling us to disregard various allegations, are asking us to ignore too many bits of corroborating circumstantial evidence that suggests an unseemly intimacy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s corrupt regime.

Exhibit A is Trump’s disinclination to criticize or confront Putin’s Russia over the country’s hacking of American politicians and apparent efforts to destabilize our democracy.

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Exhibit B was his campaign manager Paul Manafort. Picking Manafort, a literal foreign agent who has worked for the Kremlin and other dictatorial regimes, was an early misdeed by Trump that today gives credence to any Russia charges flung his way.

Trump fired Manafort when Manafort’s secret payments from Russia-backed operatives in Ukraine became too politically poisonous. But Manafort never really left. After the election, he advised Trump on Cabinet picks. If Trump wants to clear up concern about Russia’s influence in his campaign, hiring an agent of Putin to run his campaign and help staff his administration isn’t the way to do it.

Manafort was likely behind Exhibit C: The removal from the Republican platform of language calling on the U.S. to arm Ukraine “with lethal defensive weapons” against Russian invaders. The Trump campaign quietly and unilaterally spiked this language just before the July convention.

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Exhibit D is the odd closeness to Russia of some of his picks. Mike Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, has in the past year changed his rhetoric and become a consistent Putin apologist. Flynn has taken money from the regime via the state-owned television station RT.

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Trump’s own odd behavior is Exhibit E. He spent weeks denigrating the intelligence community. Separately, he rebutted allegations about his coziness with Russia with a tweet beginning with the words, “Russia just said … .”

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If the public and the press are suspicious of Trump’s stance on Russia, it’s because of Trump’s own doing. He needs to fix this.

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