Good morning! I planned to write a Sunday mailbag issue, but ended up getting stuck on one reader question I wanted to give a thorough answer to (which also made me think of another, somewhat related situation). So, here goes. As always with the mailbag columns, the full thing will be for paid subscribers.
I. Hoax
Let’s start with the reader question.
Q: Did you believe the Russia hoax in 2016? What do you think of the evidence now?
Here is a list of things I’ve believed since, well, if not 2016 (when much of this was only going on behind the scenes), then at least 2018 or 2019:
Russia meddled in the 2016 election by trolling on social media in an attempt to sow discord in America, and by hacking email accounts associated with the Clinton campaign.
Moscow did not tamper with any actual voting machines or election infrastructure, at least not successfully enough to change any literal votes.
Their online efforts also didn’t really have much of a persuasive effect on the election.
The investigation into Trump and Russia may have been launched on a somewhat flawed basis, but once that investigation was initiated, it turned up several odd ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
No evidence, however, ever emerged of any collusion between the two entities.
Several years later, I’ve yet to encounter much of any evidence that has really swayed me from any of these beliefs. The reader question is difficult to answer because it’s hard to say what is meant by “the Russia hoax”: if it’s the allegation that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election, I believed that years ago and I believe that now. (In other words: Not a hoax.) If it’s alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, I believed then that there were several connective points that were suspicious but also that Democrats were exaggerating their most salacious claims of collusion, and I believe that now. (Or: Hoax is strong, since there was some basis for suspicion, but I agree Democrats overplayed their hand.)
A few weeks ago, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents that she said would blow the lid off of Russiagate. “The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government,” she said in a statement. “Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.”
Those are, obviously, serious allegations. The statement comes with a list of claims accusing the Obama administration of hyping up Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, as well as a document titled “the Russia Hoax memo” that purports to give evidence to these claims.
I read it, and I can’t say it changed many of my priors. Much of the memo is dedicated to chronicling the intelligence community’s conclusions, during the 2016 race, that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.”
Several of the documents unearthed by Gabbard stress this point. But, as I already said, I never thought that Russia manipulated the 2016 vote count and — while I’m sure there are various online (and perhaps even real-life) actors that suggested otherwise — I simply don’t recall it being a main tenor of Democratic allegations against Trump during his first term. It certainly was never a public contention of the supposedly treasonous Obama administration, or of the “coup-plotters” on the Mueller team.
The memo goes on to quote then-President Obama, speaking in December 2016, as saying: “What I was concerned about in particular was making sure that [Russia’s hacking of Clinton campaign emails] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that, that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly. And tell him to cut it out.”
Very notably, nowhere in that Obama quote does the former president allege what Gabbard is pretending he is alleging, that Russia successfully manipulated the literal results of the election. (He only says that he was “concerned” about that, due to their other campaign-related hacking.) Gabbard is accusing people of fomenting a coup by showing that they privately said something didn’t happen that they also never publicly said happened.
The only real finding about Obama himself in these documents is that, in a December 2016 meeting, he tasked his intelligence advisers with putting together an intelligence assessment on Russian interference that he wanted completed before the end of his term in office.
It seems entirely plausible that Obama’s expedited timeline led to a rushed analysis, which is obviously not ideal. But that feels like a far, far cry from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim that Obama “went to great and nefarious lengths to try to thwart the will of the people and sabotage his successor” or Trump’s claim that Obama committed treason. The only evidence they surface to support those allegations is him asking for an assessment of a foreign country trying to meddle in an election. The entire “coup” seems to have consisted of him requesting a report.
The closest Gabbard comes to accusing the Obama team of something actually sinister is here, when she states that the intelligence community assessed that Russia is “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means”:
That certainly would cut against what we have been told for years about Russia in 2016. But this bullet point is incredibly misleading. If you look at the actual documents Gabbard released, you can see that the full quote (from the then-deputy director of national intelligence) says that Russia is “probably not (and will not) trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” (Emphasis mine.) That is a very different claim, one that moves Gabbard’s claim down from being a new revelation to something we have long known. Yawn.
The intelligence community never told the public that Russia used cyber means to influence the vote count, so it really isn’t shocking to learn new information about this non-allegation.
There is no proof in the new documents, however, that what Russia was accused of using cyber means to do in 216 — sow discord and hack the Clinton emails — was a hoax. In fact, Gabbard’s memo agrees that Russia did so. “Note: There is still supporting evidence indicating the Russian government directed hacking of the DNC and DCCC,” the memo says at one point. That is all that the Mueller team or other investigations accused Russia of. No hoax.
So, in conclusion, above is a list of what we knew in 2017-19. Here is what we know now, after the latest Gabbard release:
The intelligence community definitely didn’t think Russia changed votes during the 2016 election (something that they had never indicated that they thought).
Obama wanted an assessment of all of this done quickly, which may have led to some shoddy intelligence work (though if so, you’d have to assume that the shoddiness would have been corrected in the several longer investigations that followed, all of which basically came to the same finding).
II. Epstein
This is actually a helpful exercise to go through any time a political actor is purporting to tell you new information: what did I know before this release, and what do I know now.
So, in that spirit, let’s consider what we knew about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein during Trump’s first term:
Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for many years, but their relationship fractured in 2004, before Epstein was arrested for sex crimes.
The term “Epstein Files” is a bit of a misnomer — there are several different tranches of documents at issue here — but we knew Trump’s name appeared in Epstein’s flight logs and contact book, and that Mar-a-Lago figured into one at least one allegation against Epstein, so it would be likely that whatever group of documents are being referred to, Trump would pop up in them.
There was no evidence of Trump committing Epstein-related wrongdoing.
There were no evidence for claims, largely coming from right-wing circles, that Epstein’s death was not a suicide.
And here is what we know about Trump and Epstein now: