Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

In what otherwise would have to be counted as a sleepy week in the annals of the Trump Tower scandal, President Donald Trump gave the press a much-needed news peg by granting New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt a 30-minute interview in which he said more than a dozen times that there had been “no collusion” between the Russians and his campaign.

Of course, Trump has spent much of the past year denying any Russian collusion. What makes this year-end “no collusion” insistence so newsworthy is that, according to the transcript, Schmidt doesn’t even question him on the topic! Bringing up collusion unbidden, Trump returned to it again and again, scratching it like a suppurating wound, probing his own threshold of pain and all but inviting Schmidt to touch the abscess, too. If you witnessed this tic at the movies, you’d reckon that the scab-picker was a little bit nuts. But if the scab-picker got caught searching the face of his interviewer for a reaction, you’d ask yourself, “What is the old fox up to?”


Like advertising writers, sloganeers and propagandists, Trump appreciates the power repetition has on the lax mind. Properly executed, the right catchphrase can work as both setup and punch line and occupy mind-space in friends and adversaries even when spoken out of context. By repeatedly pressing the “no collusion” hotkey, Trump challenges his foes, who believe he has compromised his country, to prove it—or to shut up. He also succeeds in cueing his allies to ridicule his enemies.

In the interview, Trump claimed plenty of “no collusion” company, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and “virtually every Democrat.” Democrats, he said, “walk around blinking” the no-collusion belief at each other. Who else attests to no collusion? The Republicans and famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, he said. “I actually think that it’s turning out,” Trump said, that “there was collusion on behalf of the Democrats. There was collusion with the Russians and the Democrats. A lot of collusion.” (You’ll recall Trump and his team attempted to “flip the script” on Democrats not long ago with the thin claim that the Hillary Clinton campaign had colluded with Russia when it commissioned the Steele dossier.)

Trump might be right that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians. As early as May and as recently as November, Feinstein was endorsing the “no collusion” premise to the extent that no evidence of such an arrangement had yet been discovered. But the Russian investigation has never been a simple matter of “no collusion” or “yes collusion” as this recent visualization in the New York Times by Karen Yourish attests. As we generally understand it, the Russia story reduces to three components of which collusion (“links to Russian officials and intermediaries”) is only one. The scandal’s two other two legs, Russian cyberattacks and alleged acts of obstruction of justice, glow and flash like Las Vegas neon.

The Russian cyberattacks were very real, as the hacked Democratic National Committee’s emails attest. The same goes for John Podesta’s emails. Russians diddled with U.S. election boards and they also set up accounts and ran ads on such social media sites as Facebook, Twitter and Google in an attempt to monkey wrench the presidential campaign.

As for obstruction of justice, the very senator whom Trump cites as exonerating him of collusion, Dianne Feinstein, stated earlier this month that what “we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice.” She continued: “I see it in the hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets. And I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director [James] Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to ‘lift the cloud’ of the Russia investigation.”

As Yourish writes, Trump has exposed himself to obstruction of justice charges at several junctures. Trump asked Comey (according to Comey) to drop the Michael Flynn investigation. Trump admitted that he had been thinking about the FBI investigation into Russian interference when he fired Comey. Trump urged Senate Republicans to end the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation. Trump may also have known that Flynn had lied to the FBI when he asked Comey about “letting Flynn go.” And lord knows what sort of obstruction took place when Trump Sr. intervened in the handling of the blowback from the June 2016 meeting his son, Donald Jr., took with Russians in Trump Tower.

Which brings us back to collusion. The roster of Trump associates and relatives that made contacts with Russians is as lengthy as it is undeniable, including son Donald Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and national security adviser Michael Flynn, campaign chairman Paul Manafort and others. Flynn has admitted he lied about his contacts. Sessions remembered his contacts only after being reminded. (The Washington Post reported this week that Trump’s legal team plans to brand Flynn, once the president's BFF, as a liar. “Complete nonsense! More fake news," Trump’s outside counsel John Dowd told NBC News of the Post piece.) George Papadopoulos denied his contacts, too, until he submitted a guilty plea to charges of lying. Donald Jr. changed his story at least four times about why he took the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lawyer and her entourage. Finally, there is the hapless Russophile Carter Page, Trump’s foreign-policy adviser, who took meetings with Russian officials, too.

And that’s only the beginning of the Trump camp’s known mucking about. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, if it isn’t collusion, what if it’s something worse?

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Convince me of collusion by sending evidence to [email protected]. My email alerts want all of the probes to end, my Twitter feed wants a part in the inevitable movie that will be made of the scandal, and my RSS feed screams “yes collusion.”

