What Did the President Know and When Did He Know It?

So, we now know that Paul Manafort, while acting as chairman of Trump's campaign, secretly met with Konstantin Kilimnik, an old associate in the lobbying business who was also an ex-employee of Russian Military Intelligence, which was then attempting to rig the election in Trump's favor.  We know that at that meeting Manafort gave Kilimnik detailed polling data (possibly 75 pages of it).  We know that Manafort and Kilimnik were old pros at polling and later worked together to prepare polls for a Ukrainian election.  And we know that Manafort walked Kilimnik through the more obscure parts.  They also discussed a pro-Russian "peace plan" for its ongoing conflict with Ukraine.

There is a lot we don't know.  We don't know on the Russian side who Kilimnik was working for.  Was he working for old contacts with Russian Military Intelligence or for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs who were business associates of Manafort and owed him money?  Nor do we know what the Russians did with the polling data once they got it.  I have no idea whether we can examine Russian micro-targeting to see whether it appears to have been influenced by the polling data provided.  If so, that is highly significant.  If not, then I think we will have to write off the entire Russian side of the story as an unknowable mystery.

What we can hope to know (and what the Mueller investigation is presumably seeking to find out) is what Manafort's motives were and whether Trump was aware of his actions.

I see three possibilities.

Possibility 1: Manafort was acting on Trump's direct orders.  If true, that is our smoking gun.  That is collision.  The Trump campaign give 75 pages of polling data to the Russians to coordinate their messaging in exchange for a promise to lift sanctions and give a favorable peace in Ukraine.

Possibility 2: Manafort was a rogue actor.  This one cannot be ruled out.  Manafort had major debts to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and was attempting to collect from Ukrainian oligarchs who owed money to him.  The New York Times appears to indicate that Manafort asked Kilimnik to pass the information on to two Ukrainian oligarchs in a presumed attempt to collect a debt.  Manafort and Kilimnik were long-term associates in sleazy lobbying on behalf of Ukraine's pro-Russian party.  Manafort was certainly unethical enough to do such a thing.  In that case, his secrecy may have been intended to conceal the meeting, not just from the US intelligence committee, but also from the Trump campaign.  The prosecutor made comments about this being "win-win" and "no downside" for Manafort, suggesting that he expected to benefit whether Trump won or lost.

If this is so, the degree of disloyalty is mind-boggling.  To wrap one's head around just how disloyal he was, try to draw and analogy to any normal campaign.  Suppose some normal campaign hired a campaign manager who had a lavish lifestyle, was up to his neck in debt, and desperately trying to collect from various people who owed him just to keep his head above water.  That alone would show poor judgment.  If such a man were to offer his services for free, he might as well come out and say, "I have a corrupt motive here."  To hire him would be sheer madness.  But suppose he then went rogue and stole campaign polling data to sell to a data broker that sells such information to marketing agencies to allow them to narrowcast their advertising.  Or even suppose he did not get paid directly, but asked the data broker to turn it over to people owing the campaign manager money in order to get them to pay.

Quite simply, data theft is theft.  Not only could the campaign manager go to jail for his actions, but the candidate would be well-nigh apoplectic with rage over such an unthinkable act of disloyalty and the first to demand a maximum sentence.  If the candidate had such an itchy twitter finger as Trump, one can imagine some, well, colorful comments.  The absence of such outrage would seem mighty suspicious.  And if, in fact, the candidate did not make any expression of outrage, and if the stolen data seemed to turn up in various pro-candidate political action committees and other independent organizations, that would set off major alarm bells.  (Campaign laws do not allow candidates to coordinate directly with pro-candidate PAC's and other organizations).  It would raise suspicion that there was some complicity there.  And if such complicity were proven -- well, I don't know if it would be impeachable, but it would be very, very serious. 

Now just throw in a hostile foreign power.  And a President who values personal loyalty above all else.  And yet the silence is deafening.  If would defer to this article:

It seems there’s a conspiracy there one way another. Either Manafort effectively stole Trump’s campaign data and traded it to foreigners for monetary gain. And/or Manafort handed over that data expecting that the campaign would get a thing of value from the foreigners he was sharing it with. . . . [G]iven the public facts in this case, Republicans should be outraged that Trump’s campaign manager was so disloyal he shared highly sensitive data with potentially malign actors. Republicans should be outraged that Trump’s campaign manager was putting his own financial imperatives ahead of sound campaign practice. 

But they’re not. For some reason, Republicans are not squawking about the explanation for this data hand-off that would suggest the campaign didn’t expect to benefit.

Possibility 3: Nudge, nudge, wink wink.  Plenty of people have said that it is inconceivable that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and others would not have discussed their sinister activities with Trump.  I disagree.  It is entirely possible that he ran his operation on a need-to-know basis.  His subordinates may have understood that if illegal activities were called for, the boss wanted to be left out of the loop on the operational details so as to preserve plausible deniability.  The boss may very well have known how to signal what he wanted while taking care not to say anything indictable.  He had practice with that sort of thing.

So what was Trump signalling to his campaign?  Well, he consistently denied that Russia was responsible for the hacks, in the face of all evidence to the contrary.  He regularly quoted Russia Today and Sputnik as sources of information.  He hired sleazy characters with sinister Russian ties, like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Flynn.  He deflected all questions about his ethics with references to Hilary's e-mails.  He openly called on Russia to release his opponent's e-mails.  In short, he was signaling loud and clear, presumably surrounded by people who knew how to pick up on those signals. 

Any my guess is that this third possibility is the most likely.