American HustleJuly/August 2019 75
ally become public. The adversarial political and legal system will
conduct oversight and, i necessary, hold the president accountable,
within the remedies established by the Constitution and, above all,
through the sentiments o the electorate.
ONE BIG SURPRISEUltimately, what have we learned? The report might seem merely to
recapitulate, albeit in more granular detail, what we already knew. But in
fact, it contains an enormous surprise. A few observers, mysel included,
had long assumed that during the 2016 campaign, Russians who were
operating at the behest o the Kremlin (or were seeking to ingratiate
themselves with it) were not trying to collude with the Trump cam-
paign. Rather, they were trying to gain unfettered access to the cam-
paign’s internal communications in order to obtain operational secrets
and compromising material (kompromat) on Trump and his people or to
implicate them in illegal acts. I took the real story oÊ Trump and Russia
to be one o penetration and assumed that Russian intelligence eaves-
dropped on the cell phones not just o Manafort and his deputy, Rick
Gates, but also oÊ Trump himsel and his family. I assumed that Russian
intelligence had implanted devices on the cables running underneath
and into Trump Tower and wondered about those Russian-owned apart-
ments upstairs, not far from Trump’s operations. (Trump did not return
to the tower for the Ãrst seven months oÊ his presidency, as i it were not
a secure facility; in 2017, when he accused the Obama administration o
wiretapping phones in the tower, I took it to be a typical Trumpian false-
hood about something that was true in another way.) The idea that such
surveillance was under way during the campaign seemed like a no-
brainer. After all, ocials in Russia whom I have known for a long time
were bragging about it, and the tradecraft was elementary.
So imagine my astonishment when I read in Mueller’s report that
Russians approaching the Trump campaign could not Ãgure out
whom to contact, who was in charge, or who mattered. Russian op-
eratives and intermediaries were coming at the campaign from all
angles, exploring channels with individuals who had no inÁuence
whatsoever on policy positions, to the extent that the campaign even
had any. The reality was that no one was in charge and no one mat-
tered except Trump, and he swiveled one way, then the next, capri-
ciously, in his executive chair. But the Russians essentially failed to
gain access to him, even when the campaign and the White House