AP Photo Backtalk Why You Shouldn’t Be a Russiagate Skeptic What Blake Hounshell misses about the Mueller investigation.

Max Bergmann is senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and director of the Moscow Project. He served in the State Department from 2011-2017. Jeremy Venook is research analyst at the Center for American Progress and the Moscow Project.

It is time to stop being a Russiagate skeptic. We just know too much.

Earlier this week, the editor of this magazine, Blake Hounshell, laid out the case for skepticism, centering on President Donald Trump’s incompetence and the apparent lack of a smoking gun. He argues that the Trump campaign—run by a first-time politician with no filter, aided by a bumbling staff of amateurs who leaked like sieves—was simply too incompetent to have colluded with Russia and kept it a secret. Hence, we would have the smoking gun by now if there was one.


None of his arguments withstand a skeptical eye. Instead, they require disassembling, isolating and explaining away an array of damning information.

The first claim is that Trump is too undisciplined to hide this caper.

The Trump campaign was certainly a chaotic and leaky affair, but when something damaging needed to be kept quiet it certainly knew how to cover it up and keep quiet—at least, temporarily. If anything, it has a lot of practice in coping with scandal. Trump has been silent on: cash payments to hide alleged extramarital affairs, never revealed during the campaign; all those nondisclosure agreements he has signed over the decades; and his tax returns, despite immense pressure to release them. In the face of significant political or legal pressure he’s had the message-discipline to stick to a line or keep quiet, such as by saying his taxes were under “routine audit” and therefore could not be released.

This same pattern exists in the Russia scandal. Since the campaign ended, more than 50 contacts between Trump’s team and Russian operatives—which the campaign repeatedly, and for a time successfully, lied about and covered up—have been revealed. All the while, Trump stays on message, insisting, in all caps, there was no collusion and attacking those investigating him.

It is also true that colluding with a foreign government without getting exposed would require a certain crafty competence. But the Trump team’s incompetence is exactly why we know so much already.

This gets to the second claim of the skeptics: Why has there been no smoking gun? In fact, there have already been several.

Trump campaign and administration officials have been indicted and pleaded guilty. Trump’s campaign chairman and his deputy, the national security adviser, and a campaign volunteer have all been charged with crimes as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference and whether there was coordination with the Trump campaign.

For skeptics, Mueller’s indictments don’t yet provide anything truly damning. Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos are just charged with lying to the FBI, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are in trouble for their work in Ukraine, and the 13 Russian indictments implicate Russia, not Trump. However, this is exactly how a veteran prosecutor would conduct an investigation against someone with pardon power and the ability to fire the investigator: Tread lightly and reveal only what you absolutely need to reveal.

A skeptic will rightly say this is all tea-leaf reading. While Mueller’s indictments might be suggestive, they do not yet implicate Trump. That’s true, in isolation. But it raise the question: What are Flynn, Papadopolous, and now potentially Gates cooperating about, then? The answer is that they have information that Mueller finds valuable enough to grant them leniency.

In demanding a smoking gun, skeptics also ignore the obvious one: the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Trump’s campaign leadership and Russian operatives. In June 2016, PR man Rob Goldstone offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump” in an email, to which Donald Trump Jr. responded, not to ask what Goldstone was talking about but to say, “if it’s what you say I love it.” He then brought in the campaign chairman and Trump’s son-in-law to discuss both the dirt and Russian sanctions—the quid and the quo.

This meeting is Merriam-Webster’s definition of collusion: “secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose.” That these details have been public knowledge for months doesn’t make them any less incriminating. This meeting demonstrates that the Trump campaign knew of the Russian government’s support for Trump and was willing to collude. The Russians were offering information and capabilities that would have been of tremendous value to a political campaign. And the Trump campaign wanted what the Russians were offering.

But there’s more. The big reveal from the memo by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was that the FBI had reason to believe that one of Trump’s first five foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, might be a Russian agent. Page had previously bragged about being an “informal adviser” to the Kremlin and had been recruited by Russian spies who said of Page, “his enthusiasm works for me.” During the campaign he met top Putin allies and gave a pro-Kremlin speech in Moscow; upon returning, he spoke directly with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention. More recently, Trump’s own Justice Department had sufficient evidence to monitor Page and then gained enough evidence to renew the surveillance warrant multiple times.

Meanwhile, Papadopoulos, another one of Trump’s first foreign policy advisers, was approached by people claiming to represent the Kremlin who offered “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”; Papadopoulos subsequently sent multiple emails to higher-ups in the campaign about his Russian contacts. Afterward, he stayed with the campaign for several months, during which he did interviews as a campaign surrogate and helped edit Trump’s foreign policy addresses.

Skeptics claim that much of what we know is built on these “hapless” volunteers and “attention-seeking wannabees.” But intelligence agencies almost never recruit the best people, targeting instead individuals who are compromised, bitter, or overly ambitious, and, most important, who have access. It is now clear, as shown by the emails between Papadopoulos and Trump campaign leadership referenced in the indictment, that these “hapless” volunteers had access.

Mueller’s latest indictments further spell out what the intelligence community asserted in January 2017: There were two campaigns to elect Trump, one based in Trump Tower and the other in the Kremlin. Insisting there was no collusion requires imagining a bright line between the two and ignoring dozens of interactions between members of Trump’s inner circle and Kremlin-linked individuals, often discussing campaign strategy and shared goals.

Faced with this evidence, arguing there was no collusion is no longer the position of a skeptic, but of someone in denial. It is the refusal to acknowledge what is staring us all in the face: The president of the United States and his campaign colluded with a foreign adversary to defeat his political opponent.