<\/p>\n
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
\nWall Street Journal<\/p>\n
If Donald Trump tweeted his accusations about President Obama wiretapping Trump Tower to get the media off his alleged ties to Russia, then Democrats at Monday\u2019s hearing of the House Intelligence Committee used those same tweets to distract from their lack of goods on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.<\/p>\n
Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and ranking member, not once but twice on \u201cMeet the Press\u201d touted \u201ccircumstantial evidence of collusion.\u201d<\/p>\n
He tweeted the same words again almost as soon as he got off the air.<\/p>\n
Then why were his first questions the next day to FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency chief Adm. Michael Rogers instead about the Trump charges?<\/p>\n
Whatever their merits, the Trump tweets came four months after the election. They have no bearing on the alleged \u201ccollusion.\u201d Indeed, if evidence of Trump-Russia collusion is as rampant as Mr. Schiff claims, it seems a mite odd to be stressing Team Obama\u2019s failure to put Trump Tower under surveillance.<\/p>\n
The witnesses sat mostly stone-faced while the politicians spun, but they did vouchsafe a few interesting tidbits.<\/p>\n
On the claim that Russia wasn\u2019t merely trying to hurt Mrs. Clinton but to help Mr. Trump, supposedly a key intelligence-agency insight, this was mostly a matter of \u201clogic\u201d: In a two-person race, hurting one necessarily means helping the other.<\/p>\n
The Russians made little effort to conceal their meddling. Their \u201cloudness,\u201d said the FBI\u2019s Mr. Comey, suggested \u201ctheir No. 1 mission\u201d was to discredit U.S. democracy by \u201cfreaking people out about how the Russians might be undermining our elections.\u201d<\/p>\n
NSA\u2019s Adm. Rogers said to expect more of the same, since the Russians evidently see a \u201cpositive outcome\u201d in \u201ccalling into question the democratic process.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Rep. Schiff, a former prosecutor, he should know better than to treat \u201ccircumstantial evidence\u201d as a synonym for guilt by association.<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t room to detail the fantastically trivial basis for his portrayal of Trump pilot fish Roger Stone as an intimate of WikiLeaks\u2019 Julian Assange and alleged hacker Guccifer 2.0, or the utter fatuity of his attempt to place pilot fish Carter Page at the center of Russia\u2019s recent sale of a Rosneft stake to a Qatari investment fund.<\/p>\n
Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier tried to paint five visits of then-Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson to the White House in 2014 as nefarious, neglecting to mention that these were visits to the\u00a0Obama\u00a0<\/em>White House and that the purpose of the intensive meetings was to avoid an Arctic environmental disaster from a strict by-the-letter compliance with anti-Russia sanctions.<\/p>\n Intoned Mr. Schiff in the manner of a man uncovering a self-evident conspiracy: \u201cIs it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n But what of the question that usually excites conspiracy theorists like Mr. Schiff:\u00a0Cui bono<\/em>\u2014who benefits?<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible to know whether Russia\u2019s DNC leaks accounted for Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat, though it hardly seems likely. Powerful circumstantial evidence, however, suggests Democrats believed that linking Messrs. Trump and Putin would actually be their ace in the hole. They still do. One conclusion recommends itself overwhelmingly on the basis of circumstantial evidence: President Obama, in his final days, used his authority over the intelligence agencies to advance this partisan narrative.<\/p>\n A congressman with a modest profile, Mr. Schiff has been working hard ever since to become the public face\u2014not to say the Joe McCarthy\u2014of this witch hunt.<\/p>\n This is his main chance. It\u2019s supposedly in his wheelhouse because, 27 years ago, he led the Justice Department\u2019s effort to put a sad sack FBI agent in jail over his affair with an equally pathetic Soviet agent.<\/p>\n Again, who really benefits from his relentless campaign of disparagement against Mr. Trump?<\/p>\n The answer is obviously Mr. Schiff\u2014but also Mr. Putin.<\/p>\n In truth, a U.S. president can\u2019t do much for Mr. Putin, except for one thing: give him a convenient enemy. The breadth of opinion in support of this proposition is truly impressive. In 2014, the New Yorker magazine\u00a0noted<\/a>\u00a0a Putin regime \u201cshift in orientation .\u00a0.\u00a0. in which isolation and conflict with the West are virtues in and of themselves.\u201d In January, the Hoover Institution\u2019s Paul Gregory\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0of the regime\u2019s need to persuade the Russian people of an \u201cimminent threat from the decadent hegemonic West.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Putin\u2019s efforts in the U.S. election and elsewhere (Syria, Libya, Ukraine) really only ever had one audience, the Russian people, who must be kept supine despite an unraveling economy, lawlessness, corruption. How is their restlessness to be suppressed? By citing the supposedly warlike designs of the U.S.<\/p>\n Notice that we don\u2019t suggest collusion between Mr. Putin and Mr. Schiff, whose ambition plays so incidentally into Mr. Putin\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n Appeared in the Mar. 22, 2017, print edition.<\/p>\n