For a moment, we were transported back to the 1990s. There was Hillary Clinton being asked about yet another highly suspect circumstance involving gross improprieties and brazen lies and sidestepping the question by blaming that ever-present confederation: her enemies. “I think the real story is how nervous they are about these continuing investigations,” she said. “I would say it’s the same baloney they’ve been peddling for years, and there’s been no credible evidence by anyone. In fact, it’s been debunked repeatedly and will continue to be debunked.”
Here, again, was the timeworn Clintonian defense: Claim the “real story” is what somebody else did at some other time, and insist that the Clintons have been repeatedly exonerated—though of course they haven’t.
The story this time—actually stories, plural, for there were two in a single week and both involve Russian interference. The first and simpler is Washington Post reporting that confirmed the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the infamous “Trump dossier.” That document, remember, contained sensational allegations about Donald Trump’s sexual peccadillos and his relationship with Russian intelligence officials. The dossier was compiled by a former British intelligence agent at the behest of an oppo-research outfit called Fusion GPS.
Even if some of the dossier’s claims turn out to be true, it seems likely that some of its more outrageous ones were invented by Russian operatives with the intention of throwing the U.S. general election into chaos.
But who paid Fusion GPS? Back in January, when the dossier was first leaked, some observers theorized that it had been a deep-pocketed Republican donor interested in damaging Trump’s insurgent primary campaign. This was indeed initially the case, but when Trump secured the nomination, Democrats began to pick up the tab. Officials from the Clinton campaign stridently denied they had anything to do with the dossier. Not true. The campaign, together with the DNC, paid for it.
So defamatory were the dossier’s claims, though, that Clinton herself wouldn’t publicize them. Instead her campaign operatives pitched the allegations to reporters as if the dossier were a thing they had been given rather than a report they had ordered up. Or to put it bluntly: Someone in the Clinton campaign knew the dossier might contain lies and wasn’t prepared to defend those lies but was happy to see if American reporters were sufficiently gullible to print them. It’s nice to report that they were for the most part wrong until BuzzFeed showed its true colors and ran with it just before Trump’s inauguration.
For sleaziness and sheer corrupt stupidity, the episode matches the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and the “Russian government attorney” Natalia Veselnitskaya. It’s also a nice reminder that in 2016 Americans had a choice between the worst and the even worse.
The week’s other revelation—or, if you’re Hillary Clinton, the week’s other piece of “baloney”—involves the far more complicated tale of the Obama administration’s 2010 decision to approve the acquisition by a state-owned Russian energy company of a uranium-mining company with significant U.S. holdings. The sale, for which President Obama and his Treasury Department were rightly criticized by congressional Republicans, gave Moscow effective control over a fifth of America’s uranium supply.
Parts of the story had been reported in Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book Clinton Cash and in New York Times reporting that drew on Schweizer’s work. Now we learn that the House Intelligence and Oversight Committee, chaired by Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has launched an investigation of the Obama-era uranium deal. Nunes is exercised by reports in the Hill that the Russians undertook a massive project of bribery and extortion to secure the uranium deal. The Hill report claims the FBI conducted an extensive investigation but never informed Congress of the inquiry or what it learned. “One of the things that we’re concerned about is whether or not there was an FBI investigation?” Nunes said. “Was there a DOJ investigation? And if so, why was Congress not informed of this matter?” The day after Nunes announced his committee’s intent to investigate, the Justice Department, responding to a letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), annulled the non-disclosure agreement that kept the FBI’s key informant from testifying before Congress.
Nunes and Grassley essentially want to know if an FBI investigation turned up suspicious links between the secretary of state and the Russian government and then systematically downplayed the discovery. Foes of the Clintons and Barack Obama, moreover, can hardly be blamed for pointing out that the head of the FBI during that investigation was Robert Mueller, the man now charged with investigating collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump.
We’re guaranteed several more rounds of Clinton revelations and Clinton denials—ugly disclosures about the power couple’s dealings, accompanied by smug disavowals and impatient claims that it’s all old news. But we don’t buy the line, used by the Clintons’ many defenders, that Hillary lost the election and isn’t important anymore and why can’t her critics just let this go? The argument that a politician’s illegal and unethical behavior ceases to be relevant when he or she loses an election is deeply cynical. During the 2016 campaign, Clinton’s supporters argued that she was well equipped for office precisely because she had been in public life for more than two-and-a-half decades: as first lady, senator, and secretary of state.
Still, we can’t help sympathizing with those who want to forget about what Bill and Hillary Clinton may have done in the past. They’re gone, finished. We want to believe it, too. The day when this country can forget about that boundlessly unscrupulous duo will be a happy one.
