The Senate trial

Senate Republicans are planning to use the trial to promote the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election, in collusion with Democrats. They will do this even though intelligence officials have privately warned those same Republicans that this has been a central trope in Russian disinformation efforts for years.

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Indeed, there may be an easy way to show that Republicans privately possess extensive concrete information that undermines this theory — yet continue to push it anyway.

In an ugly preview of what’s to come, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) on Sunday brushed off our intelligence services’ hard conclusion that Russia sabotaged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. “It could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy shrugged. “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other.”

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The GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has been running its own investigation into Russia’s attack on our political system for three years. The committee has already released the first two volumes of its findings, detailing efforts to infiltrate U.S. elections infrastructure and sow social discord with disinformation warfare.

But here’s something that has been overlooked: As part of this investigation, the committee has also been examining whether there was U.S. coordination with foreign interference — by the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns.

The committee’s findings on that front are currently in the beginning stages of getting written up into a report, a Democratic aide on the committee tells me.

And so, if Kennedy is uncertain about whether Ukraine, too, interfered in 2016, he should just ask his colleague who chairs the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, what he has found.

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The central [Trump-Republican] theory here is that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic servers and that the FBI failed to investigate that crime. Trump’s own former homeland security adviser told him this is nonsense, but Trump nonetheless pressed Zelensky to make it true, and Trump’s propagandists regularly claim he had good reason to want this investigated.

Indeed, at Trump’s impeachment trial, Republican plan to use this story line to portray Trump as the “victim” of the “deep state,” the fake news media and Democrats, the New York Times reports.

The second way this theory serves Trump is that it purportedly absolves Russia of its role in sabotaging the 2016 election — and by extension the Trump campaign’s extensive efforts to coordinate with and benefit from it.

That’s why Russia has spent years pushing this theory, to “frame” Ukraine and protect its own ongoing electoral interference, which will continue in 2020, with Trump’s blessing. As the Times also reports, intelligence officials briefed GOP senators about the centrality of this theory to Russian propaganda.

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Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, recently dropped a tantalizing hint about what this has turned up, suggesting the committee was “wrapping up” this part of the investigation, and that it wouldn’t even “remotely” support various Trump narratives.

So it’s time for Republicans to put up or shut up: What did their investigation find?

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The answer to this is likely to be: Nothing.

Indeed, every Republican on that committee may well already know this to be the case. If and when they echo the Trump narrative, they should be pressed on that point as well. And so should Burr.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.