Byron York's Daily Memo: A guide to Clinton dirty tricks
A GUIDE TO CLINTON DIRTY TRICKS. Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, Secretary of State, and 2016 presidential candidate, is deflecting again. Recent revelations from a federal investigation have suggested that her campaign engaged in dirty tricks in the race against Donald Trump six years ago. Those revelations, of course, come on top of earlier disclosures that she engaged in what might be called the ultimate dirty trick, the Steele dossier, in the same campaign.
Now that there is some attention being paid to these matters, Clinton is lashing out against Trump and some media outlets. In a speech in New York last week, she said, "By the way, they've been coming after me again in case you might have noticed. It's funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get." Clinton referred to prosecutors in New York who are trying to find charges to level against Trump about the accounting valuations of his properties. "So now, his accountants have fired him and the investigations draw closer to him, and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up," Clinton said. "Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they're getting awfully close to actual malice."
By throwing in the phrase "actual malice," which is the legal standard for defamation involving a public figure, Clinton appeared to be threatening a libel suit against Fox News. It seems impossible to believe that a figure with as much baggage as Clinton would sue given the discovery into her own actions that such a suit would involve. But who knows? Maybe she will. (As a disclaimer, I should mention that I am a Fox News contributor.)
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In any event, the recent revelations, and Clinton's reaction, seem a good reason to go over the tactics she and those working for her campaign employed in the 2016 campaign against Trump, and specifically the effort to tie Trump to Russia. It's a pretty ugly story.
Clinton started right after news broke, during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked. Nearly everyone was pointing the finger at Russia for the hack — that turned out to be correct, confirmed by multiple investigations. But Clinton went further than that. Campaign manager Robby Mook appeared on ABC to hint that there was some sort of secret quid pro quo between Trump and Russia involving the hack. "It was very concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian," Mook said, referring to false stories that had come out of the GOP convention just a few days earlier.
The New York Times took note of Mook's words, reporting that Clinton and her aides were making the Trump-Russia allegation a "theme" of the campaign. "It was a remarkable moment," the Times wrote. "Even at the height of the Cold War, it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton's campaign, as part of an attempt to portray Mr. Trump not only as an isolationist, but also as one who would go soft on confronting Russia..."
At this point, it would be a good idea to note what everyone already knows: A special counsel, Robert Mueller, conducted a two-year investigation into the Trump-Russia charge, which came to be known by the shorthand "collusion." Acting with unlimited resources and all the power of U.S. law enforcement, Mueller could not establish that collusion ever happened and did not allege that a single American, from Donald Trump down, took part in any such scheme.
Clinton did not stop with making allegations on television. After Mook's comments, the Clinton campaign engaged the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion then hired a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to compile what became known as the Steele dossier — a series of elaborately false claims that the Trump campaign was working with Russia to influence the election. Paid by Clinton and the DNC, Steele came up with a list of spectacular allegations.
First, Steele said there was a "well-developed conspiracy" between Trump and Russia and that a low-level campaign adviser named Carter Page was at the center of it. Then, Steele said the Russians offered Page an insanely huge bribe, billions of dollars, to end U.S. sanctions if Trump became president. Then, Steele said Trump fixer Michael Cohen secretly met with Russians in Prague to work out the details of collusion. And then, the piece de resistance of Steele's work was what became known as the "pee tape" — the allegation that, in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, Trump watched as prostitutes performed a kinky sex act while Russian spy cameras captured the whole scene on video.
It was all rubbish. Steele, the supposed master spy, didn't appear to have real sources in Russia. Another special counsel, John Durham, discovered that Steele's "sources" were mostly one man, Igor Danchenko, who worked at liberal Washington think tank the Brookings Institution. Sometimes, Danchenko passed on allegations from a Clinton-related PR man named Charles Dolan, who sent in stuff that he had read in the newspapers, characterizing it as coming from sources close to Trump. The dossier was an elaborate joke.
And yet, Clinton's operatives got a willing FBI to take it seriously. Then-bureau Director James Comey pushed to include information from the dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment, which was the intelligence community's investigation of Russian hacking. The FBI also used the dossier to win court approval to wiretap Carter Page. (The FBI's then-No. 2, Andrew McCabe, told Congress that absent the dossier, the FBI would not have sought the wiretap.) Then, the FBI engaged confidential human sources to secretly record conversations with Page. Of course, the FBI's plan was not to stop with Page but to look into the inner workings of the Trump campaign. So it's fair to say Hillary Clinton played a critical role in pressing the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign.
Of course, Clinton's real goal was to get the allegations into the public discussion before the election. Steele tried desperately to do that but mostly failed. Then, in January 2017, Comey and the nation's other intelligence chiefs had a briefing with Trump, then the president-elect. Afterward, Comey, in a one-on-one meeting, briefed Trump on the pee tape. It came out of the blue for Trump; Comey dashed down to an FBI vehicle to type up his impressions for the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team.
Then came the big score. News of the meeting leaked to the media. And then, amid the furor over Trump being briefed on some sort of compromising information — for a while, it wasn't clear what that information was — Buzzfeed published the whole dossier. The nation's political conversation exploded, all over the laughably false contents of the dossier. It was an incredible, if belated, payoff for Hillary Clinton, the moving force behind it all. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that with the dossier, Clinton pulled off one of the most successful dirty tricks in American political history.
That was dirty trick No. 1. Then there was Alfa-Bank. In late summer 2016, with the presidential campaign running in high gear, a couple of lawyers working for the Clinton campaign tried to sell the press on a story. A group of researchers, they claimed, had discovered a suspicious number of computer communications between a Russian institution known as Alfa-Bank and the Trump Organization. The lawyers claimed that the data "demonstrated the existence of a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and [Alfa-Bank]," wrote special counsel Durham. But the data demonstrated no such thing; later research showed the Alfa-Bank allegation was no more reliable than the pee tape.
In September 2016, with the election six weeks away, the Clinton lawyers took the Alfa-Bank tale to the FBI. The Clinton hope was twofold. One, perhaps the FBI would look into it. And two, the press, which were skeptical about the story, would take it more seriously if they knew the FBI was investigating. But little came of it. Slate published a story about Alfa-Bank that was big, ominous, and wrong. When it came out, Clinton tried to build interest in the story, tweeting, "It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia," followed by, "Four things you need to know about the Trump Organization's secret server to communicate with Russian Alfa Bank." Clinton also tweeted a statement from a top campaign adviser, Jake Sullivan, now President Joe Biden's national security adviser.
"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow," Sullivan wrote, as tweeted by Clinton. "This secret hotline could be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide ... We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia's meddling in our elections." But nothing much happened, publicly at least. Lacking evidence, the story went nowhere.
As big as Clinton had hit with the dossier, she missed with Alfa-Bank. But as they had with the dossier, the Clinton forces fed a false story to the media, and to the FBI, in hopes that it might catch on and damage Trump while there was still time before the election. It was another dirty trick, although far less effective than the dossier.
The third and final dirty trick is described in a recent Durham court filing. The filing describes yet another effort by the Clinton campaign and tech researchers, who in this case worked, in Durham's words, to "mine internet data," some of it "non-public and/or proprietary," searching for information that could be used to claim a Trump-Russia connection. Among the secret data that were "exploited," according to Durham, was internet traffic from Trump Tower, from Donald Trump's Central Park West apartment building, and from the Executive Office of the President. The Clinton-aligned tech researchers, Durham says, "had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement," a government contract to provide tech services. They then "exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP's [internet] traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump."
The work began around July 2016, when the Clinton campaign started to devote significant effort to make a supposed Trump-Russia tie a "theme" of the campaign. The Durham filing strongly suggests the tech team was looking for dirt it could give the Clinton campaign to use against Trump as the presidential race headed to a close. The tech executive involved "tasked these researchers to mine internet data to establish 'an inference' and 'narrative' tying then-candidate Trump to Russia," Durham said. "In doing so, [the executive] indicated he was trying to please certain 'VIPs,' referring to individuals at [Clinton's law firm] and the Clinton campaign." Unfortunately for Clinton, the effort failed.
But it did not end with the campaign. Durham describes the Clinton lawyer, on Feb. 9, 2017, when Trump had been president for 20 days, giving the CIA data gathered by the tech researchers. The lawyer told the CIA that the data "demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations."
So, in yet another example, Clinton used her lawyers and various contractors and supporters to come up with false allegations against Trump, which the Clinton side could then pitch to reporters individually or use as the basis for general appeals to the media to investigate supposed collusion between Trump and Russia. The effort took on a frantic tone in the final days of the campaign, when it became widely known that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Clinton's secret email server. Don't look at Hillary Clinton, her top aides said — look at Trump and Russia. "If you're in the business of releasing information about investigations on presidential candidates, release everything you have on Donald Trump," Mook said, addressing the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016. "Release the information on his connections to the Russians."
So there are three examples — the dossier, Alfa-Bank, and the data-mining operation — in which Clinton sought to push false or unverified stories to the press. And even though she did not have the goods on Trump, her operatives also tried to enlist the nation's most powerful intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the effort — to turn the FBI, in particular, into an arm of the Clinton oppo research shop. It was an effort that outlived the campaign itself, with mixed results. By any measure, the dossier was a smashing success: The damage it did Trump lasted throughout his presidency. Clinton could not replicate her success with the Alfa-Bank story or the data-mining operation. But she tried.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-a-guide-to-clinton-dirty-tricks
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