After the conventions, the candidates moved into the debates. They were all interesting. A record 84 million people watched the first one. Ironically, Hillary wore red and Trump wore blue. She was in great form and he was clearly uncomfortable trying to fit his vitriol into the format. It was a clear, big win for her. The second debate was far more contentious, with questions from an audience of undecided voters. When Trump stalked around, then stood behind Hillary as she answered a question about the Affordable Care Act, she managed to keep her cool. Hillary later said that she probably should have told him, “Back up, you creep. Get out of my space.” It certainly would have been better TV. In the end, Trump’s stalking around sort of worked for him, as he lost the second post-debate surveys by less than the first.
The big story in the third debate was Trump’s refusal to say he’d concede if he lost the election. Although his hard-core base liked his refusal, the post-election surveys said most people disagreed, with 80 percent of the electorate saying they would accept the results. The biggest plus for Hillary in the debates, especially the third one, may have been the simple fact that millions of voters got to watch her talk about the issues for the first time.
According to Gallup, she won them all, by 34, 18, and 29 points respectively, and among independents, by 29, 19, and 23 points. She did much better with women than men, who still rated her the winner by 20, 11, and 19 points. Her biggest edge was in being “more presidential” by 32, 29, and 38 percent of the viewers, and “having a good understanding of the issues” by 36, 31, and 37 percent. She also got more “likable” as the debates progressed by 19, 28, and 28 percent.
In the third, most substantive debate, moderated fairly by Chris Wallace with 72 million viewers, she led Trump by an average of 15 points as the better candidate to deal with immigration, Social Security, Russia, and the Supreme Court. The most troubling number was her small 4-point margin on the economy, showing the strength of Trump’s economic arguments against trade. Of course, these numbers were better for her than the head-to-head polls because not all voters watched the debates. Still, with three weeks to go, it would take something truly astonishing to beat her.
That’s exactly what we got. We were already in the throes of the release of thousands of Hillary’s emails to and from her campaign chairman, John Podesta, about the campaign. WikiLeaks had gotten them from Vladimir Putin and released them on October 7, right after the Trump Access Hollywood “groping” story broke, hoping to change the storyline back to Hillary’s emails. Tom Friedman of The New York Times read them all and wrote a column entitled “WikiHillary for President,” saying the email trove, including her speeches to big-bank audiences, showed “someone with a vision, a pragmatic approach to getting things done and a healthy instinct for balancing the need to strengthen our social safety nets with unleashing America’s business class to create the growth required to sustain social programs.”
Of course, most people only read or heard about campaign gossip. Putin gambled that our political press would only cover that because it produced more clicks and retweets than the more substantive ones showing how much more ready to be president she was. Putin was right: he did blunt the Trump groping story, which had already blunted the announcement by the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Homeland Security that the Russian government was interfering in the election to help Trump. It got good coverage for about thirty minutes. All that happened in eight hours on one day!
Although Putin’s interference helped Trump by blunting the groping story, it didn’t hurt Hillary much. With less than two weeks to go, she was holding her own with a lead between 5 and 6 points, with $100 million in positive and competitive ads on order showing how the election would affect the voters and their kids.
Then, just eleven days before the election, Jim Comey got into the act again, announcing that he was reopening the email investigation he had closed in July, because some of her emails had been found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, a former New York congressman and the estranged husband of Hillary’s personal aide, Huma Abedin, which had been seized as a part of the unrelated investigation into him. Once again Comey violated many decades of FBI policy, followed during Republican and Democratic administrations alike: the FBI didn’t comment on an ongoing investigation within sixty days of an election unless someone was being indicted.
Back in July, he’d broken the policy that the FBI didn’t comment at all when an investigation concluded with no charges being filed. Comey concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Hillary because she had been honest in her interview and none of the disputed emails she received and forwarded were marked classified. But he also smeared her and three hundred other State Department employees for being “extremely careless” in handling classified information, saying the material should have been classified because the intelligence agencies “owned” it and they classified it, and it was “possible” that hostile actors gained access to Hillary’s computer.
Translated into plain English, he was saying that the State Department and the intelligence agencies had always had different classification systems. The Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough, an ardent Republican, after failing to persuade the forty-year State Department veteran who was responsible for classifying material to adopt McCullough’s classification position, asked Comey to look into it, and Comey appointed himself the ultimate judge, not his superiors in the Justice Department, and not President Obama. Finally, Obama made a statement that Hillary didn’t do anything to endanger national security, but it didn’t get much coverage.
Thanks to the late Representative Elijah Cummings, who pushed the Department of Justice to retrieve the relevant emails, we also know Colin Powell, who had also used a personal computer at the State Department with its data stored on a commercial server, had advised Hillary to use her own device and server, because he believed the State Department server was not secure. He was right. While Hillary was secretary of state, the department’s files were hacked, along with those of other government security agencies. But hers weren’t! Comey couldn’t bring himself to say that.
McCullough’s real beef seemed to be with his own intelligence agencies, not the State Department, which had consistently followed its own rules. Shouldn’t he have reported to Congress on the intelligence agencies’ lack of concern for its own classification problem? No, because McCullough had targeted the State Department and its leader.
How did this happen? After Hillary left the State Department, someone decided it would “look better” to change the way inspectors general had been appointed since the position was created in 1978. Up until then, the IGs were nominated by Congress but the White House had to approve them, to solve the constitutional issue of letting the legislative branch force the executive branch to hire people who report directly to Congress and who might be heavily biased, especially when the president and the congressional majorities are of different parties. Now, for no apparent reason, the inspectors general would be okayed not by the White House but by a “nonpartisan” review board. Soon there were people with clearly partisan backgrounds “swearing on a stack of Bibles” that they would never politicize the inspector general’s work. Some got through the interview process and proceeded to do just that. That’s how we got to McCullough and to Comey usurping the title of classification chief.
If the political press really believed these different classification systems were a big problem, why didn’t they ask the heads of the intelligence agencies why they weren’t trying to fix it? Why didn’t they say there should be one authority on classification covering all the agencies? Why didn’t they demand that the one person who could mandate a fix, the president, bring all the agency heads, CIA, DOD, NSA, DIA, State, and any others with classification systems, into the Situation Room and keep them there until all these problems were ironed out? These are all the logical things you’d do, if you were on the level. Why did Comey put himself above the president, who said Hillary didn’t do anything to endanger national security? And why didn’t the press give Obama’s assessment a lot of coverage?
When Comey said that Hillary was “extremely careless,” he was really saying, “She didn’t send any of these emails but whenever she forwarded one to appropriate staff, I counted it against her, just as I did when others did the same thing.” All these people, dealing with dozens of emails every day, overlooked Comey’s definition of their highest duty: to be classification clerks for the overtly partisan inspector general of the intelligence agencies.
Hillary received more endorsements than any previous candidate from people who’d spent their careers in intelligence—including Republicans and independents as well as Democrats. Now Comey and his allies in the press were basically saying she was careless. They knew better.
Here’s an example of her lack of carelessness. On the evening of May 2, 2011, after the success of the bin Laden operation, President Obama called all the former presidents to tell them.
When I answered the phone, the president said, “Bill, we got him!”
“Got who?” I asked.
“Bin Laden. Hillary didn’t tell you?”
I laughed and said, “Mr. President, you told your team not to tell anybody, didn’t you?”
He chuckled and said, “Yes, but…”
“Mr. President, she didn’t tell anybody.”
Although I still had a security clearance, I had no need to know. On the raid, the president made the right call and she was right to urge him to do it and right not to tell anybody, including me.
What about John Kerry, who used his personal email in his first year as secretary of state until the rules changed in 2014, requiring him to use a State Department device? In May 2016, a State Department Inspector General report said Kerry had “primarily” used a State Department device before 2014, Kerry’s second year, when the department changed the rules and required the use of a State Department device, and he complied. Before that, would Comey say Kerry was “extremely careless” in using his personal device, too? Couldn’t do that. He wasn’t the target and it blurred the storyline.
It later came out that Comey himself used his personal email for official business in clear violation of FBI policy. So Comey’s position was that it was careless of Hillary to follow the State Department’s rules but okay for him to break FBI rules. The rules apply to the target but not to the shooter. Brian Fallon, who did a lot of television interviews for Hillary, said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Now, eleven days before the election, Comey decided he had to tell the “special” Select Benghazi Committee about it, the very committee that Kevin McCarthy had told the world a year earlier was just a political operation set up to hurt Hillary after five other Republican-led House committees had cleared her of any wrongdoing. Comey knew full well what would happen. There’s a reason the FBI has followed a policy of not commenting on anything short of an indictment close to an election. Even J. Edgar Hoover, with all of his backstage shenanigans, didn’t do that.
Comey later justified his breaking this “norm” by saying he’d promised the committee that he’d notify them if there were any new developments, and he thought she was going to win anyway and didn’t want this to undermine her legitimacy. My first reaction, after gagging on his “not wanting to undermine her legitimacy,” was, he didn’t know there was a new development. Huma was Hillary’s personal aide, not someone in a line position, so the chances that there was a relevant new email were very remote. Second, he hated to be criticized; he wasn’t afraid of being sacked by the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, or the White House, but he was getting heat from a cadre of ultraconservative current and ex-FBI agents in New York with close ties to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney at the time. And third, Comey was a Washington Republican masquerading as a master of the moral universe. He may have thought Hillary was going to win anyway, but there is no way he didn’t know that his breaking longstanding FBI policy would hurt her badly, and that the political press wouldn’t punish him for doing it.
In Hillary’s polls, she dropped 5 points overnight. I had never seen anything like that. In the next ten days The New York Times gave the Comey move ten times more coverage than it had given to the differences between Hillary and Trump on the issues that would affect voters’ lives in the previous sixty-nine days. They had to cover it, but they knew it was highly unlikely to lead to anything and should also have given at least equal coverage to the issues that would affect voters and hit Comey hard for violating FBI policy. I was on the road and basically said this to everyone I could. At least it seemed to reassure and motivate Hillary’s hard-core supporters.
Back at headquarters, they did the polls and focus groups and decided Comey’s intervention had damaged Hillary so badly that her positive ad campaign would fall on deaf ears, so their only option was to pull the positive ads and double down on hitting Trump. Essentially the message was “No matter what Comey says, Trump is far worse for America.” Trump’s last ad rush took the other side of the coin, “What have you got to lose?”
Sure enough, early Sunday morning before the Tuesday election, the FBI completed its review but waited for several hours, until all the talk shows were over, to say, “Nothing new there.” I had no idea how many votes it would change. Many people had voted in the nine days since Comey made his announcement, so a lot of damage had already been done. And of course, Trump cried foul—the establishment had won again—which riled up his “Lock her up” crowd even more.
Hillary won the popular vote by just under 2.9 million votes, with narrow margins in New Hampshire and Minnesota, and losses of less than 1 percent in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and 1.2 percent in Florida, more than enough to cost her the Electoral College. We live in the only country in the world where you can win the election and still lose the job.
Election night was like a death watch. I just tried to be there for Hillary, to help her get through it with Chelsea, Marc, Charlotte, and baby Aidan. I thought back over all the years we’d been together, how I quickly decided when we were in law school that she was as gifted a leader as I’d ever met. She inspired confidence in people and made them believe they could and should make a difference. In all the work she had done since, she devoutly followed the instruction of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
She would have been a great president.
I was heartsick for her and for our country. I knew she wouldn’t be broken by this. But the country might be.
The next morning Hillary suited up—literally. With millions of people still in shock, she took the stage in a dark, purple-accented pantsuit and gave a proper concession speech.
In a steady voice, Hillary said, “Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope he will be a successful president for all Americans…. This is painful and it will be for a long time…. But I want you to remember that our campaign was never about one person…it was about building an America that is hopeful, inclusive, and big-hearted. We have seen that our country is more divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, we must accept the results and look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.
“Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them. I am so grateful for our country and for all it has given to me. I count my blessings every single day that I am an American. And I still believe as deeply as I ever have that if we stand together and work together with respect for our differences, strength in our convictions, and love for this nation, our best days are still ahead of us.”
Compare that to Trump’s whining response to losing in 2020, his support for the January 6 insurrection, his refusal to attend Biden’s inauguration—the first president to do that in 152 years—and his attempt to persuade Vice President Pence and his congressional allies to refuse to certify the 2020 election. Hillary’s concession speech provides a telling contrast in what each of them believes it means to be an American with real devotion to our Constitution and the essential requirement that we all live under the same set of rules.
Hillary’s “best days still ahead of us” had already started for her and her family, and for all the people who had worked hard for her. Those who had hoped they might serve in the coming administration had to find something else to do. And Hillary got to work right away trying to help them.
We also resumed our long walks in wooded areas in and around Chappaqua, and Hillary went to work on turning the little house next door into a proper guesthouse for our family and old friends. She did a nice job, opening the entry to the living room to make it more welcoming and full of light, and hanging paintings, photos, and mementos that meant a lot to us. Marc and Chelsea had given us an amazing gift, two flags made from bed linen, tablecloths, and other cotton items, cut and sewn into a U.S. flag and a Union Jack by citizens of Paris who waved them to welcome the American and British soldiers when they marched into the city after running the Nazis out in World War II. It reminded me of what my country was capable of doing when we were faced with an overwhelming challenge so great that denial was impossible and democracy and freedom were on the line.
Meanwhile, all kinds of people were running around trying to claim credit or shift the blame for Trump’s victory. Trump and his crowd were happy. The Mercers were happy. Putin was happy. Fox and Breitbart were happy. But Jim Comey and the political media’s first priority seemed to be avoiding any responsibility for the outcome of the election they had done so much to bring about.
Still, Comey and the press got the lion’s share of the blame. Nate Silver, a respected political analyst, said Hillary’s net 3-point drop in the polls, including a larger 4.5 percent drop in the swing states, was “media driven.” He later said, “You really have to twist yourself into a pretzel to conclude that the impact wasn’t large enough to cost Clinton the election.” For the first time in years, his opinion got virtually no coverage in the political press, and he had to make his case on social media.
A different but persuasive “Comey Did It” case was made by Brad Fay, whose company, Engagement Labs, does interesting research on consumer product brands, polling thousands of people every day, asking them online about what they’re saying offline in face-to-face conversations about various brands. Since 2008, they’ve asked questions in presidential election years to pick up daily conversations about presidential candidates. According to Fay, Hillary opened a clear lead over Trump after the first debate that persisted until Comey’s statement on October 28, when there was an immediate 17-point drop in net sentiment for Hillary and an 11-point increase for Trump, a 28-point change “in the word-of-mouth standings…much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.”
In addition to the political press coverage and Comey, Putin also had something to do with it, barraging Bernie voters with false charges—Hillary was part of a cabal that was running a child trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, she was sending arms to ISIS, she was deathly ill, and the pope was for Trump—and telling them that if they couldn’t vote for Trump, to vote for a “real progressive,” Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or stay home. In December of 2015, when General Michael “Lock Her Up” Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, had gone to Moscow to see Putin, Russian TV showed footage of the dinner Putin hosted for him.
Guess who else was there? Jill Stein, sitting at Putin’s table.
The Russian meddling worked. Jill Stein doubled her vote from 2012, enough to change the outcome in Michigan and Wisconsin and to virtually tie the vote in Pennsylvania, where the “don’t vote” angle was effective enough with younger Black voters in Philadelphia to do the rest.
The campaign to discourage young Black voters from turning out centered on rewriting the history of the Crime Bill and Hillary’s comment back then that gang killings of young Black and Latino boys was predatory behavior, was led by the man who did the same job for Bernie before he went to work for Trump. That explains a lot of the heckling I got in Philadelphia and why the hecklers wouldn’t take me up on my offer to take the microphone and make their case, then allow me to respond.
The Russian campaign had an impact, but Trump wouldn’t have been close enough to benefit from Putin’s efforts without the much larger impact of Comey and the political press coverage. Lanny Davis, a lawyer who worked for me in the White House Counsel’s office and was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board established by the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act, wrote a fiery short book, The Unmaking of the President 2016: How FBI Director James Comey Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency. He cites all the major polling data and argues that no one can doubt that, had the election occurred on October 27, Hillary would have won. In about 150 pages he makes a case that has not been effectively refuted.
Throughout the campaign, there were some really perceptive journalists and commentators who tried to keep America’s train on the tracks, warning the press early on not to make a mountain out of the email molehill and of the dangers of “false equivalency”—you have to say something bad about Hillary even if it’s false, misleading, or just silly, if you say something bad about Trump, even if it’s true. They bravely stood against the political press groupthink, but they didn’t get television coverage.
From the very beginning, the political press knew they were peddling what Hillary’s high school friends call “phony baloney.” On March 10, 2015, right after the New York Times’s first big email article claiming that Hillary’s use of her personal email and server was “possibly breaking the rules,” Kurt Eichenwald, a Newsweek columnist and former New York Times reporter, wrote a rebuttal, “Why Hillary Clinton’s ‘Emailgate’ Is a Fake Scandal.” In his piece he proved that very regulation the Times cited as justification for its story contradicted the primary point of the piece by showing the paper had left out the words that explicitly allowed her to use her personal device, to store emails however she wanted, and even to declassify documents! The regulations also required anyone permitted to use their personal email to save work-related emails and turn them over when requested by the State Department record keepers.
The press quickly shifted its argument, saying that since they didn’t know whether Hillary saved work-related emails, she “possibly” broke the rules by not saving them. That went out the window when the State Department asked all former secretaries of state to produce their emails and she promptly did so, just as the regulations then required. The State Department already had more than 90 percent of the covered emails and after reviewing them, they sent 1,000 back to her they’d deemed not work-related. The “possibly broke the rules” comment is like my saying if you’re reading a hard copy of this book, you possibly stole it. It means nothing except I’m throwing shade on you.
When I was wrapping up this section of the book, I called Eichenwald to make sure I had read his article correctly—that the email story was not just overblown, it was false. He said, “That’s right.” Then he told me that the day after his story broke, he got a call from an executive at the Times, reading him the riot act for what he said. Eichenwald replied that he was agnostic about Hillary but he was for honest journalism, and he thought the Times piece failed the test. If the paper could demonstrate that he made a factual error, he would happily print a retraction. The executive hung up the phone.
On June 1, 2015, writer Anita Finlay, whose first job out of college was at The New York Times, wrote, “I never imagined that 30 years later, I’d be singling out the ‘paper of record’ for what appears to be a vendetta against Hillary Clinton…. [It] has taken on the role of Hillary Clinton’s de facto opponent for the presidency…allowing debasing trash talk about a First Lady, two-term Senator and Secretary of State voted America’s most admired woman for 19 years…. The once great ‘Grey Lady’ has fallen far indeed.”
By contrast, most New York Times columnists from left to right were rational and objective. I already mentioned Tom Friedman’s “WikiHillary for President” column. Paul Krugman, who set the standard for consistency, and wrote early on about the danger of “abnormalizing” all politicians, said in August of 2015 that the Republicans were great at creating cults of personality, while in the political press Hillary “is the subject of a sort of anti-cult of personality, whose most ordinary actions are portrayed as nefarious. (No, the email thing doesn’t rise to the level of a ‘scandal.’)”
The editors and political reporters were too smart not to know Eichenwald, Finlay, Friedman, and Krugman were right, but they couldn’t stop doing it. You know you’re in trouble when the opinion pieces have more substantive and accurate information than the news in print, online, or on the air. The New York Times may have endorsed Hillary every time she ran for anything, but its real power lies in determining what gets covered and how, and sending a big signal to the rest of the political press, including television news, about what not to cover.
In 2012, the press jeered when Mitt Romney’s campaign said his strategy wouldn’t be “dictated by fact-checkers.” By 2015, the political media had adopted the same practice. The major fact-checkers said Hillary was more factually accurate than Bernie in the primaries, and beat Trump by a country mile on that score. Yet by the last week of the election, polls showed voters thought she was less honest than Trump. Quite an achievement for the coverage.
When it was over, the press did take some hard hits. The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy led by the nation’s longtime expert on the presidency and the press, Thomas Patterson, captured every article in the major national and big regional newspapers and on the major social media sites, and every television segment on national network and cable channels. The center’s report covered the pre-primary, primary, convention, and general election in four separate releases, the last titled “How the Press Failed the Voters.”
Patterson’s been calling the political press out for more than twenty years. Way back in 1995, Patterson, then at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse, wrote that a major factor in our 1994 loss of Congress was the relentlessly negative press coverage, creating perceptions that “are greatly at odds with the facts.”
Marcie Bianco wrote a perceptive review for the Women’s Media Center, “Harvard Study Documents Anti-Clinton Media Bias,” noting its documentation of how the far-right media “garnered access to mainstream media outlets” and cited the success of “Breitbart Senior Editor” Peter Schweizer in getting mainstream media outlets to adopt its storyline and amplify it, “even though no actual evidence of wrongdoing was presented in the book [Clinton Cash] or in subsequent reporting.”
The New York–based Columbia Journalism Review did its own review and piled on with its own analysis: “Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media,” emphasizing the impact the print coverage had on television news. The three major broadcast networks devoted a grand total of thirty-two minutes to substantive issue coverage in the entire campaign, while about one third of Hillary’s coverage focused on “fabricated and exaggerated scandals…. Attempts by the Clinton campaign to define her…on competence, experience and policy positions were drowned out while coverage of Trump associated with trade, immigration, and jobs was balanced with that on his personal scandals…. As long as extremist messaging and sensationalist disinformation continues to win elections while bringing in rich rewards to the networks that propagate them, the dynamic we observe here is likely to continue unabated.”
Almost two years after the election, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a highly regarded social scientist, said Russia’s cyberattacks piled on top of Comey’s interventions were effective enough to persuade voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to vote for third parties or stay home. What the Russians did may have been enough to turn what would have been an Electoral College win into a close electoral vote loss. If so, Putin’s enablers were Comey and the political press. The election wouldn’t have been close enough without them. The coverage and Comey were the big factors.
So was there anything Hillary could have done after Comey’s late intervention to change the outcome of the election? I’m not sure. Everyone was in a PTSD-like shock because nothing like it had ever happened before. I was on the campaign trail and no one at headquarters asked me what I thought. As I said, the campaign’s focus groups and polls convinced them that after Comey, reachable voters were so down on Hillary that their only option was to argue that Trump was much worse.
It might have been better to run the issue-focused ads to revive the positive feelings of the convention and the debates, especially the last one. Of course, they’d need a different opening, something like: “There they go again [a great Reagan line]. They—the Russians, Comey, and the press—are trying to take the election away from you. Don’t let them do it. Look at the real differences between Hillary and Trump on things that matter to you. Vote on that.”
Her lead was about 6 points before Comey. Without the media’s email coverage and their refusal to cover her positive issues, the lead would have been even bigger than that. Hillary’s high points were the convention and the debates, because voters were free to hear her and think about what the election meant to them as Hillary and the people whose lives she had touched slowly turned the ugly cartoon the Republicans and the coverage had drawn into a three-dimensional human being, far more knowledgeable, presidential, and—God forbid—likable than she had been portrayed.
Would it have worked? We’ll never know.
This whole thing is hard for me to write. I couldn’t sleep for two years after the election. I was so angry, I wasn’t fit to be around. I apologize to all those who endured my outbursts of rage which lasted for years and bothered or bored people who thought it pointless to rehash things that couldn’t be changed. In this chapter, I’ve tried to calmly write about the darkest election possible in the United States, because it’s important to understand what happened. Our country had, and still has, the best prospects for a bright twenty-first century. I still want that future, and we can’t have it without a press that’s on the level. I don’t want 2016 to ever happen again.
Jim Fallows, a highly regarded author and journalist, always thought the email issue was way overblown, and said so during the election, citing Eichenwald’s work. Afterward, when Hillary wrote What Happened, he responded to those in the political media when they unleashed their torrent of outrage. In his Atlantic piece, Fallows said:
No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election…should have depended more than about 1 percent on what Hillary Clinton did with her emails. But this…issue came across through even our best news organizations as if it were the main thing worth knowing about one of the candidates….
The press is among the groups that messed this up, badly…With this book, Hillary Clinton has gone a considerable distance toward facing her responsibility for the current state of the country. I’d like to see [the political press] be as honest about their own responsibility.
Don’t hold your breath. On Trump’s inauguration day, Liz Spayd, the Times’s public editor, wrote that the paper knew that the Comey-led FBI had opened its own investigation into Putin’s connections to Trump but had decided not to run a story about it before the election. She also wrote, “At one point, the FBI was so serious about its investigation…that it asked the Times to delay publication.” Comey presumably had his own reasons for holding back on any public acknowledgment of the investigation (not that he showed any such responsibility with Hillary’s emails), but the Times had no reason to stay mum on what they knew. Yet their editor-in-chief still had the gall to say in response to criticism of the decision, “We wrote everything we knew—and we wrote a lot. Anybody that thinks we sat on stuff is outrageous. It’s just false.” Soon Spayd was fired and the public editor position was abolished.
Like I said, don’t hold your breath.
But The Washington Post, which also caught the email virus early, did recover, and returned to professional journalism, including publishing a series of articles by David Fahrenthold on Trump’s family foundation in New York for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. At some point during the general election, the Post had stopped practicing false equivalency and recognized Trump’s—and Putin’s—behavior for the threats they were, especially in tough, insightful articles by conservative columnists like Jennifer Rubin.
Although the press dropped it like a hot rock after the election was over, the email story didn’t go away. In mid-October 2019, Congress received a nine-page report from the Trump State Department on Hillary’s use of a personal email account to conduct work business, acknowledging that Colin Powell and Condi Rice’s top aides had done the same thing. On the twenty-first, Ian Millhiser wrote a column in Vox saying, “And now we have an appropriate bookend for this media-made scandal: a State Department report that finds it was no big deal in the end, published on page A16 of the New York Times.” In 2020, the same was true for the hyped investigations of the Clinton Foundation, run by the Trump Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Washington Post reported they “found nothing worth pursuing.” As the founder of CharityWatch later said, “If Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for president, the Clinton Foundation would be seen as one of the great humanitarian charities of our generation.”
I want to make one thing clear before I leave this painful subject. I don’t “blame” the political media for Hillary’s defeat. An election is a zero-sum game. To win you have to overcome whoever and whatever is arrayed against you. You win or you don’t. Hillary and those of us who supported her failed to do that by a narrow margin in the Electoral College.
The blame is on us, but the evidence is overwhelming that the political media, Jim Comey, and Vladimir Putin deserve most of the credit for Trump’s victory. At least Putin acknowledged his role in a press conference with Trump in Helsinki, admitting that he tried to barrage persuadable voters with false attacks on Hillary because he thought Trump would be better for Russia. In return, Trump pandered shamelessly to him, practically kneeling before the czar who possesses the kind of unbridled power he craves. When I saw them on TV, I was embarrassed for our country.
Comey and the political media should be at least as forthright as Putin and not hide behind “I thought she was going to win anyway.” If I had a dollar for everybody who justified the damage they caused Hillary’s campaign with “well, she’s going to win anyway,” I could take our whole family for a long dinner at a five-star restaurant.
For years, going back to my days in Arkansas, I kept handy a list of “Clinton’s Rules of Politics” that I used to explain, enlighten, and lighten up political conversations:
Never tell anyone to go to hell unless you can make them go (Sam Rayburn told LBJ that).
Never drink in public—you might act like yourself.
Whenever you hear “it’s nothing personal,” brace yourself.
When someone can shift the heat from himself to you, prepare to be barbecued.
Everyone is for change in general but often against it in particular—it depends on whose ox is being gored.
When people say, “it’s not a money problem,” they’re always talking about someone else’s problem.
If you see a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident.
When you start to have a good time, you’re supposed to be somewhere else.
You’re always most vulnerable when you feel invulnerable, or when you’re angry and exhausted.
Take criticism seriously but not personally (one I got from Hillary and well explained by Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements).
If you want to bring your feelings to work, get in another line of work.
Don’t give up on people—if you dig long enough, there’s almost always still a person down there somewhere.
The 2016 election forced me to go to a baker’s dozen with a new rule: “If you’re ever in the room with someone who says…‘but you’re going to win anyway,’ smile, thank them for their time, and get out of that room as fast as you can.” They may want you to win, but they don’t want to speak up for you for fear of criticism or punishment. “Anyway” is the tell word. When you hear it, get ready to move.