Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, has finally said what is now becoming the central focus of the Trump administration: the alleged role of Russia in the 2016 election.
The Senator said at a town hall meeting in Carolina on March 04 that he had no doubt that the Russians had interfered in the election in favour of Donald Trump and that he would do everything in his power to expose the extent and nature of the Russian involvement.
The Senator's statement came following a series of revelations that many, including the Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former National Security Adviser Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, were in contact with the Russian Ambassador but did not say so when they went through the confirmation process in the Senate. General Flynn was asked to resign after it was revealed that he had also "forgotten" to tell Vice President Mike Pence of his Russian contacts.
The Attorney General has recused himself from any possible investigation by the Justice Department whether charges could be brought against him for being in contact with the Russian Ambassador. However, unlike General Flynn, he could face the charge of perjury. According to what has come out about his meeting with the Russian Ambassador, he is said to have avoided mentioning about the meeting in his confirmation hearing in Senate when he was under oath.
That there were contacts between the senior members of Donald Trump's campaign and the Russians are very serious charges. US intelligence agencies were the first to leak to the media soon after the election that they were 98 per cent certain of the contacts. In speaking about the contacts, Senator Graham said that he was convinced that the Russians had hacked into the computers of the Democratic Party and leaked the materials through WikiLeaks and independently to targeted voters through the email to help Donald Trump win.
The alleged Russian contacts are not just serious; these are potentially dangerous for the new president's administration and his political future. There is no precedence to judge what would come from the allegations of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence because no one like him ever entered US politics at the highest level and no one in the United States ever thought that such an allegation about a presidential election could be real in US politics.
Nevertheless, precedence or no precedence, if investigations were to reveal that the Russians have influenced the election against Hillary Clinton, then hell could break loose in Washington. It would then be very likely that not just Donald Trump would have to step down, there could be a good case to even declare the 2016 election null and void and hold a new election to elect a new president.
The Russian connection is therefore very bad news for the Trump administration. It is also very bad news for Moscow. Ironically though, the statements that have come out from Washington and Moscow were identical to a large extent following the revelation of the Attorney General's meeting with the Russian Ambassador and the uproar in the United States over it. Both the White House and Kremlin have stated that the opponents of the new US president are on a "witch-hunt" over the alleged Russian connections!
The predicament of the White House and Kremlin over the alleged Russian connections ends with the similarity of the statements. While the connections could become 'Russiagate' and end the Trump presidency; for Russia, it is quite a different story. If these connections had not come out to threaten the new administration, Russia could have looked forward to a dream relationship with the United States where at the minimum it could have had the US and West's sanctions against it following its invasion in Crimea in 2014 lifted. The sanctions are killing the Russian economy.
Donald Trump's praises for President Putin and love for Russia during the campaign were unusual. It raised suspicions that the Russians were active to defeat Hillary Clinton who as president would have been difficult for them on the world stage. Some key posts such the Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser went to well-known pro-Russia members of the Trump team. At the time of the inauguration of the new president, it had appeared that Russia was about to get its best four years in its relations with its worst adversary. Those hopes are now as good as over.
It is not just the Russians whose hopes and dreams the new President has been unable to fulfill and does not look like to be able to fulfill at all. He has likewise failed thus far to please his extreme right-wing white supremacist supporters with his anti-Muslim and anti-immigration measures. The Courts have thrown out his Muslim ban and Mexico has bluntly told on his face that it would not spend a penny for the infamous Wall that have underlined that the new president was full of sound and fury that signified nothing.
Trump is running an administration with the mindset of President Putin blissfully oblivious that in Russia, the law, the constitution and all institutions of the state are there to carry out the decisions of the president while in the USA, there is the rule of the law, the constitution and the institutions to prevent dictatorships from arising. In fact, his grand plan to ban the Muslims from the United States was effortlessly defeated by a federal judge in Seattle who happened to be a Republican appointee.
So far, Trump has survived because the Republicans control both Houses of the Congress. Although some like Senator Graham and Senator John McCain are convinced that he is bad for their party and the country, the GOP has still not abandoned him. But, meanwhile, he has made the media, unofficially the fourth branch of the government in the US, a mortal enemy. In the past, many presidents had been at odds with the media but no president came anywhere near insulting and trashing it as Donald Trump has done because of its power in a democratic state and, more importantly, its importance as the watchdog of democracy.
The mess over Russiagate, the Muslim ban and the Mexican Wall have prevented President Trump from seriously focusing on the economic and conservative agendas that had motivated many outside the racist and the white supremacists to support him. These groups are getting frustrated. The repeal of Obamacare is still a promise and the president by his own admission has said it now appears to be more complicated to deal with it because he does not have any alternative plan. The middle class and the poor are now afraid that the promised tax reform would benefit the rich and do little for them.
And the jobs he had promised to bring back from overseas would come if only he wanted to manufacture the outsourced items at much higher costs at home. For instance, he could bring back jobs in the auto market from Mexico by bringing the investments that US automakers have made there in manufacturing motor parts. That would only make the US cars less competitive with the foreign cars and kill the auto market that the Obama administration had rejuvenated by producing auto parts at cheaper prices in Mexico under the NAFTA agreement.
President Trump has pushed himself and his presidency into a corner where it is being openly discussed how long he would last. But if he scaled down on his racist agenda and pursued the economic and social promises he had made on the campaign trail, there is no reason why he would not complete his term. Whether he would do so is a million dollar question.
Russiagate is, of course, quite a totally different proposition. Whether President Donald Trump would complete his term or not will depend primarily on where Russiagate takes him, his presidency and with it the United States of America.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
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