Allow me to explain the ‘Russia hoax’ hoax
Let’s start deep in the weeds and then walk out.
On Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel — chosen for that role in large part because of his commitment to undermining the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — declared on social media that his team had uncovered a document, “along with thousands of other documents, buried in a back room at the FBI.” A classified annex to the report compiled by Special Counsel John Durham, Patel insisted that the document revealed “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
Patel’s post quoted writer John Solomon, who called the annex a smoking gun that, if “authenticated by further investigation” would show a plot by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to invent a Trump-Russia link. Oh, and rest assured, George Soros got a mention, too.
Solomon, along with Patel, had been tapped by Donald Trump in 2022 to serve as the then-former president’s representatives for records held by the National Archives. The point of that appointment appeared even at the time to have been to cherry-pick available material to make a case that the Russia investigation was a political hack job.
The effort simply took a few years to manifest.
The current allegation
The problem here is that the annex had been investigated further, by John Durham. The New York Times writes that Durham had come to the conclusion that the email at the heart of the claim was “probably manufactured” by Russian intelligence, the source of the email in the first place. Journalist Marcy Wheeler, who has tracked all of this closely for years, thinks that probably overstates Durham’s conclusion — but paints a compelling picture for why he should have. Either way, Durham relegated it to an annex when, if his probe had shown it to be legitimate or useful, it would have largely made the case he was seeking to prove.
The other thing is: none of this is new. Not only because Durham looked at it during his investigation, itself an effort to formalize a means of undercutting the public understanding of the overlap of Trump and Russia in 2016. But the core claim was made public back in 2020, in the waning days of Trump’s failed effort to secure a second consecutive term in office.
At that point, John Ratcliffe (now the director of the CIA) was serving as Director of National Intelligence, despite his thin resume. But he was a Trump ally, which one might fairly assume is why he first produced the allegation that Patel revived this week. There was a July meeting in which Clinton’s campaign discussed tying Trump to Russia, see, and that was how all of this started! Oh, also, this was a product of Russian intelligence analysis and the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
It didn’t get much traction in part because of that (warranted) caveat and in part because of the other tumult of the campaign. (Trump had just been diagnosed with covid-19, for example.) It also didn’t get much traction because there wasn’t the same investment by Trump’s allies in debunking the Russia allegations — and because the effort to cast all of the Russia-Trump investigation as a “hoax” was still relatively young. Yes, Trump was calling all of it a hoax since his first months in office. But it took a while for that idea to percolate out to his base and, more importantly, for the right-wing media universe to distill the disparate, cherry-picked elements of that purported hoax into something that served as a convincing post hoc explanation for what had happened. By 2025, by now, Trump had both the burning desire for vengeance and the inoculation of his base necessary for the appointment of unabashed loyalists to intelligence positions and for a full-on assault on the reality of what had happened.
The context
It’s important to note that, in addition to the evidence of a Clinton-led plan to impugn Trump being unreliable, there was already a broad, public discussion about Trump’s ties to Russia at the point Clinton’s team is alleged to have invented the whole thing. If there was a conversation within the campaign that inspired the information stolen by Russia that then made its way to U.S. intelligence, it was probably simply one in which she and her advisers recognized that the Trump-Russia question was a liability for her opponent.
This conversation allegedly happened on July 26, 2016. On July 25, there was an article in Vice discussing possible efforts by Russia to aid Trump’s campaign. On July 21, there was a Politico article describing Russian enthusiasm for Trump. The month prior, The Washington Post had reported that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s network. On July 22, WikiLeaks began publishing that material, to the Democrats’ and Clinton’s disadvantage.
That was all public. Behind the scenes, there was a lot more going on. The FBI was already looking into Carter Page, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, when Page traveled to Russia in early July and gave a speech praising Vladimir Putin. Trump had tapped Paul Manafort to manage the Republican convention and then his campaign — someone who was also on the government’s radar for his ties to Russia. (Manafort, who volunteered to work for free, would later be revealed to have passed campaign polling information to a man linked in a bipartisan Senate report to Russian intelligence.)
Then there was the meeting at Trump Tower. A contact of the Trumps emailed Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 to inform him that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. responded with enthusiasm and a meeting was set up. The evening the meeting was set, Trump clinched the delegates needed to be the Republican presidential nominee. In his victory speech, he announced that he would “give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.”
The contact who reached out to Trump Jr., by the way, knew the family from the time that the then-Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow.
The 2016 meeting, involving Trump Jr., Manafort and a Kremlin-linked Russian attorney, didn’t provide the promised dirt. The speech delineating “all of the things” about Clinton didn’t happen.
The bigger picture
It’s not clear that the Obama administration’s FBI or intelligence agencies knew all of the details in the summer of 2016, but they certainly knew the broad strokes. They knew about Page and Manafort and they knew that the Russians had hacked the DNC. When they learned in July that another adviser to Trump’s campaign had told a foreign diplomat about the existence of Clinton emails that had been stolen by Russia, the FBI launched a counter-intelligence probe. That was in late July, only days after Trump gave a press conference in which he talked about how he wanted to be friendly with Russia and asked Russia to try and hack into Clinton’s private email server. (They did.)
By the beginning of August 2016, in other words, key triggers for the Russia investigation were in place. There was reason to suspect that Russia was trying to influence American politics and the election. There was reason to be concerned about links between Trump’s campaign and Russia. American spies had evidence by early August 2016 that Putin was trying to help Trump win.
A 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general determined that the launch of the FBI investigation into all of this was reasonably predicated. The investigation, which evolved into a special counsel probe during Trump’s presidency after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, unearthed a lot of other details — and some dead ends. Robert Mueller’s report ran into the hundreds of pages, finding that, while there was not criminally provable coordination or collusion between Trump and Russian actors, the Trump campaign embraced Russia’s help.
The backlash
Trump was reportedly frustrated by post-election reports about Russia’s efforts because his victory in the 2016 campaign had been so narrow. He wanted the world to believe it reflected his popularity, not a quirk of the Electoral College. Having people saying that even that was a function of Russian interference was clearly grating. Even before he took office, he was decrying the Russia probe as a “witch hunt.” All he needed was a lattice of “evidence” that would prove his point.
As with his claims about the 2020 election being stolen, his allies in the right-wing media universe were happy to oblige. Various theories were elevated and embraced as proof that the Russia probe was political rather than justified by what was known at the time. Various FBI and intelligence officials were identified and pilloried. Picayune pieces of the probe were elevated as essential and damning. Phrases like “dossier” and “insurance policy” and “FISA warrants” became familiar vocabulary on the right, shorthand distillations of why, to their eye, the Russia investigation was all a set-up. Instead of disproving the validity of the Russia probe, though, each of those phrases simply provided something for those looking to dismiss the Russia probe as a hoax to latch onto, the way 2020 election deniers might latch onto “ballot dropboxes” or “absentee ballots.”
Now Trump is president again, unfettered in his desire to use his power to attack his enemies. His longstanding hostility to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and his wish to pretend that what happened in 2016 was all a set-up made it almost inevitable that his administration would try to gin up some sort of conspiracy. What’s surprising, really, is that it depends so heavily on already debunked claims. There was an actual investigation into all of this, initiated by his then-loyal Attorney General William Barr and led by a sympathetic U.S. attorney, John Durham! But Durham only managed to bring charges against three people and to get a plea agreement with one — the one whose actions had first been identified by that 2019 inspector general report.
All that’s happening now is that the people in charge of the bureaucracy are unbound by either honesty or shame. There’s no effort to be objective, just to present as Trump-friendly a case as possible. And since so few Trump allies ever saw or read analyses of the evidence the first time around — these were not details that got a lot of coverage on Fox News, for example — they can be presented as new and meaningful when they are neither.
Claims that the Russia probe was somehow a “hoax” have themselves always been a hoax, relying on after-the-fact cherry-picking and relying on hindsight. They have always depended, and depend now, on the willingness of Trump’s allies and supporters to be disinterested in nuance in favor of adherence to their partisan desires.
The reemergence of the “Russia hoax” narrative at the moment, of course, isn’t coincidental. It comes as Trump is trying to deflect attention from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a situation in which his longstanding effort to align himself with Real Americans against The Elites crumbles. In addition to serving as a distraction, the Russia conversation puts him back on the right side of that equation. The Elites (Obama, Clinton, whoever) were out to get him because he was fighting for Real Americans!
Why not focus on that, instead of who stole which teenager from who?
Update: Patel and his allies have responded to criticisms that they are cherry-picking and misrepresenting by … cherry-picking and misrepresenting things to backstop their initial picked cherries. Wheeler, again, went into the weeds to explain what they’re getting wrong, however willfully.