About that alleged Durham bombshell
Tim Miller does the job on this phony outcry in which Trump is running around saying “where do I go to get my reputation back?” Lolololol…
More than six years after the Russian government began a wide-ranging cyber attack on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and our political system, MAGA Republicans believe they finally have evidence that this scheme’s guilty party was neither Russia nor the Trump campaign that cheered on the attack, but Clinton herself.
This latest attempt at victim-blaming is premised on information revealed during the trial of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who has been charged with lying to the FBI when he did not reveal his association with Clinton at a meeting during which he turned over data to the bureau that purported to show additional ties between Trump and Russia. Sussmann denies that he was working on behalf of the campaign.
The specific evidence Sussmann was providing demonstrated that there was an unusual connection between servers affiliated with the Trump organization and those connected to Alfa Bank—Russia’s largest private financial-services company. The evidence presented was based on Domain Name System (DNS) logs identified by a team of computer scientists.
Whether there was anything nefarious going on between Alfa and Trump remains a bit of a mystery. The FBI eventually closed the book on this lead—more on this a moment—resulting in a presumption that any suggestion of impropriety was false. But a satisfactory explanation for the DNS pings has never really been provided. If you want to nerd out on the various possibilities ranging from “random coincidence” to “there’s something fishy here,” the New Yorker did a deep dive on the available evidence back in 2018.
The part of Sussmann’s trial that has the Trump crowd rubbing their nipples is testimony from Clinton 2016 campaign manager Robby Mook in which he revealed that the candidate was briefed on the potentially dubious Alfa Bank accusations and was fine with the campaign’s decision to share the information with reporters. (Point of fact: Many in the Trump orbit have stated that Clinton approved the Alfa Bank oppo’s dissemination, but Mook testified that he told her only after the campaign had shared it with a reporter.)
This rather mundane bit of opposition-research dissemination was treated as a bombshell in the conservative press, where it has been presented as the long-yearned-for evidence that when it comes to Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, it was Hillary who perpetrated a scheme on poor innocent Donny Trump, not the other way around.
“Hillary Clinton Did It,” screamed the headline from the wizened graybeards of the Wall Street Journal editorial board over the weekend. According to the WSJ, Mook’s testimony about sharing the undeveloped Alfa Bank information with the press proves that “Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage” as Hillary. Интересная претензия, Comrades!
Lil’ Donny Trump Jr. chimed in, arguing that Mook’s testimony somehow proves that Hillary was “behind the Russia, Russia, Russia smears against Trump.” Elon Musk tweeted that she advanced a “hoax.” And myriad troll accounts started retweeting my old article mocking the MAGAverse’s Russia Hoax false-flag theories (which you should really treat yourself to if you haven’t).
Among the problems with the reaction from the WSJ, Jr. and assorted other MAGA media influencers: Mook’s admission didn’t come close to proving any scheme orchestrated by Hillary. The only new information he provided is that the candidate said she was okay with her campaign having shared research with reporters about potential ties between Trump and Russia amid an unprecedented cyberattack on her which had been perpetrated by Russia and, at minimum, weaponized by her opponent. (As a former Republican opposition research aficionado, I can testify that passing along not-fully-verified information to journalists in the hopes that they could suss out more details is a time-honored, bipartisan practice.)
In short: The MAGA crowd’s big gotcha is that Hillary was okay with her campaign sharing rumors of questionable veracity about her political opponent with reporters and then tweeting the published information.
Seriously, that’s all they have.
The friends of Donald Trump are upset that someone might have made an accusation that they weren’t completely, totally certain was true.
Donald Trump.
A man who can barely open his mouth without passing along a “people are saying” smear. The king of apophasis himself.
Try not to go blind from the eye-roll.
It’s too much. But they are going with it. And as Miller concludes, this stuff works. Half the country will believe there was something nefarious about the Clinton campaign pushing oppo research on Trump which somehow proves she was behind the whole Russia scandal. (Some people are very stupid. And there are a lot of them.) I mean, we have virtually the entire Republican party believing that the 2020 election was stolen despite the fact that there is ZERO evidence of fraud and Biden won the election by 7 million popular votes and 306 to 232 electoral votes. These people will believe anything.