United States | News & Politics

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It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do, after a month of disclosures, capped yesterday by the release of an explosive (and inexplicably long-classified) annex to the report of Special Counsel John Durham. Finally, it seems, we can explain how the idea that Donald Trump was “gaffing his way toward treason” through a secret love affair (really!) with Vladimir Putin and extensive “ties” or “links” with Russia suddenly became The Biggest Story in the World in the summer of 2016.

“THE KISS”: Media outlets were promoting the “love story” as early as March 2016

It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

Now, we know. With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.

One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.

I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge. Now, there’s no doubt. Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple:

At the outset of 2016, Hillary Clinton was in a world of self-inflicted hurt. Having put her entire life as Secretary of State onto a private server, opening up the possibility for an unprecedented penetration of American cybersecurity, she was facing a grave and damaging federal investigation. The story that she “chose not to keep” (read: delete) over 30,000 emails had been broken the previous year, and the details were appalling, with private computer specialist Paul Combetta belatedly wiping them out in what he called an “oh, shit” moment, three weeks after the issuance of a Congressional subpoena.

Clinton’s position was so unsteady by early 2016 that she made Bernie Sanders a real challenger for the Democratic nomination, losing New Hampshire in a landslide and essentially tying in Iowa, where she somehow lost 84% of the vote of women under 30. This was in addition to other problems, like an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation that had been “put on hold” until after the 2016 vote, creeping issues with donors, and negative publicity around husband Bill. This forced her to scramble to do damage-control interviews, many of which just did more damage. An exclusive talk with Scott Pelley of CBS produced the headline, “Hillary Clinton: ‘I’ve Always Tried’ To Tell the Truth.” Watch Clinton’s total inability to avoid lawyering a simple question, and blunt irritation at Pelley’s insistence on asking it:

[YouTube video: Clinton: I Always Try to Tell the Truth]

On top of all this, a cache of correspondence that the Justice Department Inspector General would later describe as “data exfiltrated…from various U.S. victims, including the Executive Office of the President (EoP), the State Department, the U.S. House of Representatives, [and] other federal agencies” had fallen into Russian hands. It contained material potentially very damaging to Clinton. Authorities were soon forced to plan for the possibility that it would get out.

This is the backdrop for the most key piece of information in the classified appendix to the investigation of Special Counsel Durham, whose probe fizzled with a semi-whimper in 2023, describing materials that “individuals affiliated with Russian intelligence services” hacked at some point prior to January 2016. What you need to know: Russians had a pile of emails and correspondence involving “government agencies, non-profit organizations, and think-tanks based in the United States.”

This pile of material ostensibly contained information about conversations between DNC chief Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and two members of the Open Society Foundation, Jeffrey Goldstein and Leonard Benardo. A Russian analysis of these communications described how investigations of possible preferential treatment of Clinton Foundation donors by the Department of State caused a “significant negative reaction” for Clinton within the party, and that Barack Obama was unwilling to “darken the final part of his presidency” with a scandal involving his successor:

Open Society Foundation Senior Vice President Leonard Benardo

That Russian memo, described as delivered to the U.S. by a source called T1, was dated January, 2016. A March, 2016 Russian memo referenced more rumors between American officials and think-tankers, describing how “[the Democratic Party’s] opposition is focused on discrediting Trump…. [a]mong other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian Mafia’”:

Durham on a March, 2016 analysis by Russian intelligence

Papers like the New York Times are already focusing on the idea that some of these email communications and conversations might have been “made by Russian spies,” with some principals like Benardo denying having sent at least one version of one of the key emails, and others saying they didn’t recall conversation. This isn’t a news flash: the report itself addresses inconsistencies in versions of some communications, concluding in one area that later emails from Benardo were a “composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking.” But even the Times says the composites were assembled from “actual emails by different hacking victims.” So what are we talking about?

The figures involved haven’t issued full-throated denials. The strongest statements involve Benardo and Wasserment Schultz insisting in 2017 that, as the Times put it, they “never even met, let alone communicated about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.” Others went the “I don’t recall” route, with former Clinton aide Julianne Smith dreaming up an entry for the Hall of Fame of non-denial denials. She didn’t remember proposing a plan, she said, but said it was not only “possible she had proposed ideas on these topics to the campaign’s leadership,” but that “they may have approved those ideas.” She added it was “also possible someone proposed an idea of seeking to distract attention from the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s use of a private server,” but she didn’t specifically remember, you know, that:

I DON’T REMEMBER DOING IT, BUT MAYBE I PROPOSED SOMETHING, AND MAYBE THAT SOMETHING WAS APPROVED: Julianne Smith

Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan went with “absurd, but maybe!” He called the idea of a “plan” to vilify Trump “ridiculous,” but added he could “not conclusively rule out the possibility”:

RIDICULOUS! BUT MAYBE Jake Sullivan

How should one weigh that “ridiculous”? Here’s Sullivan in 2018, a full six months after news broke that Clinton and the DNC paid for the Steele dossier, denying in an interview with David Axelrod that he had any knowledge of the dossier during the campaign:

[Embedded video cannot be included.]

It’s a more explosive story if one can confirm sordid details like Smith saying it will be a “long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,” or an alleged communication from Benardo to Smith that the FBI will “put more oil into the fire” to help the “plan.” However, the veracity of the details is irrelevant. What matters is that the FBI did “put more oil into the fire.” Even if the emails are art (which I doubt), reality sure as hell imitated it. Both the Bureau and the CIA had this intelligence of the alleged plan as early as March of 2016, took it seriously, and instead of investigating the allegations, investigated… Donald Trump!

This is the smoking gun: intelligence agencies got wind of the rumors early, took them seriously enough to brief President Obama, but instead of investigating the rumors, they made the rumors true.

This brings us to the most embarrassing passage, a Russian summary of how the “plan” was to play out, post-Wikileaks:

During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated… technical structures… in particular, the Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications.

The Russians viewed “leading U.S. publications” as pliant wards of the state who’d print whatever they were handed, as media works in Russia. The idea that the press might push back on any part of the story, like that there was a hack at all (still in doubt, as Crowdstrike’s CEO later admitted in long-concealed testimony), or that Russia might have kompromat on Trump, or that there was any logical connection at all, was not entertained. Russian spooks proving dead right on this question should be fatal to these news organizations. If I were the American author of any of those stories and read those intercepts, I’d eat a grenade today.

A damning detail hanging over all of this is the fate of the T1 material. We already knew the FBI found a dozen different ridiculous reasons not to examine the “trove” during the “Midyear Exam” investigation. We also learned, from the House Intelligence Probe, that the Obama White House refused to let CIA officers see the T1 docs when preparing their Intelligence Community Assessment, citing privilege issues. And we know CIA chief John Brennan, after learning of the “Clinton Plan” intelligence in July of 2016, placed a direct call to counterpart Aleksandr Bortnikov, warning him to stop interfering in the election. The flow of intelligence coming back from Russia ceased at that point.

As Hans Mahncke notes, it sure looked like Brennan was at least indirectly signaling to Russia that the Americans had a way of accessing key Russian documents. A more cynical reporter than me might conclude that just as FBI leaders didn’t want subordinates to look at intelligence embarrassing to Clinton, and Obama didn’t want CIA analysts seeing the same stuff, the CIA chief didn’t want any more damaging leaks reaching anyone at all, and was willing to sabotage a intelligence gold mine to cauterize the Clinton leak. Actually, screw caution: that’s what it was. Beyond being strong circumstantial evidence the documents really did describe a cover-up, this was a brazen intelligence gift to adversaries, which should put Brennan in Robert Hanssen’s old cell in the Florence Supermax for the rest of his liver-spotted life.

Lastly: the omission of all this T1 material and the “Clinton plan” intelligence from subsequent “investigations” into Trump-Russia links proves they were all fakes, in furtherance of a coverup. At minimum, it should have been included as an element to consider when weighing evidence. As Durham noted, the FBI “was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or... the product of Russian disinformation.”

Crucially, agencies gained this knowledge without taking “any investigative steps” into the veracity of the underlying material. As Aaron Maté points out, the Washington Post even today is trying to claim in a headline that the “FBI Investigated, Never Verified, Purported Clinton Plan,” when they never investigated at all.

These people just can’t stop lying. The whole thing is one endless lie, the reason for which is now clear. Hillary Clinton got in trouble being dumb, tried to save herself by doing something dumber, and all of American officialdom backed the play. That’s it. A last period of denials awaits, but they’ll fizzle like the rest, after which not much will be left but blunt truth — and hopefully, consequences.