Analysis by Philip Bump
National correspondent
May 23, 2022 at 11:57 a.m. EDT
The conclusion drawn by the Wall Street Journal editorial board is stark and damning.
“[T]he Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country,” it reads. “It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere.” Then: “Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.”
The editorial is titled: “Hillary Clinton Did It.”
A fiery, furious bit of rhetoric. Also rhetoric that is indefensible given the evidence. It is rhetoric aimed at scratching a long-frustrating itch rather than accurately informing readers.
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The trigger for the editorial was testimony from Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, Robby Mook, on Friday as part of a criminal trial targeting a lawyer who worked for a firm hired by the campaign. Mook told the jury that Clinton had approved the leak of an allegation tying Donald Trump’s private business to a Russian bank as the election neared. This, the Journal argues, is what Clinton “did.”
The criminal trial centers on whether the attorney, Michael Sussmann, was working for the Clinton campaign when he brought the rumored digital link between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization to the FBI and, if so, whether he failed to disclose that relationship to the bureau. Special counsel John Durham — appointed by Trump Attorney General William P. Barr to investigate the origins of the Russia probe, which so annoyed the then-president — appears to be hoping to bolster the idea elevated by the Journal: that Clinton was a primary trigger for allegations about Trump and Russia.
So let’s evaluate that, first in the context of the Alfa Bank theory.
There are two important things to recognize about the idea that a Trump Organization server was communicating in an unusual way with that bank. The first is that it was debunked almost immediately, including by me. There was no real evidence that anything suspicious or election-related was afoot, and there were lots of reasons to think that the communications were an innocuous artifact of automated systems. It didn’t even make sense in the abstract. If you were setting up a weird back channel (for some reason!), why use a Trump-branded server?
In other words, the story didn’t even generate much static, beyond a community of fervent conspiracy theorists. Which is the second point: That community was already well-populated, thanks to months of speculation about Trump’s interactions with Russia.
In the event you don’t recall the 2016 election, we can illustrate this with data. Google searches and mentions on cable news channels show that a lot of attention was being paid to Trump’s possible interactions with Russia well before the Alfa Bank rumor became public at the end of October. There was a surge in Trump-Russia searches when that story came out, but only for a limited period.
Why was there already so much chatter about Trump and Russia? Because so many things had emerged to draw attention to the unusual nature of the candidate’s approach to that country.
In mid-June 2016, The Washington Post reported that Russian hackers were believed to have accessed the network of the Democratic National Committee. Material from that hack was published by WikiLeaks the following month, shortly before the Democratic convention. This deployment of material stolen by Russia and aimed at harming Clinton and the Democrats drew immediate suspicion. As did Trump’s public declaration at the end of the month that he welcomed Russian efforts to hack Clinton.
There was a robust conversation about possible business links between Trump and Russia. Conservative columnist George Will speculated that Trump wasn’t releasing his tax returns because he wanted to hide ties to Russia. Trump’s campaign manager gave an evasive answer about possible ties when asked — telling in part because that campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had his own known ties to Russia’s leadership. In June, The Post published a lengthy look at what was and wasn’t known about Trump’s business interests in Russia, a report that took on a different appearance after reports that Trump allies had softened anti-Russia language in the Republican Party’s 2016 platform.
All of that was the public understanding of the Trump-Russia question. But privately — like, at the FBI — things were more complicated still.
National correspondent
May 23, 2022 at 11:57 a.m. EDT
The conclusion drawn by the Wall Street Journal editorial board is stark and damning.
“[T]he Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country,” it reads. “It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere.” Then: “Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.”
The editorial is titled: “Hillary Clinton Did It.”
A fiery, furious bit of rhetoric. Also rhetoric that is indefensible given the evidence. It is rhetoric aimed at scratching a long-frustrating itch rather than accurately informing readers.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
The trigger for the editorial was testimony from Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, Robby Mook, on Friday as part of a criminal trial targeting a lawyer who worked for a firm hired by the campaign. Mook told the jury that Clinton had approved the leak of an allegation tying Donald Trump’s private business to a Russian bank as the election neared. This, the Journal argues, is what Clinton “did.”
The criminal trial centers on whether the attorney, Michael Sussmann, was working for the Clinton campaign when he brought the rumored digital link between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization to the FBI and, if so, whether he failed to disclose that relationship to the bureau. Special counsel John Durham — appointed by Trump Attorney General William P. Barr to investigate the origins of the Russia probe, which so annoyed the then-president — appears to be hoping to bolster the idea elevated by the Journal: that Clinton was a primary trigger for allegations about Trump and Russia.
So let’s evaluate that, first in the context of the Alfa Bank theory.
There are two important things to recognize about the idea that a Trump Organization server was communicating in an unusual way with that bank. The first is that it was debunked almost immediately, including by me. There was no real evidence that anything suspicious or election-related was afoot, and there were lots of reasons to think that the communications were an innocuous artifact of automated systems. It didn’t even make sense in the abstract. If you were setting up a weird back channel (for some reason!), why use a Trump-branded server?
In other words, the story didn’t even generate much static, beyond a community of fervent conspiracy theorists. Which is the second point: That community was already well-populated, thanks to months of speculation about Trump’s interactions with Russia.
In the event you don’t recall the 2016 election, we can illustrate this with data. Google searches and mentions on cable news channels show that a lot of attention was being paid to Trump’s possible interactions with Russia well before the Alfa Bank rumor became public at the end of October. There was a surge in Trump-Russia searches when that story came out, but only for a limited period.
Why was there already so much chatter about Trump and Russia? Because so many things had emerged to draw attention to the unusual nature of the candidate’s approach to that country.
In mid-June 2016, The Washington Post reported that Russian hackers were believed to have accessed the network of the Democratic National Committee. Material from that hack was published by WikiLeaks the following month, shortly before the Democratic convention. This deployment of material stolen by Russia and aimed at harming Clinton and the Democrats drew immediate suspicion. As did Trump’s public declaration at the end of the month that he welcomed Russian efforts to hack Clinton.
There was a robust conversation about possible business links between Trump and Russia. Conservative columnist George Will speculated that Trump wasn’t releasing his tax returns because he wanted to hide ties to Russia. Trump’s campaign manager gave an evasive answer about possible ties when asked — telling in part because that campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had his own known ties to Russia’s leadership. In June, The Post published a lengthy look at what was and wasn’t known about Trump’s business interests in Russia, a report that took on a different appearance after reports that Trump allies had softened anti-Russia language in the Republican Party’s 2016 platform.
All of that was the public understanding of the Trump-Russia question. But privately — like, at the FBI — things were more complicated still.