You’d think Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump would be an election Democrats would be eager to forget. But a year and a half on, with midterm season around the corner, the party’s showing no signs that it is ready to move on from the debacle.
The Democratic National Committee on Friday filed a multimillion dollar civil suit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, and the website WikiLeaks, alleging that the three treacherously conspired to tip the scales in Trump’s favor by stealing and releasing embarrassing information from Democratic Party computers. This “brazen attack,” the suit claims, damaged the party to the tune of millions of dollars, for which the DNC now demand compensation from campaign figures such as Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone, as well as sundry Russians.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC chair Tom Perez said in a statement. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency.”
It should come as a shock to no one that the Democratic Party still fervently believes that the Trump campaign actively colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. What’s less obvious is how this suit is supposed to help bring that elusive fact into the open. If the Trump campaign did conspire with Russia, special counsel Robert Mueller’s ruthlessly effective team, which has already flipped a handful of key internal witnesses, is all but certain to ferret it out. Even if not, it’s difficult to see what additional firepower a civil lawsuit brings to the table.
What’s more likely is that this action is a Democratic public relations maneuver, a sort of Cliff’s Notes refresher course of the main plot points of the Russia skullduggery intended to jog the memories of voters beaten insensate to the story by a year of relentless media coverage. With all the sound and fury surrounding such tertiary stories as Paul Manafort’s indictment for illegal consulting work in Ukraine and campaign-finance related raids on the president’s lawyer, it’s easy to forget such alarming moments as the time Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting dirt on Clinton—first reported a mere nine months ago.
But as a PR move, the Democrats’ lawsuit may backfire in one crucial way. Ever since the election, Democrats have ruthlessly hammered alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the highest-minded language imaginable: as an assault on our national institutions, on democracy, on America itself. The lawsuit illuminates a more prosaic motivation: Russian meddling hurt the Democrats, and boy, are they mad about it.
