The Kremlin Candidate
By: Scott Mackey
Tags: Democrats, Republicans, Russia, Collusion, Donald Trump

Once Robert Mueller was appointed Special counsel, there were two possible outcomes from his investigation.

The first was that Donald Trump was a criminal. A man who in his desperation to obtain the presidency, had unscrupulously colluded with a foreign government to help him obtain the presidency.

The second was that Donald Trump had either willfully or ignorantly allowed himself to be used as a Russian pawn in its psy-ops campaign to undermine American democracy and the American people.

We’ve known this since Paul Manafort joined and eventual came to be the chair of Donald Trump’s campaign.

Even as former low level player in DC’s foreign policy community, the name Paul Manafort meant a lot to me in the summer of 2016.

He was a Russia guy. He’d been the strategist and string puller for Yanukovych and the Party of Region’s, Putin’s mouthpiece in Ukraine. He’d had a variety of well documented ties to Russian Oligarchs. He made millions of dollars shilling and lobbying for Russia in the U.S.

How was this man, known Putin hack and friend to authoritarians, running Donald Trump’s campaign?

As a newly minted resident of Austin, fresh off spending the better part of a decade as a DC based foreign policy staffer, and with no productive course of action at my fingertips but a functioning sense of humor, I built and launched the website Kremlin Candidate in an early morning, caffeine fueled burst of creative frustration (see the very silly facebook page here).

My feckless and ineffective efforts to bring attention to the obvious accomplished nothing, but the point that matters is this: As a 30 year old with less than a decade of foreign policy experience under his belt, I knew that Paul Manafort’s involvement was either a sign of active partnership with a Russian entity, or was an act of such irresponsibility that it should have completely disqualified Donald Trump from office.

To be fair, much of the Republican foreign policy establishment felt the same…and their efforts to stand in Trump’s way proved to be as impotent as my own.

But that’s all the past. What matters today is the present and the future.

I am thrilled that Donald Trump has been exonerated of formal, intentional collusion with Russia. No citizen of this country should be rooting for our Chief Executive, no matter how onerous we may find him, to be actively conspiring against the country.

Innocence and culpability do not correlate, however.

American voters, and history, should not forget the levels of neglect and irresponsibility that laid the groundwork for Mueller’s investigation.

Its in our interest to remember that before the special counsel was appointed, before we knew President Trump’s personal fixer had accepted enormous payments from Russian Oligarch’s, before his National Security Adviser was indicted for lying about contacts with Russian Government officials, before we knew of the well-funded and effective Russian psy-ops campaign in support of Donald Trump, before we knew Wikileaks was a front for Russian hackers…it was clear that Russia’s man was running Donald Trump’s campaign.

Innocent of collusion? Thankfully, yes.

Culpable for being used by Russia to undermine American democracy? Absolutely.