There are few areas of the political conversation where the partisan divide is wider than on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Many Democrats think that Donald Trump actively worked with Russian interests to aid his victory that year. Republicans often accept Trump’s own framing: The whole thing was a hoax, top to bottom.
The reality is unquestionably closer to the former. Multiple individuals on Trump’s team were in contact with Russian actors and, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III determined, Trump sought to leverage Russia’s obvious interference efforts.
But the latter group is much louder, amplified by right-wing media outlets and commentators. For many of them, the very idea that Russia sought to aid Trump’s election is ridiculous — however well-documented and however obviously aligned with the country’s interest in dividing the United States. The idea that it was ever worth investigating whether Trump assisted that effort therefore attains a new level of ludicrousness.
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This is reinforced constantly in conservative media. There’s no nuance; the entire investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign is simply waved away as dishonest and partisan.
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Its origins are misrepresented or misunderstood, falsely attributed to a varying range of nefarious actors (the creator of the dossier of unverified reports about collusion, the campaign of Hillary Clinton) instead of the actual trigger (a revelation about a Trump campaign adviser who would eventually admit to lying to investigators). Mueller’s findings are reframed as exonerating; the bipartisan Senate report on Russia’s efforts is largely ignored.
It is only within that context, that right-wing bubble, that the video shared by the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday makes any sense.
“They all lied to you,” the tweet including the video states. It then shows a series of snippets of Democrats and government officials … offering fully accurate assessments of Russia’s efforts.
“They’re doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump,” Hillary Clinton says as the video begins. It’s a snippet from a debate in early-October 2016 — after the federal government had already publicly announced that Russia was trying to interfere in the election. Inside the Barack Obama administration, it was understood that the intent of that interference was to aid Trump, though that wasn’t the White House’s public position.
The interference, Clinton is then shown saying in a later debate, was intended, “17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election.” This prompted some fact-checks — was 17 an accurate way of characterizing it? — but the consensus remained: that was the understood intent.
Next the video skips to White House press secretary Josh Earnest speaking in December 2016.
“There’s ample evidence that was known long before the election and even, in most cases, long before October,” he stated — again, accurately. (The video is accompanied, it’s worth pointing out, with the sort of melodramatic backing music used in movie trailers to imply that something nefarious is afoot.)
Next is Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, saying in July that the release of material stolen from the Democratic National Committee was, according to unnamed experts, occurring “for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.” This would eventually be validated by news reports and Mueller’s investigation but was more speculative at the time. Another member of Clinton’s campaign tamped down the idea in an interview the same day.
The video then skips ahead to Clinton again, saying in August 2020 that “there’s no question any longer the Russians actively interfered in our election to help Donald Trump. There is no hoax.” That was obviously true — but here’s the hated Hillary Clinton saying it, so the expected response is little more than a scoff.
The video continues in this vein, showing people loathed by the right — Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) — making claims about Trump and Russia in contemporaneous interviews. These are at times less black-and-white, such as Schiff’s August 2018 assertion that, in his view, there was “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight.” But the point is not to consider the words but to see their faces and recoil on instinct.
Then the video pivots from discussions of Russia’s interference to news reports about the investigation into collusion. For the intended audience, these are all the same thing. In reality, they aren’t.
So we see, for example, a clip of Mueller saying that his probe “found insufficient evidence of the president’s culpability” — a line that even the conservative Washington Examiner covered in the context of Mueller’s saying that Trump wasn’t exonerated by his investigation.
We see a news report about FBI source Igor Danchenko being indicted on federal charges for lying to the government — but no follow-up about how Danchenko was acquitted at trial.
This is more revealing than it seems. Danchenko was one of several people prosecuted as part of special counsel John Durham’s reevaluation of the Russia probe, a reevaluation initiated by Attorney General William P. Barr. Durham was tapped for the job soon after Barr had successfully downplayed Mueller’s findings. He ultimately failed to bring any criminal convictions against his targets, save one that was first identified by the Justice Department inspector general. His final assessment of the Russia investigation was little different than it would have been at the outset.
But Durham did his job in one respect. He amplified and extended conspiracy theories about the origins of the Russia investigation, and he created a counterweight to Mueller’s work in word count, if little else. It was inevitable that any finding short of “I was wrong all along” would be hailed as proving that Mueller and the FBI — and, really, anyone not on the political right — had unfairly targeted Trump for political reasons. And so it was hailed in that light, despite the lack of evidence that it should be.
The House Judiciary Committee released the video in honor of Durham’s appearance before them on Wednesday. It ends with Durham’s last name slowly coming into view, the way “BATMAN” might in a movie about his crime-fighting exploits. That, too, is telling: The details of Durham’s report aren’t important, nor are his failures. All that matters is that his name is as useful a shorthand as Clinton’s face; both are little more than signifiers that the right is right and the left is wrong.
Perhaps the most telling part of the video isn’t the hagiographic invocation of Durham’s name. Instead, it’s what came right before that.
“‘A giant and very dangerous hoax,’” an anchor for the cable channel CBN says. “That’s how Donald Trump described the Russia collusion probe after special counsel John Durham released his final report this week.”
That’s it in a nutshell: A right-wing media outlet quotes Trump’s overstatement of Durham’s work in an effort to appeal to its audience. For anyone outside of that audience, though, the message of that clip — and the video — is quite different.
Someone is lying to you, yes. But it’s not the people who said that Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016.
The reality is unquestionably closer to the former. Multiple individuals on Trump’s team were in contact with Russian actors and, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III determined, Trump sought to leverage Russia’s obvious interference efforts.
But the latter group is much louder, amplified by right-wing media outlets and commentators. For many of them, the very idea that Russia sought to aid Trump’s election is ridiculous — however well-documented and however obviously aligned with the country’s interest in dividing the United States. The idea that it was ever worth investigating whether Trump assisted that effort therefore attains a new level of ludicrousness.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
This is reinforced constantly in conservative media. There’s no nuance; the entire investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign is simply waved away as dishonest and partisan.
ADVERTISING
Its origins are misrepresented or misunderstood, falsely attributed to a varying range of nefarious actors (the creator of the dossier of unverified reports about collusion, the campaign of Hillary Clinton) instead of the actual trigger (a revelation about a Trump campaign adviser who would eventually admit to lying to investigators). Mueller’s findings are reframed as exonerating; the bipartisan Senate report on Russia’s efforts is largely ignored.
It is only within that context, that right-wing bubble, that the video shared by the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday makes any sense.
“They all lied to you,” the tweet including the video states. It then shows a series of snippets of Democrats and government officials … offering fully accurate assessments of Russia’s efforts.
“They’re doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump,” Hillary Clinton says as the video begins. It’s a snippet from a debate in early-October 2016 — after the federal government had already publicly announced that Russia was trying to interfere in the election. Inside the Barack Obama administration, it was understood that the intent of that interference was to aid Trump, though that wasn’t the White House’s public position.
The interference, Clinton is then shown saying in a later debate, was intended, “17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election.” This prompted some fact-checks — was 17 an accurate way of characterizing it? — but the consensus remained: that was the understood intent.
Next the video skips to White House press secretary Josh Earnest speaking in December 2016.
“There’s ample evidence that was known long before the election and even, in most cases, long before October,” he stated — again, accurately. (The video is accompanied, it’s worth pointing out, with the sort of melodramatic backing music used in movie trailers to imply that something nefarious is afoot.)
Next is Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, saying in July that the release of material stolen from the Democratic National Committee was, according to unnamed experts, occurring “for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.” This would eventually be validated by news reports and Mueller’s investigation but was more speculative at the time. Another member of Clinton’s campaign tamped down the idea in an interview the same day.
The video then skips ahead to Clinton again, saying in August 2020 that “there’s no question any longer the Russians actively interfered in our election to help Donald Trump. There is no hoax.” That was obviously true — but here’s the hated Hillary Clinton saying it, so the expected response is little more than a scoff.
The video continues in this vein, showing people loathed by the right — Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) — making claims about Trump and Russia in contemporaneous interviews. These are at times less black-and-white, such as Schiff’s August 2018 assertion that, in his view, there was “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight.” But the point is not to consider the words but to see their faces and recoil on instinct.
Then the video pivots from discussions of Russia’s interference to news reports about the investigation into collusion. For the intended audience, these are all the same thing. In reality, they aren’t.
So we see, for example, a clip of Mueller saying that his probe “found insufficient evidence of the president’s culpability” — a line that even the conservative Washington Examiner covered in the context of Mueller’s saying that Trump wasn’t exonerated by his investigation.
We see a news report about FBI source Igor Danchenko being indicted on federal charges for lying to the government — but no follow-up about how Danchenko was acquitted at trial.
This is more revealing than it seems. Danchenko was one of several people prosecuted as part of special counsel John Durham’s reevaluation of the Russia probe, a reevaluation initiated by Attorney General William P. Barr. Durham was tapped for the job soon after Barr had successfully downplayed Mueller’s findings. He ultimately failed to bring any criminal convictions against his targets, save one that was first identified by the Justice Department inspector general. His final assessment of the Russia investigation was little different than it would have been at the outset.
But Durham did his job in one respect. He amplified and extended conspiracy theories about the origins of the Russia investigation, and he created a counterweight to Mueller’s work in word count, if little else. It was inevitable that any finding short of “I was wrong all along” would be hailed as proving that Mueller and the FBI — and, really, anyone not on the political right — had unfairly targeted Trump for political reasons. And so it was hailed in that light, despite the lack of evidence that it should be.
The House Judiciary Committee released the video in honor of Durham’s appearance before them on Wednesday. It ends with Durham’s last name slowly coming into view, the way “BATMAN” might in a movie about his crime-fighting exploits. That, too, is telling: The details of Durham’s report aren’t important, nor are his failures. All that matters is that his name is as useful a shorthand as Clinton’s face; both are little more than signifiers that the right is right and the left is wrong.
Perhaps the most telling part of the video isn’t the hagiographic invocation of Durham’s name. Instead, it’s what came right before that.
“‘A giant and very dangerous hoax,’” an anchor for the cable channel CBN says. “That’s how Donald Trump described the Russia collusion probe after special counsel John Durham released his final report this week.”
That’s it in a nutshell: A right-wing media outlet quotes Trump’s overstatement of Durham’s work in an effort to appeal to its audience. For anyone outside of that audience, though, the message of that clip — and the video — is quite different.
Someone is lying to you, yes. But it’s not the people who said that Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016.
