Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Has the scandal-with-no-name left you feeling a little scrambled? Like you’re marinating in the pungent sauces of conspiracy? When you rise each morning, does the world appear as if viewed through a wilderness of mirrors? Don’t worry, these are standard symptoms of Washington Scandal Syndrome. Every modern D.C. upheaval—from Watergate to Iran-Contra to BCCI to Whitewater to the Clinton sex scandal to the Valerie Plame breach—has flummoxed the public. Especially in the early stages, scandals encompass too much to take in at a single sitting. Like the scandals before it, the no-name scandal isn’t about just one thing or one person—it’s about a multitude of things, a punk symphony of press investigations, congressional subpoenas, closed-door testimony, tax audits, criminal investigations, intelligence findings, charges of collusion and suspected kompromat all trussed to Russia or Donald Trump.

You have every right to feel drunk. Prepare to feel drunker.


Shafer’s Iron Law of Scandals holds that every big-bore investigation contains at least a few surprise prizes at the bottom of the bag. Watergate revealed not just one criminal break-in but an ongoing criminal enterprise of black-bag jobs and payoffs.

Our bottom-of-the-bag prize may turn out to be crimes committed by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort—crimes unrelated to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. We learned this week, for example, that special counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed the PR executives who worked for Manafort on a Ukraine initiative in 2013 and 2014 when pro-Russian politicians ran Ukraine. Manafort and associates did not register as foreign agents while lobbying, a potential violation of the law. It is, NBC News declared, a “further indication” that Manafort “could be in serious legal jeopardy.” Meanwhile, McClatchy reported that Mueller’s people are exploring whether Manafort evaded taxes or assisted money-laundering schemes.

The Hillary Clinton emails pushed their way back into the news as the Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller investigators “have been conducting interviews and collecting information” to determine how deeply enmeshed former national security adviser Michael Flynn became in a scheme during the campaign to obtain the Clinton emails from Russian hackers. If Mueller’s plan was to collect damning information on associates like Manafort and get them to flip and become witnesses against Trump, he got some rude news on Friday when the president pardoned Joe Arpaio. Sit tight, the pardon said to the subjects of the Mueller probe, and I’ll pardon you, too. Unfortunately, the only check on abuse of the presidential power to pardon is impeachment.

But in the absence of new light shows by the investigative reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times, speculation about the infamous Trump dossier shone the brightest this week. The man who assigned it, Glenn Simpson of the oppo-research and corporate intelligence outfit Fusion GPS, got the once-over in a marathon closed-door session with the investigators from the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Simpson’s attorney, he did not divulge the identities of the dossier funders, which remains one of the many mysteries of the saga.

The dossier, reportedly commissioned in September 2015 by a Republican and then bought like a used car by a Democrat in the summer of 2016 after Trump destroyed the other Republican contestants for president, lies at the origin of what we call the no-name scandal. Shared with the government and top journalists, the dossier was first teased into public view by Mother Jones’ David Corn in late October after multiple outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News and the New Yorker, viewed it but did not go with it because they could not confirm all of its claims. Sen. John McCain passed it to then-FBI Director James Comey in December, and it was finally published by BuzzFeed in January before the inauguration. Written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the dossier asserted that the Russian government had cultivated Trump for several years, garnering compromising information about him in the process. Some of the dossier’s claims have been verified, others disproved. Steele himself has said the package itself needs additional verification and has told the FBI the names of his sources.

Trump has called the dossier a fabrication, but from this founding document the no-name scandal has spread to encompass its own universe of subterfuge and stealth. In the words of the official U.S. intelligence report on the Russian influence campaign in the 2016 campaign, published in January, Moscow followed a “messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’”

When digesting the no-name scandal, it’s only rational that we might suffer a little heartburn as the conflicting information passes through our mental gullets. If the Russians so favored Trump that they (allegedly) pinched and released emails that damaged his opponent, Clinton, and fed the disinformation machine with stories that helped his campaign, why would it also assemble kompromat on him that might be discovered by the press and backfire on them, crippling their purported “asset”? Why stage such a visible operation as the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a gaggle of suspicious Russians and top Trump aides Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. if the Russian intention was to keep its effort on the down low? As one observer has noted, the Trump Tower meeting was so public it looks like it was meant to be discovered. If the Russians are such wizards, why did they leave such obvious crumbs all over the email hacks that led U.S. investigators back to them?

If the Russian operations don’t add up to a single rational number, that’s to be expected. The Russian playbook teaches its operatives to “create so much confusion and uncertainty and mystery that no one knows what the truth is,” British journalist Ben Macintyre told novelist John le Carré in a recent conversation. “It’s called maskirovka—little masquerade.”

Peering into the wilderness of mirrors, Macintyre offered this about the Russians:

“They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that’s true, and some stuff that isn’t true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration.”

The Macintyre interpretation brings a sense of temporary order to the confusion of all the Russian crawling through all the nooks and crannies of the no-name scandal. Instead of viewing every Russian move as one coherent chess move after another designed to take the king, think of them as independent, chaos-inducing gambits that need not connect in order to work together. Take the recent news about two Trump campaign aides—George Papadopoulos and Rick Dearborn—who tried to set up meetings between Trump and Putin in 2016 during the campaign or, in Dearborn’s case, fielded requests to do so. It comports with the interpretation that the Russians thought repetition was the key to penetrating the Trump operation. Over time, all those pebbles tossed into a shoe turn into a big rock, right?

Also comporting with the pebble theory are the other Russian interventions: The attempt to recruit Trump volunteer Carter Page as a spy; Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s meetings with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions; the meetings Kislyak and other Russians had with Kushner; and Kislyak’s telephone conversations about sanctions with Flynn, which eventually earned him a dismissal from the Trump administration.

Like Macintyre and le Carré, retired CIA officer Steven L. Hall would counsel us to consider the no-name scandal as a giant intelligence operation, and that the fun-house confusion is just a part of the price of admission to the show. Hall, who ran the agency’s Russian operations and now serves as a talking head for CNN, made this point recently in a Washington Post story. “The Russian government was casting a wide net when they were looking at the American election,” he said. “I think they were doing very basic intelligence work: Who’s out there? Who’s willing to play ball? And how can we use them?”

Mueller’s biggest job at this point may not be to determine who played ball with the Russians. We now know. It’s to resolve who scored for them and how many points they put on the board.

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Hat tip to T.S. Eliot for providing the sauces and mirrors found in my lede. Send poetry to [email protected]. My email alerts dig Pound, my Twitter feed has memorized Heaney, but my RSS feed still sings Dylan (Bob).

