Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Don’t Let the Original Trump-Russia Question Fade

Proving collusion is far more important to the nation’s long-term interests than Trump's attempts to shake off the investigation.

May 23, 2017 at 5:10 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Appearances.
Photographer: Brooks Kraft/Getty Images

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The Trump-Russia scandal has changed. The latest leaks are all about President Donald Trump’s acute discomfort with the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s possible collusion with the Kremlin, not about the collusion itself. This is a dangerous bit of bait-and-switch: Soon, it may not even matter whether or not Trump or his associates accepted help from President Vladimir Putin or those working for him.

In 2002, a poll revealed that 65 percent of Americans didn’t remember enough about Watergate to tell the basic facts to another person. At the same time, 63 percent said Richard Nixon’s actions were serious enough to warrant his resignation. Almost two-thirds of the American public would be unable to say exactly what Nixon did, whether he knew in advance about the Democratic National Committee burglary (there's no evidence that he did) and what he undertook to cover it up (schemed to replace the investigating agency and hide evidence).