Not to belabor the point, but on the matter of potential Russiagate prosecutions, here’s something I should’ve mentioned in myunplanned debate yesterdaywith Matt Taibbi: my general position is that “Russiagate,” broadly construed, is best understood circa 2026 as an unresolvedpoliticalproblem — and one that can now be said to have occurred in the somewhat distant historical past (OK, the relatively recent past). Any measures that might be warranted to remediate this decade-old political problem, therefore, would be most aptly pursued in thepoliticaldomain, rather than by application of punitive criminal law.
One of thecore problemsI always had with “Russiagate,” an admittedly nebulous term, was that issues of ordinary political disputation — such as whether Trump appeared to be favoring foreign policy prerogatives that were overly aligned with Russia — got wildly warped into some kind of urgent “national security” crisis, and in tandem with that overwrought theme, the federal law enforcement apparatus deemed itself authorized to barrel head-first into the political arena with unprecedented audacity. The entire premise of this “Deep State” intervention was fallacious and destructive, I’ve always argued, and the successive Russiagate ops by the Feds, starting with “Crossfire Hurricane” in July 2016, followed by the Robert Mueller (RIP) Special Counsel saga in May 2017, were themselves fundamentally predicated on a slew of destructive fallacies.
It was obvious that what ultimately gave rise to these brazen law enforcement gambits was the wider political outburst that’d been triggered by Trump’s overall ascendance, and among the most self-righteous purveyors of this spasmodic outburst were factions of the FBI, who connived to reify their political anxieties through “novel” application of punitive state power. In other words, they arrogated authority to referee a roiling political dispute, although they’d never admit it — and made the tactics they employed appear all the more existentially vital, thanks to the conjoined theatrics of the “Intelligence Community,” or at least certain elements therein. The whole Russiagate episode did tremendous damage, for a host of reasons, which I chronicled almost daily from around 2016 to 2019. (Here’sone small example, among countless I could dig up.)
Cheering these encroachments by the National Security State into domestic political affairs — the consensus reaction among left-liberals at the time — struck me as uniquely repellent, whatever the hell one ever thought about Trump. That’s why I made it such a huge journalistic focus of mine. But as to what remedies might be practicable today, in 2026…?
Well, I’m not usually in the habit of proposing “solutions,” because sometimes there just aren’t any, but even so, I’d have thought a no-brainer would’ve been to establish some kind of big-league Congressional inquiry, modeled on the landmarkChurch Committeeof the mid-1970s — which despite its imperfections, did unearth a great deal of hitherto hidden information about the dark inner-workings of the Security State complex, which till then had been cloaked in almost impenetrable secrecy since it was regrettably created after WWII.
***As a brief aside, one glaring flaw of the Church Committee was that it did not adequately probe the out-of-control antics of John F. Kennedy and his bagman brother Robert F. Kennedy — described,inter alia, by Seymour Hersh in the tragically underratedDark Side of Camelot(1997). Hersh writes that evidence linking JFK and RFK toZR/RIFLE, a clandestine CIA caper to assassinate foreign leaders, most obsessively Fidel Castro, was “overwhelming” — and much of this evidence was known to Church’s Committee as it scoured through various chapters of CIA chicanery. But “for political reasons,” Hersh says, the matter was not robustly pursued, as Democratic Senator Frank Church did not want to disrupt his party’s cherished Kennedy lore. This is just one datapoint, of many, that madesuch a complete farcethe latter-day exaltation of RFK Jr. as some kind of valorous warrior against the “Deep State,” even if the dumb-dumb podcaster guys all giddily ate up that weird inverted “Camelot” narrative he concocted, and then proceeded to subsume into the GOP, having cleverly imbued himself with an aura of nonsense bizarro nostalgia around his BS family lineage — as though RFK Jr. was on an epic hero’s journey to finish the Deep State-slaying mission of his martyred dad and uncle. My IQ dropped a few points just summarizing it.
Anyway, something akin to a Church Committee for the 2020s, excavating whatever’s yet to be excavated about the recent conduct of the National Security apparatus, always seemed a perfectly creditable political remedy to the problem of “Russiagate,” such as that problem continues to exist. Informative public hearings could conceivably be held, appropriate fact-finding undertaken, and remedial legislation then to emerge, perhaps with an eye toward curbing excessive government surveillance powers, or at least restraining the Security State from intruding in presidential campaigns. Which undoubtedly did happen with Trump in 2016, on totally scurrilous grounds. During the Biden Administration, it even became an occasional MAGA talking point, promoted by the likes of Matt Gaetz and such, that the time had surely come for Church Committee 2.0, and Republicans would have this at the top of their agenda if they retook Congress in 2022 and/or the Presidency in 2024.
Well, we haven’t heard much about that idea lately.
And why do you figure that might be?
Maybe because Donald Trump has no interest in actually curbing the powers of the “Deep State.” His singular grievance has only ever been that those powers were once marshaled to his own detriment, and yes, he was often substantively correct in his complaints. But now, in Term Two, he’s got thoroughly consolidated control of the Executive Branch. No longer are there any bureaucratic holdovers maneuvering against him, as in the First Term, hiding away in their little ideological silos to plot and connive. Indeed, Trump has now comprehensively imposed hisownideology on the Security State structures, and we all know the main feature of Trump’s ideology is personal allegiance tohim.That being the case, he’s all in favor of exerting audacious state power, so long as it serves his own interests — rather than getting him caught up in another open-ended Special Counsel fiasco, as bedeviled him the last time both politically and practically, having constricted his latitude to govern. No such nuisance bedevils him in 2026. Russiagate? Schmussagate.
Source: Michael Tracey
