Last month, the Columbia Journalism Review published a massively long (24,000 words) investigation into the media’s coverage of the Trump-Russia collusion story. Ed wrote about one aspect of it, Bob Woodward’s criticism of how the media handled it, last week. But there’s so much more to this four part story that deserves attention. Author Jeff Gerth spent more than a year talking to everyone involved, though as he notes early on the journalists who had prime roles in the story were the least willing to talk.

Anyway, there’s enough material here for a whole series of posts so I’m going to dive in starting with part one which is subtitled “An narrative takes hold.” Again, this is only part of a longer story but what comes across is the degree to which it really is a story about collusion. The collusion wasn’t between Trump and Putin, it was between Hillary Clinton operatives and their contacts in the media.

Three days before Trump’s presidential announcement, Hillary Clinton entered the race, and it was she, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over Russia ties. Weeks earlier, the Times had collaborated with the conservative author of a best-selling book to explore various Clinton-Russia links, including a lucrative speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration while Hillary was secretary of state. The Times itself said it had an “exclusive agreement” with the author to “pursue the story lines found in the book” through “its own reporting.” An internal Clinton campaign poll, shared within the campaign the day of Trump’s announcement, showed that the Russia entanglements exposed in the book and the Times were the most worrisome “Clinton negative message,” according to campaign records.

By the spring of 2016, Clinton’s law firm signed a contract with a research organization called Fusion GPS co-founded by Glenn Simpson. Within weeks, Fusion had made an agreement with a British spy named Christopher Steele to provide information on Trump’s connections to Russia. Meanwhile, Fusion GPS was not idle. In June 2016, the Washington Post published a story titled “Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin” which sort of set the tone for everything that was yet to come. How did that story come about?

The lead author of the story, Tom Hamburger, was a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked with Simpson; the two were friends, according to Simpson’s book. By 2022, emails between the two from the summer of 2016 surfaced in court records, showing their frequent interactions on Trump-related matters. Hamburger, who recently retired from the Post, declined to comment. The Post also declined to comment on Hamburger’s ties to Fusion.

This was followed by another story from Post opinion columnist Josh Rogin. Rogin’s story was titled “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” And that seemed to set off another burst of high-profile opinion connecting Trump and Russia.

Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his Times column, called Trump the “Siberian candidate,” citing the “watering down” of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a “de facto agent” of Putin.

By this point, attempts to make this Russia connection a disqualifier for Trump were actively being pushed by Clinton cronies behind the scenes.

…on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later.

It was right about this time when Trump made a joke of asking Russia to release all of Hillary’s missing emails. He clearly intended it as a smirking way to highlight her own ongoing scandal but Clinton’s people ran with it.

Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.”

I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the time…

At the same time, Fusion was pushing what came to be known as the Alfa Bank story, i.e. the claim that Trump had a secret computer connection to a Russian bank. The Clinton camp seems to have believe this would be the October surprise that would put an end to Trump’s chances once and for all.

The Clinton campaign, in mid-September, was eagerly anticipating a “bombshell” story on “Trump-Russia” from the Times. It was causing a “Trump freak out,” headlined a private September 18 memo by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime close Clinton confidant. His memo circulated among top campaign aides, the two Fusion leaders, Elias, and Michael Sussmann, then a partner in the same firm as Elias. (The memo was made public in 2022.)

Two hours after Sussmann received the memo, he texted the private phone of James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI, seeking a meeting on a “sensitive” matter. They met the next afternoon, where Sussmann briefed him about the back-channel allegations. Sussmann upped the ante with Baker by pointing out that the media—soon understood to be the Times—was about to publish something about the supposed secret Russian communication link.

The FBI quickly figured out that all of this was junk and word got back to reporters for the Times who decided not to publish the initial version of the story. Eventually the Times did publish a story about the FBI’s doubts about the Alfa Bank story titled “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” But earlier the same day, Slate published a story about the Alfa Bank allegations that was much more to the liking of the Clinton camp.

At 8:36 at night on October 31, the campaign lit up, as Fritsch promised, on Twitter. Hillary tweeted out a statement by Jake Sullivan about “Trump’s secret line of communication to Russia.” Her aide only cited the Slate story on Alfa Bank.

So Clinton and her people tried to push the Alfa Bank story on the media and the FBI and when they finally got the story they wanted (from Slate) they ran with it.

It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016

Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016

But it wasn’t true. The FBI looked and concluded the secret connection was a spam server. And obviously this October surprise wasn’t enough to win Hillary the election.

I’m only scratching the surface of the first part of Gerth’s story but there’s still a lot more to come. I’ll probably look at part 2 of his story tomorrow. Again, if you can spare the time, the whole thing is worth reading.