The GOP Collusion With Trump

By Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker

27 November 17

peaker of the House Paul Ryan, if you believe him, is not all that bestirred by the indictment of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman. “I really don’t have anything to add, other than nothing is going to derail what we’re working on in Congress, because we’re working on solving people’s problems,” he told a Wisconsin radio host. What Ryan really wanted to talk about, he said, was tax reform. That suggests that Ryan doesn’t put possible foreign intervention in the election, or influence peddling, stealth lobbying, tax fraud, and money laundering—which are strands in the indictments of Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, who both pleaded not guilty—in the category of “people’s problems.” News of the indictment was accompanied by the unsealing of a related plea deal that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, reached with George Papadopoulos, a former campaign adviser. These are questions that go to the heart of the integrity of our electoral and legislative systems. (Indeed, the Manafort indictment, because it concerned lobbying Congress on behalf of Ukraine, was in some ways as much in Ryan’s realm as in Trump’s.) Whose problem, one might ask, does Ryan think they are?

Not his, Ryan reiterated, in another appearance on Monday. “I have nothing to add to these indictments, other than this is what Bob Mueller was tasked to do,” he said, as ABC News reported. “I haven’t read the indictments, I don’t know the specific details of the indictments, but that is how our legis—that’s how the judicial process works.” That was a typical Ryan move: attempting to end a line of questioning by drawing on his reputation for wonkiness, and explaining how something works. Someone so professedly nuts-and-bolts-oriented might, at some point, read the indictment, which is about thirty-one pages long. (Another figure of interest is the bond the government asked for from Manafort: ten million dollars. He and Gates, for whom the government asked five million dollars in bond, were under house arrest following their arraignment.) And the House, on Ryan’s watch, last week opened new investigations into the Clinton campaign’s supposed Russian ties. For that matter, Manafort is not a stranger to him personally: Ryan, as Speaker, was the honorary chair of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, of which Manafort was one of the main organizers and front men on the campaign side. Ryan, when asked about a Trump tweet or outburst, often makes a wry remark, as if to suggest that everyone has a difficult colleague or uncle. (Asked last week about whether the President’s tweets might distract attention from tax reform, he offered a playfully hopeful line about Trump heading to Asia.) That has long since been inadequate; the problem of the Republican leadership’s surrender to and complicity with Donald Trump is not a new one. (Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, made that very clear last week.) But, with Mueller moving to the stage of indictments, the game of make-believe that Ryan and others in the Republican leadership are playing is likely to keep getting cruder. (Senator Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, had no comment on the indictments.)

Trump, meanwhile, claimed that the indictments and plea were not his problem, either. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????,” he tweeted. (There’s another telling number: five question marks.) The short answer might be that Mueller, who is supposed to be independent, is focussing on what he finds; also, since Hillary Clinton lost the election, she did not have the opportunity to, for example, fire the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in what might possibly be looked at as an obstruction of justice. Trump continued, in a second tweet, “....Also, there is NO COLLUSION!” That is not entirely clear; the Manafort-Gates indictment mostly concerns their pre-campaign dealings, but not entirely, as my colleague John Cassidy notes. And filings in the Papadopoulos plea deal, in which he pleaded guilty to giving a false statement to the F.B.I. about Russian attempts to contact the Trump team with offers of “dirt,” document the interest of unnamed campaign officials. (A similar incident, also involving Manafort, may prove to be a problem for Trump’s son Donald, Jr., and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.)

Still, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the President’s press secretary, was asked how the President took the news, she said, “He responded the same way the rest of us in the White House have—that is, without a lot of reaction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with us.” Manafort, she said, was just an “operative” who had been brought in to wrangle delegates—that had been a concern back when it seemed like the Republican Party might make a last stand against Trump—and was fired a few months after that. Sanders skipped over the interval of his campaign chairmanship, as if it were just a Cleveland-based fever dream. She had opened her press briefing with a long fable about reporters splitting a bar tab that was supposed to show why people shouldn’t get upset if the greatest savings from tax reform went to the wealthiest Americans. It would be an odd bit of storytelling on any terms, but the moral—that if too much were asked of wealthy taxpayers, they would move their money to other countries—seemed particularly inept, given that moving money to dubious foreign accounts to avoid taxes is precisely what Manafort is accused of doing. (There is a chart in the indictment with a section labelled “Cypriot entitites”—often a bad sign.)

Who else’s problem might it be? The President’s rough ideas about his ability to direct the investigative process might lead him in reckless directions. For example, he might fire not only Mueller but people in the Justice Department whose replacements need to be confirmed. At that point, McConnell might find that his preferred silence is increasingly awkward. Or Trump might lash out with an overbroad or spurious assertion of executive privilege, or even of his pardon power. Trump might defy a judge; he might defy the Supreme Court. (Nixon came close.) In that sense, the investigation has the potential to become a test of how politicized the Court has become, and how independent each Justice remains.

Ryan, anyway, does seem genuinely excited about tax cuts. Republican hunger to get those through, coupled with fear about primary challengers in some quarters and blind loyalty to the President in others—opportunism, cowardice, and ideology—have done their work, making it less likely that the G.O.P.’s own collusion will end soon, or that it will end for reasons having to do with political or public shame. If that changes, it may be sooner because the Party is punished at the polls than because, or only because, Mueller brings more indictments. (And, at this pace, he surely will.) After all, for a bill of impeachment to get through, the House has to pass it, and then the Senate has to hold a trial, and convict. That, as Ryan might say, is how our legislative process works. This is, in the end, an American problem, and there tend to be constitutional solutions for those.