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Political Probes in Moscow and D.C.
But when the stakes are high, the U.S. wins because voters have the final verdict.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Who killed the daughter of Alexander Dugin, the pro-Kremlin philosopher? What’s in the boxes the Justice Department has been so keen to get back from Donald Trump?
You know, whatever the seeming vagary of linking these two matters, there is at least one connection: Vladimir Putin.
Straight-arrow Merrick Garland, the Biden attorney general, has already seen the impossibility of keeping the politically charged Trump investigation within its straight and narrow lane simply by declaring the Justice Department’s desire that it be so. Whatever Mr. Garland intended in the Trump matter, the leaks are flying fast and furious in the media, and Mr. Garland’s rigid posture and closed-lippedness only complicate the public’s job in sorting out which leaks might be accurate, which might be authorized by Mr. Garland himself, which are meant to serve Mr. Trump, which are promoted by arch-leaking Democrats like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
The furor Mr. Garland instigated cannot be helpful to any purpose Mr. Garland has, but it clearly has benefited Mr. Biden and his Democrats, who want to run against Mr. Trump in the midterms. It has so clearly benefited Mr. Trump that left and right are in heartwarming agreement on this point.
Of the many, many leaks, perhaps the least desultory and offhand were reported by Newsweek a few days ago, citing “two high-level U.S. intelligence officials,” which is already more sourcing than most press outlets have given us.
A complete sentence spoken by one of Newsweek’s sources indicates that the Mar-a-Lago raid’s “true target was documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration.” This includes, Newsweek adds in its own words, “material that Trump apparently thought would exonerate him of any claims of Russian collusion in 2016 or any other election-related charges.”
Voilà, true or not, there was no way the seven-year battle between Mr. Trump and our intelligence agencies wasn’t going to be propelled back to center stage in our politics once Mr. Garland opened this can of worms.
Mr. Garland might be struck by the symmetry of events in Moscow. The Kremlin almost immediately named a Ukrainian woman, traveling in Russia and later to Estonia with her preteen daughter, as the culprit in the car-bomb killing of Darya Dugina. The official story apparently aims to blame Ukraine, but everyone in Moscow knows authorities may have simply scoured visa records for anybody who could have been in Moscow and had since left the country, and ended up with an unlikely story about an assassin who traveled with a child.
In any case nobody cares. The question that will consume Moscow and take on a life of its own is how Mr. Putin intends to benefit or at least protect himself from the fallout.
Mr. Garland might even sympathize with his counterparts because no finding or fact asserted by Russian prosecutors can now quell a chaotic debate over who ordered the killing and why: Putin enemies on the left who oppose the Ukraine war? Putin enemies on the right who want it prosecuted more vigorously? Mr. Putin himself, to warn off any who might stand in the way of a negotiated settlement with Ukraine, or perhaps alternatively to frighten his public into accepting a doubling down on a failed war?
No criminal investigation, no matter how warranted by the facts, that intersects the top levels of power can proceed unpoliticized in any country I can think of. And Mr. Garland has four such investigations under way: two Trump-related investigations, the Hunter Biden investigation, and special counsel John Durham’s probe into the Clinton campaign’s role in the Russia collusion hoax.
It is simply a metaphysical impossibility for Mr. Garland to make the decisions he’ll have to make in these cases uninfluenced by political considerations as long as Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the anticipated presidential candidates in 2024. And if you think these decisions Mr. Garland will be making weren’t also in Joe Biden’s mind when he named the unforceful but upright former judge to be his attorney general, please see my famous-bridges-for-sale webpage.
It’s hardly sacrilegious to notice that politics has parallels in capitals as different as Washington and Moscow and even sometimes unites them in common interest. Remind yourself you still don’t know what really happened to Mikhail Lesin, the Putin crony who died in a D.C. hotel room in 2015, or the truth about the highly classified, possibly fake “Russian intelligence” that drove FBI Chief James Comey’s actions in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Happily, the U.S., helped by its two-party system, has one giant advantage over Russia: U.S. primary voters can obviate many problems by making sure Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump won’t be the major-party nominees in 2024.
