The now-famous mural of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius.
With national security advisor Michael Flynn’s resignation and new reporting from The New York Times that Trump campaign officials had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials, it is time to ask the fundamental question about this administration’s underlying weakness over Russia:
Was there a quid pro quo between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to help Trump win?
No one wants to believe this, of course, and it is an important moment to give Trump as many benefits of the doubt as possible. It is probably true that Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton without any Russian cyber-shenanigans (though of course Richard Nixon would have easily defeated George McGovern in 1972 without ordering a break-in at the Watergate Hotel). It is also true that the leaks coming from the intelligence community could represent a serious threat to civil liberties, though it is not clear to me whether this information is coming directly from the intelligence community or secondhand from any number of potential investigations. There are many ‘known unknowns’ here, and there are potentially even more ‘unknown unknowns.’
Instead of making awkward jokes about Snapchat or sniping about wiping her private server ‘with a cloth,’ why is it so hard for former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton — who will almost certainly be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2016, like it or not — to say something like this?
“Look, in 2009, these rules were still in flux, and we actually thought a private server would be more secure than government servers. Reports of Russian and Chinese cyberattacks have borne that fear out, and it’s a multi-faceted problem I will tackle when I’m president.
“Unlike the Bush administration, which sought to hide 5 million emails from the public, I have no intentions of shielding my emails from FOIA. I respect and embrace government transparency as a fundamental value of our democracy. We have worked (and are working) with State and all other government agencies to make sure that all work-related email correspondence is archived and to confirm there were no security breaches.
“To the extent a very small amount of classified information was sent to me over four years, I take responsibility, and I will work with government officials to ameliorate any security breaches. But my actions as Secretary of State were done with the best of intentions and with the highest standards of security and propriety in mind.”
