Next Time, Get Your Facts Straight

Sean Davis invented a false history of my writings in order to smear me.

I t is, on occasion, necessary in the business of opinion writing to defend oneself. My horseshoe coalition column on the alliance of progressives and the anti-interventionist “restrainer” right against American action on the Iranian nuclear program produced a response. It will probably not surprise you to learn that some people on the right who responded completely ignored my thesis and my analysis and reacted almost entirely with canned ad hominem insults that never seem to change from one foreign policy controversy to the next. Which is about what one expects at this point from the populist anti-intervention faction.

In the process, Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis hyperventilated, “The level of deliberate dishonesty and willful deceit from the author of that piece is hardly surprising — he’s a NeverTrumper and deranged Russia collusion hoaxer.” “Dishonesty” and “deceit” in this case constituted quoting people in their own words. It’s pretty rich of Davis to call me “deranged” simply for not changing my views or burning all of my bridges in the Trump era in the way that Davis has. I have not willfully cut ties with all manner of old friends in conservative media or mass-deleted old tweets to cover up changes of position that have since become embarrassing; Davis cannot say the same on either score. We were friends once, in regular contact; ending that was not my choice.

Now, you may say that I should not take Sean Davis seriously, because nobody really takes Sean Davis seriously anymore. But Davis has nearly 600,000 followers on X/Twitter, an audience of sufficient size to justify defending one’s good name, and his serial distortions require more elaborate rebuttal than the platform permits.

Russia Hoaxer? Really?

Davis contends that I am, or was, a “deranged Russia collusion hoaxer.” He and his allies have made this claim before. What on earth is he talking about? He doesn’t say. In looking back at what I wrote on the “Russiagate” story in 2016–18 and beyond, I don’t pretend to have been right on every particular at every bend in the tale, and I’m sure I was more flip at times on social media than in full columns. But on balance, I think my stances hold up fairly well: I took the evolving story cautiously and consistently advocated against abuses of the legal process. My general view all along had six components:

First, Trump’s foreign policy views toward Russia, as shown in his public statements, were irresponsibly naïve and unduly favorable toward the Kremlin. While I’ve criticized Trump on many occasions since then over particular remarks or steps in Russia policy, I’ve often noted that his first term policies in particular were far less cozy toward Russia than his campaign rhetoric suggested. But that’s fundamentally an assessment of foreign policy posture, not about whether Trump was (as Jonathan Chait famously claimed) a Kremlin asset since 1987. The ways in which Trump is compromised by Russia have always seemed to me to be not that different from the ways in which a lot of Washington figures are compromised by ties of friendship and commerce to foreign governments or factions.

Second, Vladimir Putin’s regime did attempt to interfere with the 2016 election, partly just to sow chaos but also with a pronounced preference toward Trump, particularly in the Republican primary. The evidence of this is well known, has been detailed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and does not depend on any assessment of Trump “collusion” or supposed criminality.

Third, Russian meddling did not change the outcome of the 2016 election. It was fairly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Malicious actors in an American presidential contest are often, as the Russians were in 2016, a drop in the ocean.

Fourth, people on the Trump campaign did do a variety of things, some in terms of contact with Russia, that were unseemly and hard to defend. Most of those things were legal; some were not, and have been duly prosecuted.

Fifth, “Collusion” is not a crime recognized in American law, and there was never a substantial basis to accuse Trump of any crime or make him the subject of a proper, lawful federal criminal investigation.

Sixth, the decision to treat the 2016 Trump campaign as the target of a special prosecutor investigation was misguided from the beginning, involved a dangerously vague intersection between criminal investigation and counterintelligence, undermined the proper executive branch chain of command, and distorted many aspects of the legal system during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.

I submit that none of those six propositions is inconsistent with the others, but I concede that they require holding more than one idea in one’s head simultaneously. That seems to be something Sean Davis regards as objectionable and possibly unnatural.

Let’s walk through the chronology of my writings on the topic at NR, which I hope is also a useful way of auditing my own work:

• December 19, 2016: I wrote on “the hyperventilating headlines about CIA sources concluding that Russia intervened in the election to help elect Donald Trump,” and concluded, “We know what Russia appeared to be doing — in the sense that there is good reason to strongly suspect Russian involvement in Wikileaks and the hacking of DNC emails. The CIA likely knows more than that, although media reports on the subject don’t really suggest that the agency’s conclusions are based on much more than what an informed observer could already tell. Ditto the issue of the Russian government’s motives; any conclusions on that score may be informed, but are nonetheless speculative.”
• March 24, 2017: After Jim Comey’s testimony to Congress, I wrote, “There is no ongoing criminal investigation of President Trump or his campaign. . . . The investigation Comey references is not a criminal investigation; it’s a counterintelligence investigation, and crimes will be investigated or charged only if they happen to be uncovered in the process. . . . Nobody determined that there was a basis to think a crime may have been committed — or that investigators were likely to uncover a crime — before starting an investigation. That’s not what people usually assume when they hear ‘FBI investigation.’” This turned out to be misdirection on Comey’s part of how the FBI was using the mission creep of a counterintelligence probe to dig for crimes, but it was what the FBI director claimed under oath, and I thought that a useful rebuttal at the time to Trump’s Democratic critics.This may be the column that most clearly laid out my thinking. I warned that there were problems with proceeding this way: “The investigation has no target and no standards, and that there is no expectation it will have a public endpoint,” “Counterintelligence investigations can drag on more or less indefinitely, for years and years, without witnesses being called or a case being built,” and, “This is why the FBI would normally never reveal to the public that it is conducting a counterintelligence investigation. . . . Because national security is at stake, innocent people can be freely investigated, there’s no due process, and there are effectively no rules. The only protection is that these investigations don’t become public. Until now.”I did not let Trump off the hook for blundering into this mess: “This is not to say that the Trump campaign is wholly innocent here, or that no investigation should happen. Counterintelligence investigations are opened for a reason, too. But those reasons are fundamentally political rather than legal in nature.” I began laying out a case on which I’d elaborate later for a different kind of probe more suited to the topic: “The voters, who on the Democratic side are drinking deeply of conspiracy theories about the 2016 election, deserve a public accounting by Congress rather than vague declarations that ‘an investigation is ongoing’ from the FBI, followed by no public outcome or reckoning, ever. . . . Trump, through a variety of exercises of bad judgment, has earned a thorough and public investigation of what (if anything) his campaign did to encourage or collaborate with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. If you care about the integrity of American elections and government, you should want that. But if your goal is merely to throw a tantrum over Clinton’s loss, an investigation that never ends and never requires any evidence of a crime is an ideal excuse to avoid responsibility for governing.”
• April 3, 2017: I debunked the claim by Democrats “that Trump should not have the power to fill a Supreme Court vacancy until the FBI concludes its investigation of Russian interference in the election. . . . This is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that . . . what exactly do Democrats say was done to render the election illegitimate? They offer no evidence, nor even a theory, of collusion by any particular person in the Trump campaign with any particular Russian activity.”What I found instead: “The release of accurate and modestly damaging information only about one side, and what amounts to the Twitter equivalent of a whispering campaign (which some of us were complaining about publicly as far back as mid-2015, as Putin’s Twitter troll army was suddenly converting accounts into pro-Trump accounts). Unfair? Sure. Worthy of criticizing Trump and his team for their coziness with a regime that did this, and — in Trump’s case — for publicly egging it on? Absolutely. But if we are starting down the road of delegitimizing anyone elected with the help of media unfairness and whispering campaigns, there’s a long list of elections we should be undoing. . . . Rage, conspiracy theories, fake history and fantasy deus ex machina scenarios are no basis for a Senate caucus to behave.”
• May 10, 2017: After Trump fired Comey, I argued at length that what we should have had was not an FBI probe that mixed and matched the law enforcement and counterintelligence roles and would be conducted behind closed doors, but “a 9/11 Commission-type blue-ribbon bipartisan panel composed mainly of respected people outside of day-to-day active partisan politics, empowered to take testimony, compile documents, and prepare a public report . . . Republicans’ political interest should be in an open and transparent process that clears the air of all of this, and does so well ahead of the 2018 midterms. And that political interest dovetails with the national interest in a full accounting of what went on during the election . . .” “Democrats and liberals cannot seem to stop mischaracterizing what is actually being investigated. . . . In political terms, the problem for Republicans is that as long as the investigation is secret, Democrats can continue to make it look worse than it is. They have a license to spin conspiracy theories . . . without the need for any facts or evidence; they can just say ‘the FBI is investigating this,’ knowing full well that’s not what the FBI is doing but that the FBI won’t say so.” And I offered my assessment of what Trump had done: “Trump is no intelligence mastermind, and conspiring with Putin and Wikileaks behind the scenes to arrange the hacking of DNC emails isn’t Trump’s style; Trump’s style would be to have something like that drop into his lap and go out in public and cheer for it happening, which is what he actually did.”
• May 15, 2017: I complained that Trump’s “entire ham-handed handling of the firing of Jim Comey is almost certain to lead to more, rather than less, vigorous investigations of the Russia 2016 story.” Which of course it did.
• May 22, 2017: Following the Comey firing, the recusal of Jeff Sessions, and the appointment of Robert Mueller as Russiagate special counsel, I argued that the system for investigating high executive branch officials was broken and should be moved from the Justice Department to a separate “Department of Public Integrity” run by a cabinet-level inspector general. This continued my case against the process gone wrong.
• June 7, 2017: Assessing Comey’s upcoming Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, I noted that “Comey backs up Trump’s claim that Comey told him on three separate occasions that Trump was not under FBI investigation, and Comey confirms that . . . the investigation was a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal investigation” and that Comey had originally met with Trump to warn him of “the wild ‘pee tape’ claim that Russians had filmed Trump getting kinky with a bunch of Russian hookers. . . . Comey explodes the Democrats’ narrative that Trump was under criminal investigation for collusion with Russia, and confirms with specificity that Trump was telling the truth when he tweeted that Comey had told him as much on three occasions. . . . The narrative the Democrats desperately want is that Trump is under FBI investigation for criminal activity that invalidates the 2016 election, and has committed impeachable offenses. The facts they actually have are a lot less sexy.”I did, however, criticize Trump’s handling of Comey, specifically his efforts to get him to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn: “While Trump’s request would not amount to ‘obstruction of justice’ under the law, it’s still highly improper conduct by the president of the United States to ask the FBI Director, who knows full well that the president can fire him, to lay off a friend and former aide to the president.”
• June 8, 2017: Following Comey’s testimony, I collected and mocked quotes from Democrats who had argued against confirming Gorsuch due to the pendency of the FBI investigation: “A whole lot of people — starting with Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren — owe President Trump an apology.”
• July 12, 2017: After news broke about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin, apparently in the hopes of obtaining some dirt on Hillary Clinton, I explained at length that this was morally and politically indefensible: “Anybody with half a brain and half a conscience would have realized, before sitting down to meet a source connected to the Russian government on behalf of a presidential campaign, that there was something very wrong with this picture.” But I also emphasized that Democrats were not innocent of such things, that the meeting was not “treason” as some of the Resistance types were then claiming, and that we should hesitate to creatively expand the campaign finance laws to retroactively make this a crime.
• September 18, 2017: On news that New York AG Eric Schneiderman was assisting Mueller in pursuing Paul Manafort, I argued that Schneiderman’s long, vocal record of anti-Trump posturing “make it impossible for the public to have confidence that he could be impartial on the subject of the president. Precisely because Schneiderman occupies a unique position of leverage, he needs to recuse himself from the probe.”
• October 30, 2017: With Paul Manafort and Rick Gates being indicted, I again noted the good news and bad news for Trump. The bad news: “Manafort was dirty and everyone knew he was dirty, he shouldn’t have been put in that job [as Trump campaign manager], and doing so was part of a larger pattern of (at a minimum) undue willingness by Trump to surround himself with people too favorable to Putin and in a number of cases compromised by Putin. . . . Trump deserves criticism for hiring a notorious bagman for that job.” The good news: “Nothing in the indictment itself relates to Trump or the rest of his inner circle, or to the 2016 election. The entire indictment focuses on Manafort and Gates receiving income for lobbying work for the Ukrainian government and failing to properly disclose it. . . . As I’ve noted in previous writings . . . the Russia/Mueller probe was, despite originating as a counterintelligence probe, always likely to spin off some collateral criminal investigations of things like disclosure violations. That’s exactly what we have here, and Manafort and Gates may not be the last ones indicted for such things. But if you’re waiting for a smoking gun, today is not your day.” At the same time, I warned against Trump firing Mueller.
• October 30, 2017: With George Papadopoulos pleading guilty, I wrote, “His guilty plea is much more relevant to the subject of the Trump campaign’s willingness to be a conduit for Russian meddling in the 2016 election [than the Manafort and Gates indictments]. . . . The overall picture here looks similar to what we saw with the Trump Jr. story: People in the Trump campaign were desperate for dirt on Hillary, they were willing to work with anyone to get it, and Russian interests used this desperation to play them for suckers.” That was about as close as I got to suspecting that somebody might actually have something damaging on Trump, but the trail seemed to run dry: “The plea then goes on to detail more of Papadopoulos’s efforts to get Trump to meet with Putin, but goes oddly silent on who else besides Papadopoulos was in the loop on efforts to get ‘dirt’ or emails.” I concluded: “This entire story is the perfect storm of an aggressive and devious foreign regime, a Republican nominee of low character surrounded by inept and naively cynical amateur advisers, and a Democratic nominee who was heedlessly reckless with national security out of partisan paranoia.”

Here is where I have to pull back the curtain a bit: Until March 2020, I was writing as a sideline while working at a big law firm. A partner at my firm represented Rick Gates, and while I had no involvement in that, at some point after Gates was indicted, I was asked by firm management to steer far clear of the Mueller investigation and Russiagate in my writings in order to avoid saying anything that could be used against our client. So, from mid-2017 on, I tended to touch only generally on the topic in columns and went almost totally silent on it on social media.

In a Trump overview at the start of 2018, I noted generally that “Mueller is a responsible Republican with bipartisan credibility, and nothing we have seen so far suggests that he has a basis to bring any significant charges based on the 2016 campaign.” (In retrospect, I was too trusting of Mueller himself, but I was also right that he never brought such charges.) In February 2018 I argued again for systemic reforms, making the case that Trump should have the unfettered power to sack Mueller, but that Congress had a right in that case to demand a full, public accounting of both Trump’s reasons and what Mueller had found.

In August 2019, I argued at length against the Democrats’ claim that “Moscow Mitch” McConnell prevented President Obama from stopping Russia from stealing the 2016 election. In fact, while I detailed further evidence of Russian interference, I asked, “Were voters really unaware, before the election, of the arguments that Donald Trump was unduly sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, that Putin was meddling in the election in ways that in turn helped Trump, and that Russia was behind the hacking of Democrats and the release of hacked information by WikiLeaks and Guccifer? A sampling of what was publicly known and speculated about during the election suggests that the answer is a firm ‘no.’” In November 2020, I recounted the excesses of the Democrats’ Russia-stole-2016 theories, and I rebutted those theories in January 2023.

A False History

Davis also categorizes me as one of “the very same people who swore to you that Iraq had WMD, that we would be greeted as liberators, that the war would be done overnight, that Afghanistan would be a western democracy, that toppling Gaddafi would make America safer, that backing ISIS in the Syrian civil war would be fine, that the Arab Spring would lead to peace and stability, and that flushing trillions of dollars down the toilet and extinguishing the lives and limbs of thousands of American soldiers over the last 25 years would make us stronger.”

I will go out on a limb and guess that — unlike the battery of direct quotations that makes up my column — Davis did zero research before ascribing these views to me. Just to pick a few examples, I was critical of the Libya war in 2011, due in large part to my conclusion that Qaddafi “may be a bad guy, but he’s the devil we know, and the prospects for replacing him with something worse look even more problematic than they did in Egypt.” I wrote in 2017 about Trump bombing Assad that “some of us thought this was not a great idea when Obama wanted to do it, and don’t think it was such a great idea this time, either.”

I have never argued that the Arab Spring was sure to be a font of “peace and stability,” as should be clear from my 2011 essay on the fall of Mubarak, my 2012 essay on the Arab Spring, or my 2013 review of the bumpy path through radical changes to the Greater Middle East — the latter of which was published in the Federalist back when I was one of the site’s earliest contributors and Davis was editing my work, including my essays on foreign policy and the Iraq War. Heck, while I would not argue that I got everything right in my February 2003 overview of the case for war in Iraq, I had my share of words of caution on the promotion of democracy even in that heady period:

Long-term, we would like to establish a secure government in Afghanistan that will consolidate the victory over theocracy and prevent re-establishment of havens for terror. But if we fail in that aim, as we still may, the war will no more be a failure than it is a failure to weed your garden in spring and, the following year, discover new weeds. The task is never done so long as the hatred that breeds our foes is loose in the world. . . .

I think the most useful lessons will be those of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, with the former Soviet and South-Eastern European states — longest under tyranny and with the least tradition of self-rule — as the best models. The record in each of those places is mixed — but in all but a few cases, obviously better for our own interests than the aggressive despotism that preceded it.

Democracy? It’s worth trying, as long as we’re not expecting it to look like New Hampshire overnight. The upside of establishing a state like Poland or Russia or Albania in Iraq would be huge, and an American presence in the country ought to help in that project. But the odds on success . . . well, the jury’s still out on democracy in Russia, too, isn’t it? I’d at least say there’s a very substantial chance of failure.

Stability? Not a prayer, in the short run — there will be huge dislocations, which is why we need the U.S. military around. The forces of democracy may well tear the country into shreds, but maybe that’s as it should be. But what I don’t foresee is a descent into the Balkans. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to be from Tikrit when Saddam’s regime is gone.

Next time Davis wants to criticize me, maybe he should first consider getting his facts straight.