The utility of the Mueller investigation has not been the uncovering of collusion, or even in the badgering of an Administration perceived as loathsome. Rather, it has allowed American elites to avoid facing uncomfortable questions about the factors that put Trump in the White House.
I cannot contemplate the havoc of Russiagate without a shudder of horror not only for my country, but also for myself. How very different my life would have been over the past year or more if I had been one of those Trump volunteers assembled in early 2016 to give the campaign the pretense of having a foreign-policy team. For that matter, it would probably have been enough for me to have volunteered as a neighborhood canvasser to get out the Trump vote (what precious little of it there was) in my community in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Once the charge of collusion with the Kremlin had been leveled against Team Trump, my 40-year association with Russia, much of it as a diplomat, would have made me a prime suspect. A swarm of reporters would have descended on my quiet suburban street, observing my comings and goings and pumping the neighbors for information and pithy sound bites (“He seemed like a quiet, unassuming guy; I would never have thought him capable of such a thing.”).
The fact that I am a nonentity would not have spared me, any more than it has spared Carter Page or George Papadopoulos. Certainly, all my personal and business contacts had been with ordinary, working-level Russians, not the ruling elites. Nevertheless, a few of the Russian diplomats I knew 20 years ago have by now risen through the ranks, and no doubt some of them have presumed intelligence links that could have been used to cast aspersions on my patriotism. And although I knew no one at, say, Rosneft or Gazprom, I’m sure I must have known someone who knows someone in those organizations. A veritable cottage industry could therefore have arisen to contrive a daisy chain of connections, however tenuous and improbable, linking me with the inner sanctum of the Kremlin—the conduit along which cash and information presumably flowed in the supposed collusion that many people deem the only plausible explanation for Trump’s electoral victory.
Perhaps some creative journalist would even have fingered me as the American who explained to the Russians what a purple state is.
My sudden notoriety would have come as a most unwelcome embarrassment to my employer, who might well have felt obliged, however reluctantly, to let me go. Combining unemployment with the imperative to “lawyer up,” I would have been staring bankruptcy in the face and contemplating the disheartening prospect of having to crowdfund my children’s college education, and perhaps even my own retirement.
