(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Attorney General William Barr has now released two letters that manage to both clarify and grossly muddle what we understand about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of President Donald Trump’s intersection with Russia.
Barr used the first, eight days ago, to “summarize the principal conclusions set out in the Special Counsel’s report”: Mueller’s findings didn’t produce enough evidence to show that Trump and his aides criminally conspired or coordinated with Russia in the country’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller didn’t “fully exonerate” Trump nor did he decide whether the president obstructed justice, according to Barr, although Mueller apparently compiled ample evidence of obstruction (without, however, interviewing Trump). Mueller left Barr with a legal vacuum and Barr took it upon himself to fill the void by making his own call in a four-page note summarizing a 400-page document: Trump hadn’t obstructed.
Barr’s conclusion, and Mueller’s decision not to indict the president or any of his family members, touched off a week of debate about whether the media had been overzealous and prosecutorial in its coverage of the investigation. And when, exactly, would Congress and the public get to see a full, unfiltered version of the special counsel's report? There were questions too about whether Barr had overreached and sullied both the Justice Department’s reputation and the public’s understanding of the Mueller probe.
The attorney general was clearly aware of all of this and, with Democrats threatening to issue a subpoena for the full report, he waded in again on Friday evening. In a second letter, he promised to release the report by mid-April and was forced to re-characterize his first missive. The first one, he allowed, was never meant to be a summary or an “exhaustive recounting of” Mueller’s investigation. All he meant to offer, he wrote, was a “bottom line” conclusion.
I’ll avoid debating the merits of how Barr handled Mueller’s work here, but his take that Mueller, without fully exonerating Trump, absolved him of conspiring with Russia became a rallying cry for the president and for critics eager to zap the media (and cable news in particular) for breathless coverage of a probe memorialized in a report most people haven’t read.
Barr’s interpretation of the Mueller investigation — case closed! — was also taken to mean that accounts had to be settled (“a reckoning” was the phrase du jour in many of the first hot takes, as were many of the same examples of reporting lapses). Writers from the left, such as Matt Taibbi, and from the right, like Sean Davis, offered sweeping condemnations that pivoted credulously and erroneously off of the Steele dossier — the infamous and lurid report by a former British intelligence operative that outlined possible connections between Trump, his campaign team and Russia.
It all adds up to an ill-informed — and, for some, opportunistic — media roasting that the press has largely absorbed in silence, thrown off balance by Mueller’s final bow and Barr’s rapid-fire gamesmanship.
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I have some history with Trump. He unsuccessfully sued me for libel for a biography I wrote called “TrumpNation,” citing unflattering sections of the book that examined his business record and wealth. He lost the suit in 2011. While I’ve written regular opinion pieces about his latest iteration ever since he announced his presidency in 2015, I wasn’t a full-time chronicler of the Mueller investigation. I weighed in when Trump meddled with the probe (and, yes, firing former FBI director Jim Comey sure smacked of obstruction); when myriad, excellent reporters broke significant stories about it; when the GOP turned it into a political football; and when Mueller’s team filed revealing court documents (loaded with valuable information, including that Team Trump was populated with felons, Russian hackers burglarized Democrats’ computers, and propagandists, at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin, disseminated fake news to support Trump’s presidential bid).
I too was wary of the conspiratorial overreach that marked some of the Trump-Russia reporting even before he was elected. In the summer of 2016, I noted that all “conspiracy theories need a theory” and that the facts supporting an entrenched Trump-Putin bromance were hard to find, even though reporters (for good reason) had begun speculating about it. That didn’t mean the sketchy Trump links to Russians weren’t there, I pointed out back then (they were, and I and others wrote about them long before Mueller started digging). I also said in 2016 that it was “unlikely” that he had an active, current interest in a project in Russia itself (I was wrong about that. Trump pursued a deal in Moscow throughout the 2016 campaign and lied about it).
Obsession with Mueller’s investigation after it was launched in early 2017 was a facet of something that swallowed an even bigger portion of media attention: The Trump presidency itself. Reporters made lots of bad mistakes along the way. Headlines on news stories sometimes read like headlines on opinion pieces, and impeachment narratives invoked the ghosts of Watergate. Some reporters and pundits queued up for bragging rights, eager to be the first to identify some new twist that surely, finally marked the end of the Trump presidency. Others didn’t bullet-proof their reporting.
I’d take issue with Glenn Greenwald’s worry that flawed reporting about Russians zapping the U.S. embassy in Cuba with a weird microwave weapon really contributed to “exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow.” But there’s no question that another piece he identifies as an example of media overreach, BuzzFeed’s flawed story about Trump directing his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congress had a seismic impact on the debate over whether the media was being careful enough.
Probity was the centerpiece of a Wall Street Journal column, “A Catastrophic Media Failure,” written last Monday by Sean Davis, which interpreted the broader ramifications of Mueller’s findings (sans the final report) almost as hastily as Barr did. Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, a conservative web site, notes that he wanted to analyze how Mueller-watchers “managed to get the story so wrong, and for so long.”
Davis catalogs what he considers to be a rogues list of bungled Mueller-related stories and zeroes in, correctly in my mind, on a Jonathan Chait feature in New York magazine from last year. Chait, in several thousand words pulling together everything known about Trump and Russia, posited that the president might have been a Russian asset going all the way back to 1987 (during a period when Trump was publicly fooled into taking a meeting outside of Trump Tower with a Gorbachev impersonator).
Chait’s piece also featured a dizzying chart illustrating a web of Trump-Russia business and political ties, the kind conspiracy theorists tack to their basement walls. Much of Chait’s piece was aggregated from other reporters’ work and usefully put it all in one place, but its ambition to call out Trump as a lifelong Russian puppet undermined its authority and gave media critics ammo to attack journalists straining to find skeletons in Trump’s closet. If Mueller has concluded that Trump isn’t Putin’s stooge, which Barr’s letter suggests, then pieces like Chait’s will look even more feverish in retrospect.
On the other hand, Davis also attempts to take down the Washington Post and the New York Times’s Mueller reporting with the same sleight-of-hand that has plagued much of the condemnation of the Mueller coverage. Davis, like many critics, doesn’t clearly understand what the Mueller probe examined. Throughout his column he refers to it as an investigation of “collusion” when, in fact, it was an investigation of a “criminal conspiracy” (and obstruction, national security breaches and possibly more since… no one knows yet).
Collusion, which isn’t a legal term, also isn’t a crime. It occurs whenever a group gets together to harm another party. There’s already lots of indisputable information and narratives showing that Team Trump was colluding frequently with Russians. Conspiracy, on the other hand, is a crime. It occurs when a group, intending to break the law, hatches a joint plot to further its own interests. Mueller, according to Barr, didn’t find that the president and those in his orbit “had conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election” — a narrow, precise and exculpatory conclusion. Barr doesn’t use the word “collude” once in the letter about the Mueller probe that got media critics fuming.
Davis dumps on the Times and the Post’s coverage in his column by citing the language of a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize award the papers shared last year for their national security and Mueller coverage. But he doesn’t actually refute the specifics in any of those stories or in the language of the award itself, which said the reporters “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.” It’s easy to forget too that Mueller leveled about 200 criminal charges against 34 people and three Russian companies during his probe. Within that group, 26 people were Russian nationals and six were once Trump advisers.
Still, “America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story,” Davis says, because, he claims, the inspiration for all of the coverage was the Steele dossier. But that isn’t true and Davis doesn’t seem to know much about the dossier either. That much-misrepresented and misunderstood report from a former MI6 officer circulated among reporters and federal investigators in 2016. It was never published until BuzzFeed did so in 2017. I discussed the provenance and chronology of the Steele dossier here and here if you want to know the details, but it isn’t what prompted the federal probes of Trump’s involvement with Russians.
Nor was Steele a primary reason for the courts to issue special surveillance warrants to investigators tracking Trump operatives and advisers. Plenty of people were examining Trump-Russia leads well before the dossier got into their hands. (Journalists pegged Paul Manafort, for example, as a potentially porous and corrupt nexus between Trump, Ukraine and Russia from pretty much the moment he joined the presidential campaign in early 2016). But because Hillary Clinton’s team paid the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier, citing it as the wellspring of everything associated with Mueller became a convenient weapon for Trump’s allies — and for critics of the investigation.
Folks like Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi is a provocative, vivid, gutsy and reckless writer. He once published a book about Trump and the 2016 presidential campaign titled “Insane Clown President,” in which he describes Trump as “one of the world’s most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals,” someone who acts “like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.”
Other than describing the president as a “crook with money,” Taibbi’s book doesn’t detail the sources of Trump’s corruption. He apparently doesn’t think it has anything to do with Russia. In an excerpt from an upcoming book he posted online shortly after Mueller ended his investigation, Taibbi lays out in great detail — and with some of the same examples used by Greenwald and Davis — why he thinks the media shredded its reputation in its Mueller coverage. His essay, “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD,” is important, thoughtful and wayward.
Taibbi is much clearer than most media critics about what he thinks went haywire. “The story hyped from the start was espionage: A secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.” He argues that because Mueller ended his investigation without indicting Trump for collusion, the media’s coverage propagated a myth as ruinous as the weapons of mass destruction reporting that helped launch the Iraq War. (He cautions that he could be proven wrong later, and he writes without the Mueller report in hand, which violates the sober-minded reporting guidelines he accuses the media of violating, but whatever.)
You may remember that tales of yellowcake uranium helped fuel the idea that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and Taibbi’s yellowcake for the Mueller era is… wait for it… the Steele dossier. “It’s the Magna Carta of #Russiagate,” Taibbi writes. Nice try. That’s succinct, catchy and demonstrably wrong. It’s also silly, because Taibbi admits in his own essay that his understanding is that the “origin tale” of how investigations into Trump and Russia began “has not been nailed down yet.” But that’s not true either. A lot of it has been squared away and Taibbi can read about it here, here, here and here for a small sampling. He just needs to Google the name “George Papadopoulos,” the former Trump foreign policy adviser whose meetings and conversations originally set the Trump-Russia probe in motion, instead of “Christopher Steele.”
If anyone wants a quick primer on how comical and irresponsible it is to keep identifying the Steele dossier as a springboard for everything that’s wrong with the Mueller probe, Fox News’s Chris Wallace offers a recent tutorial here in which he takes Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host, to task for the same court jestering.
Taibbi is more sophisticated than Davis but he cherry-picks his examples and largely ignores Mueller’s damning indictment of Russian hackers and the great reporting that preceded that. People who should know better have avidly linked to Taibbi’s essay as if it were the Rosetta Stone rather than an entertaining screed laced with mistakes, thematic fault-lines and curious cop-outs.
In a follow-up essay responding to critics of his WMD analogy, Taibbi emphasized that “the WMD fiasco had a far greater real-world impact” than reporting on the Mueller investigation did. Well, yes. Phantom WMDs were an excuse to launch a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands and disrupted a region. The Mueller investigation encouraged reporters and pundits to ask tougher questions of Trump and his associates than they had during the presidential campaign, while focusing public attention on national security. Reporters and pundits, to their discredit, sometimes got out over their skis with speculation. But hundreds of thousands of people aren’t dead because of that. Making the comparison, even while acknowledging the distinctions, is a handy, clickbait-y bit of hyperventilating that Taibbi would have poo-pooed in the Mueller reporting.
Some of Taibbi’s other core concerns are spot on. He takes the media to task for failing to take Trump seriously as someone who could win in 2016 (conceding he made the same mistake himself). He sees Russiagate reporting displacing more relevant social and political explanations for why Trump beat Clinton, and he believes that Democrats’ failure to connect with working-class Americans is a greater threat to the country than Putin’s trolls.
I don’t see it as an either-or problem, though. Yes, the media can continue sharpening its understanding of the dynamics in the election and better understand how they might resurface in 2020. But that doesn’t have to come at the expense of solid Trump-Russia analysis.
A deep focus on Trump-Russia really hasn’t been about the media sticking its head in the sand. Remember: A financially conflicted president who encouraged Russians to hack his opponent was told by his own intelligence and law enforcement agencies that Russia tried to sabotage the 2016 election. Instead of supporting the probe, Trump went out of his way to attack and undermine it. So it’s good journalism to explore his motives.
And reality is likely to keep intruding on everybody who has been ushering Trump-Russia coverage into the grave. Just last week, for example, Bloomberg News reported that Felix Sater, a Russian émigré, career criminal, and longtime business partner of the president, was sued in federal court in Manhattan by a Kazakh bank. The lender alleges that Sater wanted to launder stolen funds through the Moscow project that he, Trump and Cohen pursued in Moscow during the 2016 election.
Sater, whom my lawyers once deposed in that libel suit Trump filed against me, described the laundering charges as baseless, “cheap and desperate.” I’m sure the Steele dossier groupies will think it’s all without merit as well.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
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