Really
Philip Bump does a nice job of laying out the contours of the latest Trump nonsense about the Russia probe. In case you’ve missed it, here’s the basic idea:
On Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel — chosen for that role in large part because of his commitment to undermining the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — declared on social media that his team had uncovered a document, “along with thousands of other documents, buried in a back room at the FBI.” A classified annex to the report compiled by Special Counsel John Durham, Patel insisted that the document revealed “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
Patel’s post quoted writer John Solomon, who called the annex a smoking gun that, if “authenticated by further investigation” would show a plot by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to invent a Trump-Russia link. Oh, and rest assured, George Soros got a mention, too.
Solomon, along with Patel, had been tapped by Donald Trump in 2022 to serve as the then-former president’s representatives for records held by the National Archives. The point of that appointment appeared even at the time to have been to cherry-pick available material to make a case that the Russia investigation was a political hack job.
The effort simply took a few years to manifest.
The current allegation
The problem here is that the annex had been investigated further, by John Durham. The New York Times writes that Durham had come to the conclusion that the email at the heart of the claim was “probably manufactured” by Russian intelligence, the source of the email in the first place. Journalist Marcy Wheeler, who has tracked all of this closely for years, thinks that probably overstates Durham’s conclusion — but paints a compelling picture for why he should have. Either way, Durham relegated it to an annex when, if his probe had shown it to be legitimate or useful, it would have largely made the case he was seeking to prove.
The other thing is: none of this is new. Not only because Durham looked at it during his investigation, itself an effort to formalize a means of undercutting the public understanding of the overlap of Trump and Russia in 2016. But the core claim was made public back in 2020, in the waning days of Trump’s failed effort to secure a second consecutive term in office.
At that point, John Ratcliffe (now the director of the CIA) was serving as Director of National Intelligence, despite his thin resume. But he was a Trump ally, which one might fairly assume is why he first produced the allegation that Patel revived this week. There was a July meeting in which Clinton’s campaign discussed tying Trump to Russia, see, and that was how all of this started! Oh, also, this was a product of Russian intelligence analysis and the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
It didn’t get much traction in part because of that (warranted) caveat and in part because of the other tumult of the campaign. (Trump had just been diagnosed with covid-19, for example.) It also didn’t get much traction because there wasn’t the same investment by Trump’s allies in debunking the Russia allegations — and because the effort to cast all of the Russia-Trump investigation as a “hoax” was still relatively young. Yes, Trump was calling all of it a hoax since his first months in office. But it took a while for that idea to percolate out to his base and, more importantly, for the right-wing media universe to distill the disparate, cherry-picked elements of that purported hoax into something that served as a convincing post hoc explanation for what had happened. By 2025, by now, Trump had both the burning desire for vengeance and the inoculation of his base necessary for the appointment of unabashed loyalists to intelligence positions and for a full-on assault on the reality of what had happened.
The New York Times has some details:
Where did the information come from?
In 2016, a Dutch spy agency hacked a Russian spy agency and copied internal memos and messages by Russian intelligence analysts. The Russians were writing reports about various topics based on the emails of American victims of Russian hacking operations. The Dutch shared a copy of the trove with the United States.
From the beginning, U.S. officials have said, they viewed the material with caution. Among other things, some reports were said to make inconsistent or false claims — raising the possibility that Russians had exaggerated things for their own purposes, or knew the server was compromised and deliberately mixed in disinformation.
What is the new report?
It is a 29-page annex to Mr. Durham’s 2023 report. The annex, which was declassified on Thursday, quotes the purported July 27 email and reveals that there was a related one on July 25.
The report also shows how Mr. Durham expended significant effort trying to prove that the emails were real, but gathered evidence that led him to conclude that Russian spies likely concocted them.
[…]
The two crucial emails were most likely manufactured by Russian spies, who appear to have assembled them in part using passages lifted from various hacked messages written by people other than Mr. Benardo.
“The office’s best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others,” Mr. Durham’s annex says
In other words, it’s all bullshit. But we knew that. If Durham couldn’t make it stick — and you know he badly wanted to — there’s nothing there.