The allegations of subverting American democracy are troubling in themselves. They also spell trouble for the president.
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Today we learned that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has obtained indictments charging that 12 Russian military intelligence officers engaged in a conspiracy to subvert our democracy. The indictments demonstrate that Mr. Mueller, the Department of Justice and a federal grand jury agree with a conclusion that the intelligence community, the Senate Intelligence Committee and a majority of Americans long ago reached: The Russian government was unambiguously responsible for the attack on our election. The direct and specific evidence of Russian interference laid out in the indictment — both by hacking into Democratic Party accounts and into actual state election commissions — is immensely significant.
Any other president would seriously consider canceling Monday’s summit with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. One of us is a former American diplomat in the region, but you don’t need to be an expert to understand that it is unlikely the official Russian conduct Mr. Mueller has unearthed could have occurred without Mr. Putin’s blessing. To confer legitimacy on the man who was part of an assault on our country is reprehensible.
Unfortunately, we have no expectation that Mr. Trump will cancel. If he proceeds, the indictments must be the first point of reference for the president as he meets next week with the leader — and former intelligence chief — of the country that orchestrated this attack. In previous statements, President Trump has at times said that he takes Mr. Putin at his word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. To put it bluntly, the evidence collected by the Department of Justice further demonstrates that Mr. Trump’s trust in Mr. Putin is horribly misplaced. He must now tell Mr. Putin he knows that he is lying.
The indictments — like others that preceded them — also have important domestic implications. Already some of the president’s defenders are using these latest indictments to suggest that they exonerate the president’s campaign. No Americans were alleged to have participated in this hacking, except perhaps unwittingly, the argument goes, and therefore the Mueller investigation has definitively found no collusion.
That is precisely the wrong reading of this latest development. As is Department of Justice policy, when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced this complaint, he stuck to the facts alleged in the complaint but repeatedly emphasized that no Americans were charged with crimes “in this indictment.” Media reports indicate that the investigation is wrapping up its look into possible obstruction charges and now moving toward collusion. As criminal law experts (one from the prosecution side and one from the defense camp), we believe that Mr. Mueller is moving steadily toward the Trump campaign.
The signs are many, including the fact that numerous high-level individuals in and around the campaign have not yet been interviewed, as far as we know. (They include Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr., Brad Parscale and, of course, Michael Cohen.) We do not know whether Mr. Mueller will ultimately find that those around Mr. Trump — or the president himself — knowingly participated in illegal efforts to influence the election or otherwise violated the law. But it would be recklessly premature for the president or anyone else to conclude that today’s filing absolves the Trump campaign and its associates of any wrongdoing.
Quite the contrary. After today’s indictments, investigators will be scrutinizing the widely reported contacts between Mr. Stone and Russian hackers and between another Trump associate, Rick Gates and a former Russian intelligence officer during the campaign. The indictment also alleges that the Russian conspirators targeted Clinton campaign email accounts with phishing emails on July 27, 2016 — the same day that President Trump called on Russia to hack the Clinton campaign. The two events could of course be nothing more than a coincidence. But it is hard to imagine that the special counsel hasn’t wondered whether it could be more.
If there was catastrophic wrongdoing closer to home, we are confident Mr. Mueller will find it and will charge it if the law and the facts allow. He is moving effectively and, for an investigation of this breadth and complexity, extremely quickly. If others in this country broke the law in connection with the last election, now is not the time for them to rest easy. The decision to allow the national security division of the Department of Justice to assume responsibility for this prosecution of Russian officials allows Mr. Mueller’s team to focus on investigating other issues here at home.
At today’s news conference, Mr. Rosenstein poignantly emphasized the need for the American people to view these indictments in patriotic terms. The victims, he said, were not one side or one party, but rather the American people. This is of course true, though one wishes that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, could have had the same perspective before the 2016 election when he rejected an opportunity to sign on to a bipartisan statement about Russia’s election interference. Other Republicans — including those who have supported the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee — have put country first.
Still, many Republicans, and House Republicans in particular, have so far seen too much to be gained by obscuring the truth and revisiting irrelevant disputes about Hillary Clinton — rather than uncovering the truth about Russia and possible cooperation by the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, while evidence of Russian interference mounts, bipartisan efforts to protect the special counsel investigation and to better secure our election infrastructure have also stalled — in no small part because there is no support from Mr. McConnell and the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.
With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, the hour for protecting the rule of law and the sanctity of our elections is already late. Mr. Rosenstein’s call for patriotism and the indictment he unveiled is therefore a reminder more than anything that we must do more. Mr. Mueller will continue his march toward accountability for wrongdoing related to the last election. But if Russia is permitted to interfere in our elections again, or if the President is permitted to interfere with this investigation, the impact on our democracy, and Americans’ faith in it, could be catastrophic.
Norman L. Eisen is the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the author of the forthcoming book “The Last Palace.” Noah Bookbinder, a former federal corruption prosecutor, is the executive director of CREW.
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