Opinion | A Spy by Any Name - The New York Times
A few questions about the F.B.I.'s don't-call-it-spying on the Trump campaign.
- May 4, 2019
E. Howard Hunt in Washington in June 1974. Credit Credit Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Back in the golden age of presidential conduct, before Donald Trump wrecked every norm and smashed every guardrail, someone — either in Lyndon Johnson’s White House or in Langley, accounts differ — decided to have the C.I.A. spy on Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
The agent assigned to lead that illegal operation, in one of history’s winks, was E. Howard Hunt, who would later conduct campaign spying in a private capacity for Richard Nixon’s re-election. Hunt had subordinates volunteer for the Goldwater campaign and obtain advance copies of speeches and position papers, which were dutifully passed to the Johnson White House, which relied on them to pre-empt and befuddle Goldwater.
Hunt and others would later suggest that Johnson welcomed the intel because he needed a blowout win in 1964 to establish his own legitimacy. This is entirely plausible, but it’s also reasonable to connect the spycraft to the larger climate of the ’64 election, in which the entire political establishment treated Goldwater as a unique threat to the norms of postwar politics, a dangerous man likely to bring fascism to America or to lead the United States into thermonuclear war. It’s a lot easier to justify the abuse of counterintelligence powers when you’re convinced that the abnormal nature of a presidential candidacy demands it.
Now, 55 years later, we have an abnormal presidential candidate who actually won, and an F.B.I. that definitely ran a secret investigation into his highly-unusual campaign. We can wrangle over whether to use the term “spying” to describe sending informants to meet with a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, under false pretenses and subjecting another aide, Carter Page, to wiretapping. But having the law-enforcement arm of the executive branch surveil a presidential nominee from the opposing party is still the kind of case where, in a non-Trump context, anyone suspicious of our security state would smell a rat.
Of course we are not in a non-Trump context, and as someone who shared the establishment’s fears about his candidacy, I’ve long assumed the combination of the Russian hacking and the shadiness of Trump’s campaign associates created a reasonable predicate for investigation — especially since, unlike with L.B.J., there is no evidence that it was used for partisan advantage during the campaign itself.
But now that the Mueller investigation has concluded that whatever the F.B.I. thought they saw happening was probably not, in fact, the kind of complex conspiracy suggested by Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier and other maximally alarmist theories, it’s reasonable to ask some more questions about the don’t-call-it-spying carried out against the Trump campaign.
Here are two of mine. First: Were any other entrapping approaches made to Trump campaign officials, and by whom? Throughout this controversy, running in parallel to the Steele/MSNBC theory of Trump-Putin conspiracy, there has been another conspiratorial reading of events, which alleges a pattern of outreach to the Trump campaign by intelligence-community and Clintonworld affiliates masquerading as Russian envoys. “Taken together,” wrote Lee Smith last summer, “these efforts could be interpreted not as an investigation but a sting operation intended to dirty a presidential campaign.”
I’m generally as skeptical of this counterconspiracy theory as of the maximalist collusion case. But it would be helpful to know more about some of the ambiguous characters involved. For instance, was Stefan Halper, the Cambridge academic used by the F.B.I. as a confidential informant, doing any outreach to Trumpworld before the F.B.I. investigation formally began, as the counter-conspiracists suggest? And what actually became of Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor whose meetings with Papadopoulos, in which Mifsud claimed to have high-level contacts in Russia, set in motion events leading to the F.B.I. opening its case? The counter-conspiracists suspect Mifsud of being connected to Western intelligence rather than the Kremlin, but nobody can ask him because he has simply disappeared.
Maybe more information on these points would just put the counter-conspiracy to bed. But if so that would be as welcome, and worth having, as Mueller’s “no proof of conspiracy” conclusion.
Then equally welcome would be an answer to my second major question: Was any of the Steele dossier’s bad intel deliberately crafted by the Russians?
Yes, the dossier did not itself touch off the F.B.I. investigation, as Trump and his allies sometimes claim. But it played a role in the wiretapping of Carter Page, it presumably influenced the F.B.I.’s post-election decision to open a counterintelligence investigation into Trump himself, and the sequence that gave us the Comey firing and the Mueller investigation might have played out differently without the circulation of the dossier’s more pungent allegations.
If, as seems possible, some of those pungent parts were actually invented in Moscow, then the F.B.I. took unprecedented steps with uncertain constitutional implications while under the influence of bogus information.
You can think the worst of Trump and still find that a troubling conclusion, and one that echoes the lessons of 1964: The fear of abnormality reliably produces abnormality in response.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”
You can follow him on Twitter: @ DouthatNYT