AStroll Through Memory Lane: The Clinton Campaign and the Press

My previous post pointing out how hostile relations were between the Clinton Campaign and the FBI in 2016 is mostly warmup to allegations that the Clinton Campaign and the mainstream media worked hand-in-glove in 2016 to link Trump to Russia. This posting is largely inspired by an article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how unfairly the press hounded Donald Trump about Russia and how his belief that the entire system was hopelessly rigged against him was, if not justified, at least understandable. And I will concede, the press was all too credulous about Trump-Russia conspiracy theories after he was elected But this was at least partly an attempt to correct their general disregard of the issue before he was elected.

The word cloud to the left is revealing. If you look closely enough "Russian" and "Russia are in there, but it takes some looking to find them. The dominant words are "speech," "immigration," "president," "make," "convention," and "Mexico."

Nonetheless Jeff Gerth, the author of the article, finds some articles linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 election, and some attempts by the Clinton Campaign to cultivate Trump/Russia stories that failed. So I suppose that if you focus single mindedly on the two small mentions of "Russia" and "Russian" in the word cloud, you can create the impression of an all consuming obsession by the press with Trump and Russia in 2016 -- but only if you airbrush out everything else.

In 2015, Gerth says, presumably approvingly, the press was far more concerned about Hillary Clinton's ties to Russia. These included a paid speech by Bill Clinton in Moscow, Russian donations to the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary's attempts at improving relations with Russia while serving as Secretary of State. Gerth sees the entire attempt by the Clinton campaign to tie Trump to Russia as an unfair smear to deflect attention from her own Russia ties, and her hiring of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in those terms. It was only after the disclosure in June, 2016, that Russia had hacked the DNC (which Gerth seems to call into question) that the Washington Post ran its first article on Trump's suspicious financial ties to Russia. Gerth found some evidence that the reporter had communicated with Fusion GPS in writing the story, and that Fusion GPS contributed. To Gerth, this appears to wholly discredit the article.

Can we take a step back here. Trump was running for President on a pro-Russia platform. In my opinion, it was not crazy in 2016 to seek an alliance with Russia to defeat Islamic terrorism, and that, in itself, was not sinister. What was concerning was the Trump seemed contemptuous of the whole idea of international cooperation or of having any allies at all. He showed no interest in friendly relations with any country whatever -- except Russia. It was not unreasonable to find that problematic, and perhaps in need of further investigation. And the article's reports on Trump's business ties to Russia were accurate, even understated.* Also accurate were reports that two of Trump's advisors had lived in Russia and worked for Russian companies; that his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was an advisor to a pro-Russia Ukrainian president; and that Michael Flynn, considered as a possible vice president had attended a Russia Today banquet and was seated near Putin. Perhaps one can dismiss reporting of the lower-level advisors as mere bigotry or McCarthyism. But if a campaign manager or possible vice presidential candidate have unusual Russia ties, that really is newsworthy and deserves reporting. Even if one of the sources is an opposition researcher for the opposing candidate.

The next article Gerth cites is a Washington Post editorial made on July 18, 2016 during the Republican convention. The article blamed Trump for removing a portion of the Republican platform calling for lethal aid to Ukraine. This later proved to be false and quite innocent. And, given that the US was not supplying lethal aid to Ukraine at the time, it would not have been all that important even if true. So yes, this is an unfair smear based on speculation. It was followed by two opinion columns using that erroneous speculation and Trump's general hostility to NATO as evidence that he would promote Putin's interests at the expense of the US. Gerth treats dissent from this view as an extraordinary outlier, but in fact concerns about Trump and Russia were far from center stage at this time.

The Democratic Convention began on July 26, and Wikileaks significantly disrupted the convention by releasing hacked DNC e-mails showing that the party leaders clearly favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries. This badly split the Democrats at a time they needed to come together. Gerth concedes that this was "not helpful" to Clinton but adds that it "energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators." Well, yes, up until then everyone had just assumed that the Russian hack of the DNC server was just intelligence gathering. To have the e-mails turn up with Wikileaks, which released them in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to the Clinton campaign does legitimately give rise to questions about whether Russia was trying to get Trump elected. The concerns are legitimate, even when matched with false accusations that Trump was behind the change in the Republican platform. 

The purportedly innocent Trump then blundered into the trap by saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.”  Was he serious or joking?  Gerth accepts that it was an innocent joke.  In fact, there are two strong pieces of evidence to the contrary.  One was, as the Mueller report revealed, the Russians took the comment very seriously and significantly escalated their attempts to hack into Clinton's e-mails directly.  They were not successful. But Trump cannot be held responsible for how the Russians take his comments.  Far more significantly, Trump really did task Michael Flynn to cruise the dark web, looking for Hillary's e-mails, unconcerned with whether the e-mails might come from a hostile intelligence service.  But even if Trump was joking, it was a legitimately scandalous joke. The proper response for a patriotic candidate to a hostile intelligence service targeting his opponent is to make clear that such targeting is utterly unacceptable, and that, whatever our internal differences, Americans stand together in rejecting foreign meddling.

In August, Gerth sees three sinister events.  One was attempts by the Clinton campaign to interest the press in stories about an alleged link between Trump Tower and Russia's Alfa Bank. The press did not bite. The second was a story in the New York Times about reported payments from Ukraine's pro-Russia party to Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort.  The third was Harry Reid, Democratic leader in the Senate, dropping dark hints about Trump-Russia collision. As for the first, Gerth presents the goods to show that the Clinton campaign really was trying to plant stories in the press.  Does he truly think this is something unprecedented or even unusual?  Candidates seek to plant stories in the press all the time.  In any event, the press did not bite.  Second, the story about payoffs to Manafort got him fired as campaign manager, and rightly so. Manafort would ultimately acknowledge that the amounts were right but deny that the payments were in cash, rather than wire transfers. In any event, he was prosecuted for the payoffs.  Not known at the time, and certainly not mentioned by Gerth -- Manafort was secretly providing campaign polling data to a Russian spy.  As with the report on Trump's business ties with Russia, the public report was actually less bad than the reality.  And finally, Harry Reid's hints were based on the Steele Dossier and were false. Reid had a longstanding history of fighting dirty.

In fact, at about this time the Steele Dossier was beginning to circulate among some of the leading journalists. All but one declined to publish, finding the work somewhere between too unsubstantiated to outright "bullshit." The one exception was a September 23 article in Yahoo News by veteran national security reporter Michael Isikoff reported that Trump advisor Carter Page was under investigation by US intelligence agencies for his activities during a July trip to Moscow.  The article speculated that Page might have attempted to bypass US policy by setting up an informal channel of communications about lifting sanction and might have met with (named) sanctioned individuals.  The trip to Moscow was real and Page used the opportunity to criticize US promotion of democracy and human rights as self-serving hypocrisy.  However, the meetings with sanctioned individuals were more unsubstantiated rumors from the Steele Dossier.  (The article omits some even more sensational allegations).

So, from June to September, 2016, the press's purported obsession with Trump/Russian and sinister collaboration with Hillary Clinton consisted of:

• An accurate article about Trump's business ties to Russia
• A sincere but wrong opinion piece, based on speculation, attributing to Trump the change in the Republican platform to leave out calls for lethal weapons to Ukraine
• Two somewhat overwrought opinion pieces expressing alarm over Trump's proposed anti-NATO, pro-Russia outlook that proposed to reverse consensus US foreign policy since WWII
• Hillary Clinton seeking to convince the press that Russian intelligence agencies hacking DNC e-mails and releasing them to Wikileaks to publish in the manner calculated to cause her maximum damage was an attempt to get Trump elected
• A broadly accurate story about payments by pro-Russia politicians to Trump's campaign manager
• Sinister insinuations by the Senate Democratic leader based on false stories in the Steele Dossier
• An inaccurate Yahoo News story based on the Steele Dossier
• The Clinton campaign seeking to interest the press in a dubious story about Trump server ties to a Russian bank, and the press refusing to publish.

Dare I say that some of this seems accurate, fair, and well within reasonable bounds. Some are unfair and hyperbolic opinion pieces, but election campaigns are rife with unfair and hyperbolic opinion pieces.  Some are attempts by the campaign to manipulate the press, which as absolutely standard behavior for politicians, with entirely appropriate resistance by the press.  And two stories -- the insinuations by Harry Reid and Yahoo were based on the Steele Dossier and clearly turned out out to be false. Both Reid and Isikoff can both be fairly rebuked and told they should have known better.  

But this hardly looks like a media obsession with Trump-Russia, or a hand-in-glove cooperation with the Clinton campaign.

It is also a case of acute tunnel vision, focusing exclusively on what the press said about Trump and Russia and completely ignoring, not only what it was saying about Trump on other subjects, but what it was saying about Hillary.  The word cloud on the right makes clear just how contentious Hillary's relationship with the press actually was during the 2016 campaign.  

Unlike Trump, a single overreaching theme dominated for Clinton -- emails.  And the other major words are also revealing, "lie," "health," "scandal," "speech," "people," "president," "foundation," "campaign."  Some of these words admittedly are neutral, but even "health" refers to exaggerated rumors of illness and "foundation" refers to a series of ginned up scandals.  The media was, I agree, generally hostile to Trump during the 2016 election.  But they were considerably more hostile to Hillary, as the word cloud makes clear.

I quote Gallup:

The top substantive words Americans use when reporting on Trump include "speech," "president," "immigration," "Mexico," "convention," "campaign" and "Obama." Though Clinton has attacked Trump on several issues related to his character, no specific words representing negative traits have "stuck" to Trump the way the word "email" has to Clinton. Instead, Americans' recollection of information about Trump shifts in response to his campaign schedule, speeches, comments and the resulting controversies that sometimes arise from those comments.

The same article even included a table of the top stories about each candidate, week by week from mid-July to mid-September:

The table shows the leading stories about the two candidates over ten weeks.  Hillary Clinton's e-mails were her lead story in eight of the ten weeks.  On the week of the convention, the e-mails were merely the second story, the convention, with the damaging materials released by Wikileaks, was first.  The one week in which e-mails were not a leading story was when Hillary collapsed at the 9-11 commemoration, and stories about her health predominated.  Lie, foundation, scandal, FBI, and release are also major stories, all reinforcing the impression that Hillary was suspect.

On the weeks of the Democratic convention, Russia was the top story about Trump, presumably because of his "Russia, if you're listening" remark.  It was not among the top stories any other week, with the possible exception of the Week of September 12-18, in which the third word is "bear."  (I don't know what that is about). Admittedly, some were unfavorable for other reasons.  For instance, August 1-7 appears to focus on his comments insulting a Muslim family whose son was killed in Iraq.  The focus of Mexico and immigration is no doubt a YMMV matter, as is normal with any policy focus.

But this summary should make clear that the idea that the media was in the tank with Hillary and obsessing over Trump's Russia ties during the election is clearly false.**

Of course, this account only goes up to mid-September and omits all of October.  But even Gerth admits that Trump-Russia did not dominate October press coverage.  The intelligence community did put out a brief statement that they believed Russia was behind the hacks, but this was "overshadowed" by the Access Hollywood tape and Wikileaks publication of John Podesta (Hillary's campaign manager) e-mails.  Several things here are notable.  One is the the Access Hollywood tape was the only scandal that really stuck to Trump during the campaign and consumed a significant time with negative stories.  Presumably if Gallup's word cloud and lead stories had extended into October, they would have looked different.  Second, the Podesta e-mails were also part of the Russian hacks.  Gerth acknowledges the allegation, but seems to see it as unsubstantiated.  Finally, as a major social media promoter of the Podesta e-mails admitted, there was nothing "particularly weird or strange" about the Podesta e-mails, but they somehow nonetheless became a scandal.

Gerth does reveal some interesting things that were happening behind the scenes.  Members of the Clinton campaign took a strange pattern of communications between Russia's Alfa Bank and Trump tower and tried to convince the New York Times to publish. Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporter, found the story intriguing, but the FBI persuaded him to hold off until it investigated.  The FBI investigated, found nothing there, and persuaded the Times not to publish.   In mid-October, Times reports also learned that Trump was under counterintelligence investigation by the FBI.  The FBI convinced them to keep the story under wraps.

Naturally, Gerth does not mention the FBI's October 28 bombshell that it was reopening the e-mails investigation, which may very well have sunk the Clinton campaign.  He does mention October 31 stories by Slate, reporting the Alfa Bank server and by Mother Jones, revealing the existence of the Steele Dossier.  Both stories were in outlets that did not truly qualify as mainstream media -- liberal advocacy publications with relatively small readership. And neither one gained any real traction. Both seemed too much like desperate flailing by a campaign that knew it was in serious trouble.  Lichtblau of the New York Times actually followed p with a story saying that the FBI has investigated the server and found nothing to it.  And, as we all know, Trump ended up winning the election, probably largely as a result of the FBI's last minute revelations.

So what is the scandal here that Gerth is pointing to?  If he is trying to argue that the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media were working closely together to hurt Trump, he comes much closer to making the exact opposite case.  At most, he shows the Clinton campaign trying to interest reporters in various stories and generally failing.  This is completely normal behavior.  I suppose one could say the scandal was that the Times was being too deferential to the FBI and should have gone ahead and published stories that he agreed to keep under wraps.  Certainly the current lesson from Republicans about Twitter heading FBI warnings and blocking links to the Hunter Biden laptop story seems to be that the government has not business telling media what stories to publish. But somehow I don't think that is what Gerth has in mind.

Nonetheless, as Gerth admits, it was the lesson that the Times took away from the election.  Coming down hard on Clinton because they assumed she would win, the FBI and the media paved the way for a Trump victory.

None of this is to deny that the news media overcompensated in the opposite direction by being all too credulous about the Steele Dossier and all too eager to believe the worst about Trump and Russia.  But any attempt to suggest that this began during the 2016 campaign is flatly false.

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*The article mentions prior negotiations about a Trump Tower in Moscow but says that the plan had long since been abandoned.  In fact, such negotiations were underway in the early stages of the campaign and ended only when news of the Russian hacks came out.

**My own stroll down memory lane from December 8, 2016 is revealing.  I looked at the Gallup article and lamented that there were so many Trump scandals that none ever seemed to stick, and speculated on what might have happened if there had been just one.  My candidates for the one scandal were the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump University lawsuit, or general financial shadiness.  Trump-Russia did not even occur to me.  My sole mention of Russia was to say that the Clinton e-mail revelations were carefully timed by "Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, the FBI, the Russians, and Wikileaks" to do maximum damage, with the clear disclaimer that the only coordination was between Russia and Wikileaks.