—attributing Russian aggressiveness to a new cold war. Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, had, since the Trump election, propounded an absolutist view that Trump’s election imperiled Democratic norms.
This 13,500-word story—handily connecting the dots of Russia’s geopolitical mortification, Putin’s ambition, the country’s cyber talents, Trump’s own nascent authoritarianism, and the U.S. intelligence community’s suspicions about Putin and Russia —codified a new narrative as coherent and as apocalyptic as the one about the old cold war. The difference was that in this one, the ultimate result was Donald Trump—he was the nuclear bomb. One of the frequently quoted sources in the article was Ben Rhodes, the Obama aide who, Trump’s camp believed, was a key leaker, if not one of the architects of the Obama administration’s continued effort to connect Trump and his team to Putin and Russia. Rhodes, many in the White House believed, was the deep state. They also believed that every time a leak was credited to “former and current officials,” Rhodes was the former official who was in close touch with current officials.
While the article was largely just a dire recapitulation of fears about Putin and Trump, it did, in a parenthesis toward the end of the article—quite burying the lead—connect Jared Kushner to Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, in a meeting in Trump Tower with Michael Flynn in December.
Hicks missed this point; later, it had to be highlighted for the president by Bannon.
Three people in the Trump administration—the former National Security Advisor, the current attorney general, and the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law—had now been directly connected to the Russian diplomat.
To Kushner and his wife, this was less than innocent: they would, with a sense of deepening threat, suspect Bannon of leaking the information about Kushner’s meeting with Kislyak.
OOK Ok
Few jobs in the Trump administration seemed so right, fitting, and even destined to their holder as Jeff Sessions’s appointment as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. As he viewed his work as AG, it was his mandate to curb, circumscribe, and undo the interpretation of federal law that had for three generations undermined American culture and offended his own place in it. “This is his life’s work,” said Steve Bannon.
And Sessions was certainly not going to risk his job over the silly Russia business, with its growing collection of slapstick Trump figures. God knows what those characters were up to—nothing good, everybody assumed. Best to have nothing to do with it.
Without consulting the president or, ostensibly, anyone in the White House, Sessions decided to move as far as possible out of harm’s way. On March 2, the day after the Post story, he recused himself from anything having to do with the Russia investigation.
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