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Suspended Animation in the Age of Trump
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/572485/Before Donald Trump was elected, I reported about strange activity linking a Trump campaign computer server to Moscow. A new report shows how much has changed since 2016—and how many questions still remain.
FRANKLIN FOER
9:02 PM ET
For at least the last two years, Americans have lived in an extended state of suspense about what could be the most nefarious scandal in the nation’s political history. Evidence has piled up suggesting that the Trump campaign teamed with the Russian state in pursuit of electoral victory. Some of this evidence is circumstantial and hardly conclusive, some of it is pretty damn concrete.
The hard evidence, alas, reveals more about the motives of the central characters than the shape of the narrative. There’s hard and fast proof that Trump’s innermost circle was more than willing to work with the Russians. And there’s hard and fast proof that the Russians wanted to sway the American electorate on Trump’s behalf. Each of these is incredible facts; each is a historic scandal unto itself. And each of these fact patterns suggests, but only suggests, that these two parties likely met in the middle to conspire. But what really happened there? Is there a crime at the center of the narrative? After two years, those of us not working for Robert Mueller are not that much closer to knowing the answer—and, given the implications, it’s almost physically painful to live with the unfilled holes in the plot.
On October 31, 2016, just before the presidential election, I published a story in Slate that I thought hinted at a possible center of the scandal. My story was about a group of computer scientists who believed that they had uncovered technical evidence showing communication between a server linked to the Trump Organization and servers linked to Alfa Bank in Moscow. The computer scientists were vexed. They weren’t even sure what exactly they’d found. But they were convinced that it was odd enough to deserve press attention and public scrutiny. I tried to be very clear about the limitations of the evidence—but I was also sure that even this limited evidence was a big deal. When I tweeted the link to the story, I blurted, with perhaps a touch too much swagger, that there was still time for an October Surprise.
<Snip>
This morning, the New Yorker published a story by Dexter Filkins, a reporter I admire, attempting to close the gaps in the server story. He produced a meticulous work of investigative journalism. But as I read his piece, it helped set in relief some of the lessons about reporting and about covering this scandal that I have carried from the fracas over my own server piece—and it triggered some intense and unpleasant memories.
FRANKLIN FOER
9:02 PM ET
For at least the last two years, Americans have lived in an extended state of suspense about what could be the most nefarious scandal in the nation’s political history. Evidence has piled up suggesting that the Trump campaign teamed with the Russian state in pursuit of electoral victory. Some of this evidence is circumstantial and hardly conclusive, some of it is pretty damn concrete.
The hard evidence, alas, reveals more about the motives of the central characters than the shape of the narrative. There’s hard and fast proof that Trump’s innermost circle was more than willing to work with the Russians. And there’s hard and fast proof that the Russians wanted to sway the American electorate on Trump’s behalf. Each of these is incredible facts; each is a historic scandal unto itself. And each of these fact patterns suggests, but only suggests, that these two parties likely met in the middle to conspire. But what really happened there? Is there a crime at the center of the narrative? After two years, those of us not working for Robert Mueller are not that much closer to knowing the answer—and, given the implications, it’s almost physically painful to live with the unfilled holes in the plot.
On October 31, 2016, just before the presidential election, I published a story in Slate that I thought hinted at a possible center of the scandal. My story was about a group of computer scientists who believed that they had uncovered technical evidence showing communication between a server linked to the Trump Organization and servers linked to Alfa Bank in Moscow. The computer scientists were vexed. They weren’t even sure what exactly they’d found. But they were convinced that it was odd enough to deserve press attention and public scrutiny. I tried to be very clear about the limitations of the evidence—but I was also sure that even this limited evidence was a big deal. When I tweeted the link to the story, I blurted, with perhaps a touch too much swagger, that there was still time for an October Surprise.
<Snip>
This morning, the New Yorker published a story by Dexter Filkins, a reporter I admire, attempting to close the gaps in the server story. He produced a meticulous work of investigative journalism. But as I read his piece, it helped set in relief some of the lessons about reporting and about covering this scandal that I have carried from the fracas over my own server piece—and it triggered some intense and unpleasant memories.
