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.
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 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 piñata.
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.
Trolls, Bots, Fake News, and Real Russians
When reason fails, the devil helps.
Some people are blessed with a strong immune system. Others aren’t as lucky. Their defenses have been worn down by disease or injury, so they’re susceptible to all kinds of infections that a healthy person would easily fight off. When that happens to someone you love, it’s terrible to watch.
The “body politic” works in much the same way. Our democracy has built-in defenses that keep us strong and healthy, including the checks and balances written into our Constitution. Our Founding Fathers believed that one of the most important defenses would be an informed citizenry that could make sound judgments based on facts and reason. Losing that is like losing an immune system, leaving a democracy vulnerable to all manner of attack. And a democracy, like a body, cannot stay strong through repeated injuries.
In 2016 our democracy was assaulted by a foreign adversary determined to mislead our people, enflame our divisions, and throw an election to its preferred candidate. That attack succeeded because our immune system had been slowly eroded over years. Many Americans had lost faith in the institutions that previous generations relied on for objective information, including government, academia, and the press, leaving them vulnerable to a sophisticated misinformation campaign. There are many reasons why this happened, but one is that a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—recognized long ago that, as Stephen Colbert once joked, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” More generally, the right spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality. Think of a partisan petri dish where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. Their efforts were amplified in 2016 by a presidential candidate who trafficked in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet; a candidate who deflected any criticism by attacking others with made-up facts and an uncanny gift for humiliating zingers. He helped to further blur news and entertainment, reality TV and reality.