AFTERWORD

Early in the afternoon of February 16, 2018, getaway Friday of Presidents’ Day weekend for the federal workforce, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein entered a Department of Justice auditorium to announce to the press, to the world, and to Vladimir Putin that the United States was indicting thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies “for committing federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the United States political system, including the 2016 presidential election.”

Let that sink in. Crimes. Real crimes. No “phony,” no “hoax,” no “witch hunt,” no “fake news.”

Rosenstein’s comments and the accompanying indictment followed the familiar arc of what the intelligence community had been saying for more than a year, and beneath the bland charges of “identity theft, bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the indictment cataloged stunnıng operational details. The defendants had conducted what they themselves called information warfare “through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media” with a goal to “sow discord” and spread distrust “towards the candidates and the political system in general . . . [by] supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton. . . . They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”¹ President Trump had been alerted to the indictments shortly before Rosenstein stepped to the podium and by midafternoon had tweeted: “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!”

Rosenstein had been careful to emphasize that this indictment made no claim about witting American collusion with the Russians, nor whether the Russians had any effect on the election. But with the indictment and Rosenstein’s carefully crafted statement, the president, the intelligence community, and America had entered what John McLaughlin had said would be phase four of the IC–Trump relationship. Recall that John had cataloged the sequence of that relationship as first ignorance (the candidate and his team knew little about the intelligence business); followed by hostility (charges of Nazis, political hacks, and such); and developing into inevitability (jettisoning “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing” in favor of regular briefings). Phase four, John had predicted, would start when Mueller began to report his findings.

And so he has, and the former FBI director appears far from being done. Washington is alive with stories of his interest in Trump Tower meetings, Trump finances, Russian money, campaign communications, and a proposed Moscow hotel and his possibly interviewing the president.

The president, for his part, has lashed out against practically everyone except Russia and Putin since the indictment. He didn’t just contradict but publicly humiliated his national security adviser after H. R. McMaster told a security conference in Munich that evidence of Russian interference was now “incontrovertible.” The president quickly and angrily tweeted a critique: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

The tweet was a melange of inaccuracies, vagaries, conspiracy theories, and shopworn accusations, and it must have made for a long flight back to Washington for H.R. Trying to project closure as well as alert the Europeans, he had succeeded only in provoking his boss, undercutting his own status, and laying bare America’s post-truth divisions for all to see.

Still, McMaster’s view was supported by American intelligence in two remarkable appearances that bookended Rosenstein’s press conference. The first was the worldwide threat briefing in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, an annual event designed to give both the Senate and the public an appreciation of global circumstances, but an event that has just as often been diverted by the news or crisis of the day.

On the Tuesday before Rosenstein’s blockbuster, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was joined by the heads of three-letter agencies like CIA, NSA, and the FBI to give his assessment. He kept the emphasis on cyber dangers that have marked such testimony for several years now. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction followed, with terrorism third on his list. Coats added a new entry, emerging threats in space, and concluded with transnational crime.

That was solid, if unremarkable, fare, but I was struck that—apocalyptic campaign rhetoric to the contrary—terrorism no longer enjoyed its once dominant focus, and in the fine print of the DNI’s statement there were other observations that deviated from administration orthodoxy. I wondered, for example, how Coats’s comment that North Korea sees nuclear weapons as essential to regime survival would affect any American negotiating position with Pyongyang. So, too, with the observation that the Iranian nuclear deal puts Tehran further away from a weapon than it would otherwise be and continues to contribute to our visibility into that program.

One didn’t need to read the fine print to see the unwavering intelligence community consensus that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election and planned to do the same in 2018. In his opening remarks, Coats predicted that Russian operations “will continue against the United States and our European allies, using elections as opportunities to undermine democracy, sow discord, and undermine our values,” and then added, “There should be no doubt that Russia perceived its past efforts as successful, and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations.”²

Later, one by one, the five intelligence chiefs at the witness table with Coats publicly confirmed that the president, despite their obvious concern, had not tasked them to focus on this issue or do much about it.

Mike Rogers, the director of NSA, easily joined consensus that Tuesday. Two weeks later (and ten days after the Russia indictments), he was alone in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in his dual-hatted role as commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and he was answering some of the same questions. There Rogers predicted that “if we don’t change the dynamic here, this is going to continue and 2016 won’t be viewed as isolated. This is something that will be sustained over time.” And then he offered this judgement: “. . . we’re probably not doing enough . . . it hasn’t changed the calculus. . . . It certainly hasn’t generated the change in behavior that I think we all know we need.”³

That’s a pretty clear warning. And a pretty good sign that American intelligence remains steadfast on this issue and, one hopes, more broadly in its commitment to objective truth.

It’s also a pretty good sign that phase four in the relationship between the IC and the president will be lengthy, contentious, divisive, and unpredictable. Stand by.