فصل 61

61

There’s a revolution going on inside the FBI, and it’s now at a boiling point.

—Rudy Giuliani on Fox News, October 26, 2016

According to Rudy and others with close ties to the FBI, there was a vocal faction within the bureau that was livid that, in their view, Comey had “let me off the hook” in July. “The agents are furious,” Jim Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI’s New York office and a close ally of the ex–New York Mayor, told the press. Kallstrom also endorsed Trump and described me as a “pathological liar” and member of “a crime family.” Kallstrom claimed to be in touch with hundreds of FBI agents, both retired and current. “The FBI is Trumpland,” is how another agent put it. The agent said I was regarded by some as “the Antichrist personified.” The New York Post reported that “FBI agents are ready to revolt.”

There was a rash of leaks designed to damage my campaign, including the quickly debunked false claim that indictments were coming relating to the Clinton Foundation.

Then Rudy, one of Trump’s top surrogates, went on Fox News on October 26 and promised “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.” It was just two days later that Comey sent his letter.

On November 4 Rudy was back on Fox News and confirmed that he had advance warning. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it,” he said. At the same time, he tried to backpedal on his statement.

Several months later, Comey was questioned about this in that same Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

“Did anybody in the FBI during this 2016 campaign have contact with Rudy Giuliani about the Clinton investigation?” asked Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont. Comey said it was “a matter the FBI is looking into” and that he was “very, very interested” to learn the truth. “I don’t know yet, but if I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations whether to reporters or private parties, there will be severe consequences,” Comey said. This is a crucial question that must be answered. Comey owes it to the American people to say whether anyone at the FBI inappropriately provided Giuliani, Kallstrom, or anyone else with information. The bureau’s new leaders and the Justice Department Inspector General have a responsibility to investigate this matter fully and ensure accountability.

It’s galling that Comey took pains during the same period to avoid saying anything at all about the investigation into possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. This double standard has still never been explained adequately and it leaves me astonished.

The final week of the 2016 campaign was dominated by swirling questions about my emails and talk that the prayers of Trump supporters might finally be answered, and I’d somehow wind up in prison.

After nine days of turmoil—nine days in which millions of Americans went to the polls to vote early—and just thirty-six hours before Election Day, Comey sent another letter announcing that the “new” batch of emails wasn’t really new and contained nothing to cause him to alter his months-old decision not to seek charges.

Well, great. Too little, too late. The rest is history.

There is one more angle worth considering before I turn the page on this sordid chapter: the role of the press.

The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.

—Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, September 22, 2016

“Abnormalization” is a pretty good description of how it felt to live through the maelstrom of the email controversy. According to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, over the entire election, negative reports about me swamped positive coverage by 62 percent to 38 percent. For Trump, however, it was a more balanced 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive.

Coverage of my emails crowded out virtually everything else my campaign said or did. The press acted like it was the only story that mattered. To take just one egregious example, by September 2015, the then Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza had already written at least fifty pieces about my emails. A year later, the Post editorial board realized the story was out of control. “Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal,” they wrote in a September 2016 editorial.

No need to imagine. It happened.

The Post went on: “There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.”

That was one of many editorials and endorsements that got it right. I was glad to be endorsed by nearly every newspaper in the country, including some that hadn’t backed a Democrat in decades, if ever. Unfortunately, I don’t think many undecided voters read editorials, and they almost never influence broadcast or cable news. It’s the political stories on the front page that get read and picked up on TV. So even though some journalists and editors came to regret losing perspective and overdoing the coverage of my emails—and after the election, a few even shared their remorse in confidence—the damage was irreparable.

Considered alongside the real challenges that will occupy the next President, that email server, which has consumed so much of this campaign, looks like a matter for the help desk.

—New York Times endorsement of me for President, September 2016

The Times, as usual, played an outsized role in shaping the coverage of my emails throughout the election. To me, the paper’s approach felt schizophrenic. It spent nearly two years beating me up about emails, but its glowing endorsement applied some sanity to the controversy. Then, in the homestretch of the race, when it mattered most, the paper went right back to its old ways.

First, it devoted the entire top half of its front page to Comey’s October 28 letter, even though there was zero evidence of any wrongdoing and very few facts of any kind, and continued to give it breathless coverage for the rest of the week. Then, on October 31, the Times ran one of the single worst stories of the entire election, claiming the FBI saw no link between the Trump campaign and Russia. The truth was that a very serious counterintelligence investigation was picking up steam. The paper must have been sold a bill of goods by sources trying to protect Trump. It should have known better than to publish it days before the election. In both cases, it seemed as if speculation and sensationalism trumped sound journalism.

The Times was taken to task by its ombudsman for downplaying the seriousness of Russia’s meddling. “This is an act of foreign interference in an American election on a scale we’ve never seen, yet on most days, it has been the also-ran of media coverage,” wrote Liz Spayd on November 5, three days before Election Day. In stark contrast to reporting on my emails, “what was missing is a sense that this coverage is actually important.” In a follow-up column in January, Spayd noted that the Times knew in September the FBI was investigating the Trump organization’s ties to Russia, possibly including secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, yet didn’t tell the public. “It’s hard not to wonder what impact such information might have had on voters still evaluating the candidates,” she wrote. Good question! It gives a whole new meaning to what Bill likes to call “majoring in the minors.”

Over the years, going all the way back to the baseless Whitewater inquisition, it’s seemed as if many of those in charge of political coverage at the New York Times have viewed me with hostility and skepticism. They’ve applied what’s sometimes called the “Clinton Rules.” As Charles Pierce put it in Esquire magazine, “the Clinton Rules state that any relatively commonplace political occurrence or activity takes on mysterious dark energy when any Clinton is involved.” As a result, a lot of journalists see their job as exposing the devious machinations of the secretive Clinton Machine. The Times has by no means been the only—or even the worst—offender, but its treatment has stung the most.

I’ve read the Times for more than forty years and still look forward to it every day. I appreciate much of the paper’s terrific non-Clinton reporting, the excellent op-ed page, and the generous endorsements I’ve received in every campaign I’ve ever run. I understand the pressure that even the best political journalists are now under. Negative stories drive more traffic and buzz than positive or evenhanded ones. But we’re talking about one of the most important news sources in the world—the paper that often sets the tone for everyone else—which means, I think, that it should hold itself to the highest standard.

I suppose this mini-rant guarantees that my book will receive a rip-her-to-shreds review in the Times, but history will agree that this coverage affected the outcome of the election. Besides, I had to get this off my chest!

This may shock you: Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest.

—former New York Times editor Jill Abramson in the Guardian, March 28, 2016

Jill Abramson, who oversaw years of tough political coverage about me, came to this conclusion by looking at data from the fact-checking organization PolitiFact, which found I told the truth more than any other presidential candidate in 2016, including both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who was the most dishonest candidate ever measured. The fact that this was seen as surprising says a lot about the corrosive effect of the never-ending email controversy, and all the decades of baseless attacks that preceded it.

But her emails!

—the internet, 2017

The further we’ve gotten from the election, the more outlandish our excessive national focus on emails has seemed. “But her emails!” became a rueful meme used in response to the latest Trump revelations, outrages, and embarrassments.

As hard as it is to believe or explain, my emails were the story of 2016. It didn’t matter that the State Department Inspector General said there were no laws or regulations prohibiting the use of personal email for official business. It didn’t matter that the FBI found no reasonable legal grounds to bring any kind of case.

The original decision to use personal email was on me. And I never figured out how to make people understand where I was coming from or convince them that I wasn’t part of some devious plot. But it wasn’t me who determined how Comey and the FBI handled this issue or how the press covered it. That’s on them.

Since the election, we’ve learned that Vice President Mike Pence used private email for official business when he was Governor of Indiana, like so many other state and federal officials across our country (including, by the way, many staff in the Bush White House, who used a private RNC server for government business and then “lost” more than twenty million emails). We’ve learned that Trump’s transition team copied highly sensitive documents and removed them from a secure facility. We’ve learned that members of Trump’s White House staff use encrypted messaging apps that seem to evade federal records laws. And we know now that Trump associates are under federal investigation for far more serious things. Yet most of the fulminating critics have gone silent. It’s almost as if they never really cared about the proper maintenance of government records or the finer points of retroactive classification, and the whole thing was just a convenient political pi?ata.

The further we get from the election, the stranger it seems that this controversy could swing a national election with such monumental consequences. I picture future historians scratching their heads, trying to understand what happened. I’m still scratching mine, too.