If you want to understand the origins of the Russiagate scandal, you must look back much further than Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency in 2016. Where did Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff get the idea that smearing Trump as a puppet of Vladimir Putin was “fair game”? How did senior officials in Barack Obama’s administration justify tampering with intelligence materials in order to assist Team Hillary in that smear? And why was America’s journalistic establishment willing to help promote this deliberate slander against Trump?
Understanding this, I say, is impossible if you start with recent history, which too many of our young friends are wont to do, simply because they are not old enough to remember where it really began.
Nov. 8, 1994: In the first midterm election since Bill Clinton took office as president, Republicans score a massive victory, making a net gain of 54 seats in the House of Representatives, and a net gain of eight Senate seats. For the first time in 40 years, the GOP controls both houses of Congress.
To say that Democrats were surprised by the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 is to completely understate its traumatic shock. Prior to that election, Democrats had controlled the Senate by a 12-seat margin (56 D to 42 R), and had controlled the House by a margin of 82 seats (258 to 176). While the president’s party historically loses seats in the first midterm of his term, Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress had no apparent premonition of the sheer size of the electoral shift in 1994. The GOP’s massive win was unprecedented, and it left the Democratic Party in a state of stunned confusion and impotent rage.
This was reflected in the news media’s reaction to the 1994 midterms. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings insulted voters by comparing them to spoiled toddlers:
Ask parents of any 2-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week…. Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.
It was at this point, the perceptive reader must note, that speaking of mere “liberal bias” in the media was obsolete — the media had become openly partisan, if a leading network news anchor could compare voters to angry 2-year-olds, simply because they had voted against Democrats.
No one was more traumatized by the 1994 “Republican Revolution” than Bill and Hillary Clinton. Those of us old enough to remember will recall the jubilation of their 1992 inauguration, as all the Hollywood glitterati joined the Clintons in dancing to a live Fleetwood Mac performance of “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer elected president and, in vanquishing the 12-year GOP White House tenure under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Clinton and his allies saw themselves as representing the triumph of a youthful future over an obsolete and oppressive past. Unfortunately for them, when the promised “tomorrow” finally arrived in November 1994, its spokesmen were Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
The Democrats in control of the media establishment went to work demonizing Republicans — who else remembers the Time magazine cover depicting Gingrich as Scrooge? — and the Clinton White House prepared for all-out political warfare against the GOP-controlled Congress. Conceiving of themselves as innocent victims of unjust persecution by dangerous right-wing forces, the Clintons and their allies apparently decided that any tactic used against their enemies was fair, no matter how much dishonesty was required, or how much harm was done to public confidence in the government.
We now live in a political environment profoundly shaped by the Clintons’ war against the Republican-controlled Congress in the 1990s. This stroll down memory lane was inspired by my friend Byron York’s recent description of “Five facts about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Russia, and the 2016 campaign.” York wrote:
1) By April, 2016, the Clinton campaign already had a contractor — Christopher Steele — working on developing damaging information on Trump and Russia.
2) By July 24, 2016, the campaign was publicly raising the charge of Trump-Russia collusion, and the New York Times reported the topic was “emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.”
3) Also in July, Steele contacted an FBI agent and “requested an urgent meeting,” according to the Durham Report. There Steele gave the FBI one of his first reports. It alleged, famously, that “Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican president candidate Donald Trump for at least five years,” an operation that was “both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.” It also alleged, infamously, that Russian spy cameras had recorded “Trump’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow” including “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.” That was the salacious and wildly false allegation that later became known as the “pee tape.” It is without any doubt an example of the Clinton campaign, working through its contractor Steele, providing “false and/or misleading information to the FBI or other agencies.”
4) After July, Steele worked hard to funnel his anti-Trump material into the media. For journalists, the dossier’s unsupported gossip would be legitimized by the fact that the FBI was investigating it.
5) In September, 2016, a Democratic lawyer working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, Michael Sussmann, planted a false allegation about Trump and Russia — the so-called Alfa Bank story — with the FBI. At the time, Sussmann denied he was acting for the Clinton team, even though he billed the campaign for the outreach to the FBI.
Many of my conservative friends are now obsessed with the pursuit of “accountability” (i.e., criminal prosecutions) for the wrongdoing of Russiagate, an outcome about which I’ve expressed strong doubts. Whether or not any charges are ever filed, or anyone is sent to prison, what I want to make clear is why this happened.
Why would Team Clinton engage in such a blatantly unscrupulous scheme as the one Byron York has so tersely summarized? It reflects the scorched-earth mentality — the desperate war-to-knife, knife-the-hilt mindset — the Clintons and their allies adopted after Republicans captured Congress in 1994. And the complicity of others, including Obama administration officials and most of the news media establishment, shows how the Clintons’ warped worldview has infected every institution associated with the Democratic Party.
In the long history of political “dirty tricks,” has there ever been anything to equal the dirtiness of tactics Team Clinton deployed against Trump? Dear God! Hiring a foreign spy to manufacture claims that your opponent is the tool of an enemy regime blackmailing him with salacious “pee tape” compromat? Enlisting the CIA and FBI to make the phony smear appear to be credible? Peddling this alleged consensus of the “intelligence community” to your friends in the news media, knowing all the while it was an outright slander which you constructed?
Perhaps someone can think of a historic parallel for what Team Clinton is accused of doing in this scandal, but it strikes me as uniquely wicked, especially because of its ultimate motive. Matt Taibbi has followed the Russiagate saga longer than almost any other journalist. After poring over the most recent batch of revelations, Taibbi concluded that it began as a plan by the Clinton campaign “to deflect from [Hillary’s] email scandal and other problems.” Who could imagine that such a trivial motive would spawn such a gigantic conspiracy?
Those demanding “accountability” for Russiagate have my sympathy, despite my doubts that anyone will be prosecuted for their role in this sordid episode. We old folks have watched the Clintons get away with shady sheninagins for so long, it seems foolish to hope they’ll pay the price now.
Young folks may be more optimistic. The lyrics of that old Fleetwood Mac song promise that tomorrow “will soon be here … better than before.” And if that means orange jumpsuits and jail cells for the perpetrators of Russiagate, then certainly we can all sing along: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.
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Five Quick Things: The Long Overdue Russiagate Reckoning