Interference

Almost a decade ago now, I read the executive summary of the Mueller Report. It struck me at the time that the contents of the report didn’t match up very well with the way the report was seized on by the media. The right claimed the whole thing was a hoax and a “witch hunt” and that Russiagate was just a way for the Democrats and the deep state to smear Trump. The left maintained that it was obvious Trump was Putin’s lackey, and that the report merely documented this fact.

The report itself, however, supported neither of these readings. Nor were its conclusions at all ambiguous or difficult to understand. It made it quite clear that the Russians ran a sophisticated cyber campaign that aimed to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump. It also documented the ties between several Trump campaign staffers and the Russians. It went on to show that these people knew at least some of what the Russians were secretly doing and devised strategies for the campaign to profit from this information. Finally, it did not reach any conclusion about whether Trump himself knew about the Russian operation, nor about whether he obstructed the FBI investigation into this operation or Bob Mueller’s Special Counsel report on it. While it did not prove Trump had knowledge of the whole affair and was trying to cover it up, it also did not prove that he didn’t, and so clearly did not exonerate him. Instead, it merely documented that his behavior at every turn matched what one might expect to see if something was being covered up. It was all very well organized, with endless facts and footnotes, and maintained the extremely lawyerly tone of most government bureaucracy.

I read the actual report because … well, you can’t learn shit from Twitter, people! Read the goddamn original if you want to have an opinion! But also because I know one the authors, and he’s always seemed like a stand up guy. Plus, if you can’t read your friends books, what can you read?

Which brings us to the present. This friend, along with a couple other top aides to Mueller, have now written a less formal, more behind the scenes look at how the investigation proceeded and what it found. I hope Interference reaches a wider public than the report on which it is based, though I think perhaps the ship of the political moment has sailed on, and it will mainly interest only serious political junkies and lawyers steeped in the details. But if you’re someone who remains interested in knowing what actually happened, and how we know what actually happened, I think you can rely on it as an able and non-partisan summary of the whole Russiagate saga. It’s just not clear to me that anyone I know fits this description.

So what then, did I take away from this book, given that I’d already read the first version?

First, learning more about the history of the investigation was interesting all by itself. The book gives us our only insight into why the principals made some of the decisions they did. While I’m not lawyer enough to contest most of these, they sounded to me like pretty plausible choices among difficult options.

Second, the the book gives you a inadvertent look into what I think you can legitimately call the “deep state”. Mueller and all his key lieutenants, as well as many of their counterparts within the first Trump administration, have all been in and out of various federal and local government positions in both colors of administrations over the past 40 years. The biographies reminded me of what people referred to as the “revolving door” in the context of the constant back and forth between the financial industry and key people at the Federal Reserve. While this situation in finance can of course generate clear-cut conflicts of interest and corruption, its main effect is less nefarious. It mostly just ensures that the people running the show are all invested in the same social and professional circles. That is, it maintains what you might call a certain ‘clubby’ atmosphere. Club members tend to share a set of (often unconscious) assumptions, as well as a natural desire not to rock the boat. This can lead to some groupthink and systematic inflexibility, as everyone is invested in perpetuating the system they’ve built their lives around. The ship of the Deep State is hard to turn. Which, if you put it in the proper perspective, is certainly as much a feature as a bug. The Deep State is much maligned. But how else can a sprawling Republic filled with low-information voters pulling levers for the latest game show host operate with any consistency across time? Would you rather put a know-nothing like myself in charge of National Security or Monetary Policy? Or worse yet put a politician directly in charge of these? No, the truth is we need the Deep State. We need all these people who make our bureaucracy a career. And the question of their accountability has to be paired with their effectiveness. We’ve clearly disturbed this balance in our current politics, and I suspect it will lead us into a long period of less effective (and, perhaps paradoxically, also less accountable) policy on many fronts.

Finally, the book was interesting partly because it was so frustrating. Most of this frustration comes from reading about how these very capable, very hardworking agents of the Deep State completely misread how their report would be received. Despite all their experience they come off as kinda naive about how they’ve ultimately just been employed simple to manufacture yet another political football. Of course, there are principled reasons they stick to the ‘just the facts maam’ approach, relegating themselves to the role of messenger to the DOJ and Congress. With the not inconsiderable benefit of hindsight though, we can see that they fundamentally mistook the situation. They imagined that it was still possible to coast above politics, in the non-partisan heaven realm that I assume all genuine civil servants wish they operated in. They took no care to shape the media reception of the final report. They seem to have trusted that the facts would win the day and Congress would follow up and do its duty. It’s a sign of our times that today this seems almost hopelessly naive. If the greatest strength of the Deep State is its continuity, its greatest weakness is clearly this inability to imagine that anything significant can change.