February 12, 2021

Donald Trump’s Lawyer Told a Huge Lie About the Russia Scandal

It was a very telling moment.

Michael van der Veen, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate on Friday.Senate Television/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

History will determine the biggest lie of Donald Trump’s presidency. But the foundational fibs were about Russia. In 2016, and ever since, Trump has refused to admit that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election by hacking and then leaking Democratic emails. Trump also claimed that he had no business interests in Russia, and that his campaign had no contact at all with Russians. Years of ensuing investigation and reporting proved those were big, consequential lies. Russian intelligence helped Trump in 2016 by giving stolen emails to WikiLeaks. While running for president, Trump okayed efforts by aides to seek Vladimir Putin’s help landing a lucrative real estate deal in Moscow. And Trump’s campaign had “numerous links” with Russia and “expected it would benefit” from their help, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

But Trump and his defenders largely succeeded in obscuring this reality by treating Mueller’s failure to find an overt conspiracy between the Kremlin and Trump as evidence that the entire scandal was made up. This disinformation effort showed Trump’s power to declare known facts to be a “hoax” and have his supporters parrot his false claims. Trump’s success in selling a false narrative contributed to the conduct that led to his two impeachments. Getting away with blaming the Russia scandal on his critics seemed to empower Trump to engage in even more mendacious conduct. Just days after Mueller’s widely-panned public testimony before House members, the effective end of a probe that left the president largely undamaged, Trump tried to shakedown Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch bogus investigations targeting Joe Biden and into the 2016 election hack. Trump correctly anticipated that he could declare his damning phone call “perfect” and watch boosters defend it. Trump’s months of lies about mail-in voting and election fraud in turn relied on the presumption his supporters and Republican lawmakers would echo them. Trump’s Russia lies and the so-called “Big Lie” were part of the same false reality Trump concocted. To protect it, Trump supporters engaged in violence on January 6. The lies that began with Russia led to the rampage in the Capitol.

In a sense, it was fitting that Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen on Friday brought up Russia to defend Trump against inciting the attack on Congress. The attorney claimed “the entire Democratic Party and national news media spent the last four years repeating without any evidence that the 2016 election had been hacked. Van der Veen was arguing for excusing Trump’s actions because Democrats, he said, had also used “reckless dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric” about Russia. The implication was a simple equivalency: Democrats pushed the Russia hoax to overturn the 2016 election. Trump pushed the election lie in 2020. It’s a wash.

But van der Veen, in a particularly diabolical piece of bullshit, was repeating Trump’s lies about the “Russia hoax” in a bid to excuse Trump’s lies about the election. Russians did hack Democratic emails, and they did so to help Trump, as every US intelligence agency, Mueller, and the then-GOP led Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump did try to benefit from that help. And he lied, dangled and later dispensed pardons and obstructed justice to conceal his conduct.

It is no coincidence that many of the key figures in advancing Trump’s lies about Russia—Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Flynn’s conspiracy theorizing lawyer Sidney Powell, Steve Bannon, and Rudy Giuliani —were also enthusiastic boosters of Trump’s election fraud lies. The Russia lie and the Big Lie, bookends to Trump’s presidency, were part of the same misleading endeavor.

Van deer Veen’s references to Russia were something of an admission. In repeating Trump’s false claims about Russia—not to mention blaming Antifa for the Capitol riot and misrepresenting Trump’s 2017 comments about white nationalists in Charlottesville—Trump’s lawyers passed on seriously defending his conduct. This was more like joining in it.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate