Hillary Clinton's 2016 election post-mortem confirms plan to smear Trump with Russia, like intel

Newly declassified evidence shows the FBI was alerted to intelligence in 2016 indicating Hillary Clinton planned to smear then-candidate Donald Trump by linking him to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and then bureau leaders played right into the campaign's strategy by conducting a sweeping investigation into false claims of Trump-Russia collusion.

Now a major question hovers over the Justice Department strike force set up by Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the affair: was it just a political dirty trick or did it rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy?

Clinton's own words in a 2016 election post-mortem are likely to be key to investigators. 

Public records show Clinton herself, in coordination with her campaign general counsel Marc Elias, campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chairman John Podesta, campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri, campaign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, and others launched an effort to link Trump to Putin as the 2016 battle for the White House raged.

Newly declassified evidence dubbed the "Clinton Plan intelligence" included purported intercepted communications from a George Soros ally suggesting that Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump was plotting an effort to demonize the Republican nominee by connecting him to Putin, and that the Clinton campaign expected the FBI would put more fuel on the fire.

It's now well established that the Clinton campaign and its paid operatives engaged in a lengthy and coordinated effort to tie Trump to Russia during the 2016 election, including:

• TV appearances, speeches and public pronouncements;

• an aggressive news media strategy;

• British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s decision to bring his now-discredited dossier to the FBI;

• and the spreading of debunked claims to the FBI and the public related to the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank.

The bombshell allegations about a plot to falsely link Trump to Putin in an effort to distract from Clinton’s classified emails scandal are found within a formerly classified but now largely-unredacted appendix from Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report.

The declassified revelations from the Durham report included purported emails from Leonard Benardo, a top official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and alleged communications by Clinton foreign policy adviser Julianne Smith. Benardo denied writing the messages, while Smith said she didn’t remember having done so but couldn’t rule out proposing such a Clinton plan.

The newly declassified annex of the report also shows Durham found some corroborating evidence for the intercepts but concluded the purported emails from Benardo were likely mashups or composites of what Russian spies had probably collected from multiple Clinton allies. 

Smith was the head of the Clinton campaign’s Europe team and worked as a foreign policy advisor for the failed 2016 bid. Smith had been deputy national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration. She served as the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO during the Biden administration.

The Durham classified annex assessed that “it is a logical deduction [REDACTED] [Julianne] Smith was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia” and that the communications reviewed by the special counsel “certainly lends at least some credence that such a plan existed.”

Durham’s 2023 public report revealed that “the Intelligence Community received the Clinton Plan intelligence in late July 2016.”

The special counsel said then-CIA Director John Brennan's handwritten notes reflect that Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, since-fired FBI Director James Comey, and others in early August 2016 regarding the "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."

The CIA also sent a referral to Comey that was copied to former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, but Durham concluded the FBI failed to investigate.

Clinton herself was previously asked about the Clinton Plan intelligence, and told Durham’s team in an interview that it "looked like Russian disinformation to me; they're very good at it, you know."

In fact, the Clinton Plan intelligence looked an awful lot like the exact campaign strategy which Clinton touted and carried out.

The Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia strategy

Palmieri wrote a lengthy piece for The Washington Post in early 2017 following Trump’s 2016 win which was entitled, “The Clinton campaign warned you about Russia. But nobody listened to us. Democrats can still fight back now. Here's how.”

The story details a political and media strategy by the Clinton campaign to place allegations of ties between Trump and Putin into the minds of voters, but the Clinton campaign’s role in funding the Steele Dossier and pushing the Alfa Bank claims is not even hinted at in the OpEd.

“We were in a Catch-22: We didn’t want her to talk too much about Russia because it wasn’t what voters were telling us they cared about — and, frankly, it sounded kind of wacky,” Palmieri wrote. “At the same time, we understood the issue would never rise to the front of voters’ minds if we weren’t driving attention to it.”

Nowhere in her story did she mention that the Clinton campaign was funding and promoting some of the most baseless and damaging claims of Trump-Russia collusion found in the Steele Dossier and the Alfa Bank allegations.

Jake Sullivan, who was Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration, told the House Intelligence Committee about the key role he played in pushing the Trump-Russia narrative during the 2016 campaign.

“I was involved in trying to figure out how to frame the fact that a hostile foreign power was attempting to interfere in an American election, how to educate reporters and the public on what this meant, particularly after the Russians went from merely penetrating the systems, which countries had done in campaigns past,” Sullivan said. 

“When that shifted from merely being a snooping exercise to being weaponized through the form of leaks, I became much more involved in speaking publicly and also speaking to reporters about what this meant and the fact that our country was under attack," he added.

Prior to the 2016 election, Clinton had only tweeted the word “Russia” one time from her personal account — a 2014 tweet praising the “strong & brave young women from #PussyRiot, who refuse to let their voices be silenced in #Russia.” Her next tweet with the word Russia was in August 2016, and it involved an attack on Trump.

“Why do Trump’s foreign policy ideas read like a Putin wish list?” Clinton asked on Aug. 7, 2016. She added: “Seriously, what is going on with Trump and Russia?” Clinton said the next day that “we have some questions about Donald Trump's cozy relationship with Russia.”

Clinton shared a video in September 2016 linking Trump to Russia, tweeting, “The man who could be your next president may be deeply indebted to another country. Do you trust him to run ours?”

She had multiple other similar tweets, claiming that month that “Donald Trump's ties to Russia may conflict with America's interests — but they're great for his bottom line” and asking, “What is the deal with Donald Trump and Russia?”

The Clinton Plan had launched a couple months earlier at the Democratic National Convention.

2016 Democratic National Convention and the launch of the Clinton Plan

Clinton seemed to confirm in her 2017 post-mortem on her electoral defeat, What Happened, that in late July 2016, right around the start of the DNC, she personally approved something very similar to that which was captured in the Clinton Plan intelligence.

“The convention was all-consuming. So it was hard to stop and focus on the gravity of what was happening. But I realized we had crossed a line. This wasn’t the normal rough-and-tumble of politics,” Clinton wrote on the alleged hack-and-release of Democratic National Committee emails. “This was — there’s no other word for it — war. I told my team I thought we were at a ‘break glass’ moment. ‘We’re under attack,’ I said. It was time to take a much more aggressive public posture.”

Clinton wrote that “Robby Mook did a round of interviews in which he pointed the finger squarely at Russia. He said they weren’t trying just to create chaos, they were actively trying to help Trump. .

"Jennifer Palmieri and Jake Sullivan held a series of background briefings for news networks to explain in more detail.” She lamented that “the press treated our warnings about Russia like it was spin we’d cooked up to distract from embarrassing revelations.”

Palmieri wrote in her 2017 opinion piece that “earlier that week [the week of the DNC in July 2016], our campaign manager, Robby Mook, was mocked for telling CNN that the leak of stolen emails before our convention was an indication that Russia was trying to help Trump” as she linked to Mook’s claims.

Mook had argued to CNN anchor Jake Tapper that “​​experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these e-mails” during an appearance on CNN on July 24, 2016. Mook added: “And other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these e-mails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”

The Clinton campaign manager had also told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos nearly the exact same thing that day, arguing that “what's disturbing about this entire situation is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these websites ... and it's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by — by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”

Mook claimed to CNN and ABC that Trump had been praising Putin. It wasn't an accident.

“At the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia last summer, Jake Sullivan and I took to our golf carts one afternoon to make the rounds of the television networks’ tents in the parking lot of the Wells Fargo Center,” Palmieri later wrote. “We were on a mission to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.”

Sullivan told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that he and Palmieri worked hard at the 2016 DNC to push a narrative negatively tying Trump to Russia — an effort he said he hoped would prime the media to focus on this from then through the election.

“What Jennifer and I did was basically go to the reporting and producer teams of each of the major networks. I recall going to CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, I think NBC, I think it was every one of them. … And basically we sat with them and walked through what we understood to be the case from — in terms of the DNC hack and leak, what we believed to be the case with respect to Russian involvement … and there's likely to be more as we go forward, and people should really pay attention to this,” Sullivan testified.

Sullivan added: “The other thing that I was focused on in those conversations was raising questions about why — what was motivating Vladimir Putin to do this.” He contended that Trump “was adopting a series of positions that seemed to track almost exactly to Vladimir Putin's wish list” which “would be the kind of thing that would motivate Putin to want to see him get elected.”

Sullivan said that “the other dimension of this that I put on the table” for the media was “the nature of the connections between several members of Trump's foreign policy and political team and elements of the Russian Government or Russian-backed proxies, whether you're talking about Mike Flynn or Paul Manafort or Carter Page and that when you add all of this up, it's a pretty disturbing picture.”

Sullivan said he told the media at the July 2016 DNC that “we wanted to provide a certain kind of context or framing foundation for it in those conversations.”

Palmieri continued in her 2017 piece on the 2016 election that “we weren’t sure if Russia was doing this to undermine Americans’ faith in our political process or if it was trying to make Trump the next president. But we wanted to raise the alarm.” The Clinton campaign leader’s admission that they were pushing their Trump-Russia claims without evidence is notable.

The links that Sullivan, Smith, and others had to Biden are notable. Just the News reported that Biden would become the public face of the effort to attack Trump by linking him to Putin starting in late July 2016.

“Donald Trump, with all his rhetoric, would literally make us less safe,” Biden said at the DNC on July 27, 2016. “Donald Trump, with all his rhetoric, would literally make us less safe. We cannot elect a man who belittles our closest allies while embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin. I mean it.”

Obama also pitched in, claiming that night that Trump “cozies up to Putin” and “tells our NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection” during his DNC speech on July 28, 2016.

Clinton, for her part, did not directly present the Trump-Putin link during her own speech, although she did echo the theme by declaring that “I’m proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia” when she took center stage on July 29, 2016.

Clinton campaign was behind the Steele Dossier

Elias hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired Steele in 2016. Elias has testified he was aware of Fusion’s plans to have Steele brief reporters on his anti-Trump research, met with Steele during the 2016 contest, and periodically briefed the campaign about the findings from Fusion and Steele.

Perkins Coie was paid more than $12 million between 2016 and 2017 for its work representing Clinton and the DNC. According to Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson, Fusion was paid $50,000 per month from Perkins. Elias testified it was $60,000 each month. Fusion claimed that it paid Steele $168,000 for his work. Perkins claimed Fusion approached them in March 2016 while knowing that Perkins represented Clinton’s campaign.

Mook said in 2017 that he authorized Elias to hire a firm to dig up dirt on Trump’s connections with Russia and that he authorized Elias “to investigate this, particularly the international aspect.”

“We were getting briefings that were put together by the law firm with information,” Mook said. “I’m proud that we were able to assemble some of the research that has brought this to light.”

Fusion co-founders Simpson and Peter Fritsch wrote in their 2019 book that they met with Elias in April 2016 and that Elias wanted “deep research on Trump.”

Fritsch said he told Elias, “We think you guys will really want to pay attention to the Russia angle.” The authors wrote that “this angle was all new to Elias, and he loved it.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s August 2020 report said that “Elias told Fusion GPS to report only to him, so Fusion GPS’s communications could be solely with a lawyer and thus covered by attorney-client privilege.”

The Federal Election Commission said the DNC paid $849,407 and the Clinton campaign paid $175,000 to Perkins Coie for what was alleged in a complaint to be “opposition research done by Fusion.”

The Clinton campaign falsely reported the purpose of all those payments as “legal services.” The FEC ruled in 2022 there was “probable cause” to believe Hillary for America and the DNC violated federal laws by “misreporting the purpose of certain disbursements” and fined her campaign.

Steele claimed he told FBI the Clinton campaign knew about dossier

Steele told his FBI handler in early July 2016 that Clinton herself was aware of the Trump-Russia dirt digging he was conducting.

Horowitz wrote in 2019 that “we reviewed what Steele represented were his contemporaneous notes of his July 5 meeting with Handling Agent 1,” with Steele saying the days were penned within a day or two of his meeting with the bureau.

Steele’s notes reflected that Steele told his handling agent that the British ex-spy was aware that "Democratic Party associates" were paying for Fusion GPS's research, that the "ultimate client" was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign, and "the candidate" — Clinton herself — was aware of Steele's dossier work.

Steele told the DOJ watchdog that he was "pretty candid" with his handling agent, and “he also said it was clear that Fusion GPS was backed by Clinton supporters and senior Democrats who were supporting her.”

The FBI agent handling Steele told Horowitz “that he did not recall Steele mentioning these facts to him during their meeting.”

Elias briefed Clinton campaign on Steele Dossier claims

Elias told Congress in 2017 that he had seen “some” of the dossier “but not all of it” during the 2016 campaign. He said he started getting briefings on Steele’s findings in late June 2016 or early July 2016, and he likely first heard Steele’s name in early July 2016 from one of Fusion’s founders.

The Clinton campaign lawyer said, “If I received information and it was useful and it was verifiable and it was information that I felt comfortable with, then it went in one bucket. If it was information that wasn’t, it wasn’t.”

Elias testified that “I provided Fusion direction on the research and information I thought would help me perform my job. … On some occasions, Fusion’s work was distilled and incorporated into my judgments about legal issues, while in other instances, I shared the results of Fusion’s work with my clients.”

Sullivan told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that he was in meetings where Elias briefed the campaign on opposition research, claiming, “Marc wears a tremendous number of hats, so I wasn’t sure who he was representing. … I sort of thought he was, you know, just talking to us as, you know, a fellow traveler … in the campaign effort.”

Mook told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “counsel [Elias] starting in the summer [of 2016] had briefed him” along with Palmieri, Sullivan, Podesta, and others on “pieces of the reporting” in the dossier.

Palmieri spoke to the Senate about the Elias briefings/ “He had reports. … Some of the things that I have read are in the dossier I had heard about from Marc, including the famous encounter at the hotel," she recalled.

Elias aware of Fusion GPS efforts to spread Steele Dossier allegations in the media

Steele has said in legal filings that he met with numerous reporters in 2016 “at Fusion’s instruction.” During meetings in September 2016, he said he briefed journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, and CNN. Steele said he also briefed reporters from the Times, Post, and Yahoo News in mid-October 2016 and briefed Mother Jones by Skype in late October 2016.

A legal filing by Steele in 2017 noted that these press meetings, arranged and attended by Fusion, “involved the disclosure of limited intelligence regarding indications of Russian interference with the U.S. election process and the possible coordination of members of Trump’s campaign team and Russian government officials.” Fusion co-founder Simpson allegedly attended these with Steele.

As one example of Fusion’s media strategy related to Steele’s claims, Fritsch pushed for Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal to look into Carter Page in July 2016. The Journal reporter told Fusion that “your thesis of Trump being a Manchurian Candidate is worse than originally presented.” Fritsch emailed that “WSJ not interested in hack story or Russia angle” and said that made the outlet a “club of one” because “everyone wants shit on this.”

DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s 2019 report noted that “with Fusion GPS’s authorization” in late September 2016, Steele traveled to D.C. and met with “numerous persons outside the FBI to discuss the intelligence he had obtained.” These included meetings with Elias at his D.C. office, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and others. Steele later met with State Department officials such as Kathleen Kavalec and Jonathan Winer.

Steele was the source for a late September 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff about Carter Page titled “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The article cited a “well-placed Western intelligence source” who claimed that Page met with alleged Putin associate and Rosneft energy company chairman Igor Sechin. Page denies this meeting took place, and the FBI found no evidence of it. That Yahoo News article was referenced in FISA applications against Page.

Clinton campaign national spokesman Glen Caplin seized on the Clinton-funded dossier claims laundered through the media, writing, “It's chilling to learn that U.S. intelligence officials are conducting a probe into suspected meetings between Trump's foreign policy adviser Carter Page and members of Putin's inner circle while in Moscow.”

Steele was also the source for a late October 2016 Mother Jones piece by David Corn citing “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” and noting that “in recent months he provided the bureau with memos … contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump.”

When asked whether Elias knew that Fusion GPS sent Steele to talk to media outlets during 2016, Elias testified to Congress in 2017 that he was “aware that he [Steele] talked to media outlets in that time period” and admitted that he knew about the meetings before they happened.

Elias said he was not involved in deciding which journalists Steele would meet but was present when the discussions setting up the meetings with the press happened. Elias said the decision by Fusion may have been made during a meeting at his D.C. office.

Clinton allies tied to most salacious false dossier claims

A number of Clinton allies were tied to salacious allegations made about Trump and Russia — including baseless claims which ended up in the Steele dossier.

Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan was closely linked to the Steele dossier’s main source — Igor Danchenko — during the 2016 election, according to evidence gathered during Durham's special counsel probe.

Durham said Dolan “actively campaigned and participated in calls and events as a volunteer” for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Durham said Dolan “interacted with senior Russian Federation leadership whose names would later appear in the [Steele] Company Reports” and also “maintained relationships with" Russia's ambassador to the U.S. and the head of the Russian Embassy's Economic Section in Washington, D.C. — "both of whom also would later appear by name in the Company Reports.”

Dolan allegedly asked Danchenko to assist with an October 2016 conference at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, a location that would be the source of salacious claims about Trump. Durham said Dolan also attended meetings at the Russian Embassy in the U.S. in 2016. 

Dolan traveled to Moscow in June 2016 on a planning trip for the Moscow conference, where he stayed in the hotel. Danchenko was also in Moscow at the time working for Steele and met with Dolan there.

Durham said Dolan had a meeting with the general manager of the Moscow hotel and a female hotel staff member to discuss the conference and received a tour of the hotel, including the presidential suite. Durham noted references to "the Moscow Hotel, the Presidential Suite, and a Moscow Hotel manager and other staff would all later appear in the [Steele] Company Reports.”

Durham said Dolan described Danchenko in a June 2016 email as a potential former Russian spy, writing: “He is too young for KGB. But I think he worked for FSB."

Durham's eventual indictment of Danchenko -- a jury acquitted him --  said Danchenko brokered a meeting between Dolan and his Russian friend, Olga Galkina, “to discuss a potential business relationship.” Durham said Dolan and Galkina “discussed their political views and their support for Hillary Clinton.”

Dolan allegedly gifted Galkina an autobiography of Hillary Clinton, which he inscribed with a message, "To my good friend [first name of Russian Sub-Source-1], A Great Democrat." In July 2016, Galkina allegedly wrote to Dolan, “Tell her please [Clinton] has a big fan in” Russia, according to Durham's report.

The indictment said Galkina sent a message to another Russian in August 2016 describing Dolan as an "adviser" to Clinton and claimed in September 2016 that Dolan would "take me to the State Department if Hillary wins." The day before the November 2016 election, Galkina wrote to Dolan, “As a big Hillary fan, I wish her and all her supporters to have a Victory day.”

The FBI also ended up investigating claims from a second “dossier” put together by longtime Clinton family operative Cody Shearer, who passed along his baseless Trump-Russia allegations to State Department official and longtime Steele associate Jonathan Winer, who then provided a copy to Steele, who then passed it along to the FBI in October 2016.

Steele said Winer had gotten the information from longtime Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal, who received it from Shearer.

“What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources. On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele, to ask for his professional reaction,” Winer wrote in The Washington Post.

The FBI said the memo passed along from Steele claimed to be “from an FSB sub-source” — Russia’s Federal Security Service is the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB secret police — and that “the information describes the FSB efforts at successfully compromising Donald Trump.”

Shearer’s memo made similar uncorroborated allegations about Trump and the Ritz Carlton at the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013.

Steele and Fusion GPS gained insight into the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe

The FBI told Steele in October 2016 it was looking into Carter Page as well as Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos, future Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Steele passed along at least some of this information to Fusion, according to a book by the firm’s co-founders.

An October 2016 meeting with Steele involved FBI agents whom Inspector General Horowitz dubbed “Handling Agent 1,” “Acting Section Chief 1,” “Case Agent 2,” and the “Supervisory Intel Analyst” on the Crossfire Hurricane team.

The FBI revealed to Steele that Papadopoulos was under investigation after a “Friendly Foreign Government” — Clinton supporter and Australian envoy Alexander Downer — relayed a conversation about Papadopoulos. Steele then relayed details to Fusion GPS. The FBI also told Steele about Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn.

Case Agent 2 told Horowitz he informed Steele the FBI was interested in obtaining information in “three buckets” including “additional intelligence/reporting on specific, named individuals (such as [Page] or [Flynn]) involved in facilitating the Trump campaign-Russian relationship.”

Case Agent 2’s summary stated that Steele was “given a general overview of the FBI’s CROSSFIRE HURRICANE investigation” and “was advised that the CH team was made aware of [Papadopoulos’s] May 2016 comments in the U.K. in late July.”

In their 2019 book, the Fusion GPS co-founders wrote that the October 2016 FBI meeting “yielded an important bit of intelligence for Fusion” on Papadopoulos after “Steele passed that important tidbit on” to the opposition research firm.

Clinton campaign wasn’t just gathering opposition research — it was pushing it to the press

Steele’s company said in 2018 that Perkins “engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.” 

Elias submitted a redacted declaration in 2022 claiming that “presidential campaigns regularly encounter offensive and defensive litigation risks in multiple ways.” Fusion argued in 2022 that it “was operating as an investigative researcher to help Elias provide legal advice” — not as opposition research.

Durham said in 2022 that it was implausible to claim that Fusion’s “political opposition research — which triggered a sizeable outflow of unverified derogatory information into the media, the government, and the public — was, in reality, confidential expert work intended to support legal advice.”

The special counsel said the “primary purpose” of Fusion’s work related to the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank claims “was to assemble and publicize allegations that would aid the campaign’s public relations goals.” Durham noted Fusion claims were pushed to the media, State Department, Justice Department, Congress, and elsewhere, and “these efforts resulted in numerous media articles” before and after the 2016 election. 

Durham obtained hundreds of emails from Fusion showing it was pushing unverified Trump-Russia collusion claims to the media throughout 2016. Durham said the emails showed Fusion conducted "a (largely successful) effort to trigger negative news stories about one of the Presidential candidates."

Clinton campaign seizes on Obama administration's statement on Russian hacking

The early October 2016 statement from the Obama administration’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security on Russian hacking was seen as a huge boon by the Clinton campaign, which quickly sprung into action to use it against Trump.

Palmieri wrote in her 2017 Washington Post story that, in early October 2016, “I thought the Russia story would finally break through. We were at a debate prep session in Westchester County, N.Y., when the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security put out a joint statement saying that the U.S. intelligence community was ‘confident’ that not only had the Russian government hacked Democrats’ emails, but ‘Russia’s senior-most officials’ were probably directing their release to influence the election.” The Clinton campaign manager called it “incredible” and said “finally, here was the break we had been waiting for.”

The early October 2016 joint statement from ODNI and DHS contended that the intelligence community “is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails” and that “these thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” ODNI and DHS said that “only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Palmieri later said in a 2020 Hillary documentary that the statement was a “bombshell … and having worked in the White House, I knew how hard it was to get all of that on a piece of paper and have people say, yes, we are willing to make that kind of accusation about Russia.”

The Clinton campaign communications director said the campaign was thrilled. “We are so excited, like, finally, finally we can have the press pay attention. And so we were on a conference call with our colleagues back in Brooklyn to say, okay, what do we do, who do we put on cable, somebody needs to write an op-ed," she recalled.

The book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign reported that “the intelligence community report was a godsend — a piece of hard evidence upon which Hillary could start to really build the case that Trump was actually in league with Moscow. ... This was the kind of spy-thriller shit that would surely break through in the press. If the public saw Trump putting Russian interests above American sovereignty, Hillary’s aides thought, the story had the potential to break his back.”

Shortly after ODNI and DHS released their statement, the Access Hollywood video on Trump was made public and Wikileaks began releasing Podesta’s emails.

Clinton touted the determination by ODNI and DHS on Twitter.

“It should concern every American that Russia is willing to engage in such hostile acts in order to help Donald Trump become president,” Clinton tweeted in early October 2016.

Clinton’s tweet also included a long statement from Podesta, who said that Trump had “repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin” and had “outlined a list of pro-Putin policies.” Podesta added that if Trump “wants to reassure American voters … he must finally disclose the full extent of his ties to Russia.”

Clinton personally signed off on pushing Alfa Bank claims to the press

Testimony from Durham’s investigation makes clear that pushing the false Alfa Bank claims to the media were a key part of the implementation of the Clinton Plan.

Mook testified in 2022 during Durham’s prosecution of Democrat lawyer Michael Sussmann, who also was acquitted, Mook said he was “briefed about the Alfa Bank issue first” by Elias in the summer of 2016. He said the campaign leadership quickly had a meeting about whether to share the information with the media, which they decided to do. Also present in the media strategy meeting were Podesta, Palmieri, and Sullivan, according to Mook.

Mook said that “we discussed it and then made that decision” and “we did” decide to share the claims with a reporter. He said that “John [Podesta] and I were involved” but “I discussed it with Hillary as well” after the campaign team had discussed it. Mook said that he framed it to Clinton as: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter.” Mook added that “she agreed to that.”

He claimed that “she agreed with the decision” to share the Alfa Bank claims with the media. Mook said that “she thought we made the right decision.”

Mook admitted he was not confident in the veracity of the Alfa Bank claims when the decision was made to share them with the press, but when asked if the campaign was pleased the allegations were published, Mook replied, “We wanted the American people to know about it, yeah.”

Durham made it clear that Elias saw pushing the Alfa Bank claims as part of his official Clinton campaign duties, billing the campaign for his efforts.

Clinton campaign makes Alfa Bank claims key part of campaign strategy

.Sussmann was charged by Durham with concealing his clients — Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and Neustar executive Rodney Joffe — from FBI general counsel James Baker when he presented debunked allegations suggesting a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank during a September 2016 meeting. Sussmann was acquitted.

Durham revealed Sussmann had billed the Clinton campaign for the thumb drives Sussmann used to push the Alfa Bank claims to the FBI.

Durham said members of the Clinton campaign, Fusion, and Perkins all played a coordinated role in pushing collusion claims and that Elias was part of the “joint venture” in 2016. Sussmann and Elias worked for Perkins at the time, and Fusion pushed Alfa Bank claims, too.

The Durham indictment against Sussmann said Sussmann, Elias, and Joffe “coordinated and communicated about the [Alfa Bank] allegations during telephone calls and meetings, which Sussmann billed to the Clinton Campaign” during the 2016 election.

Durham said Joffe tasked employees and associates with mining and assembling internet data that would support a “narrative” tying Trump to Russia in order to please “VIPs” — including Sussmann and Elias. Joffe was never charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

Franklin Foer of Slate reported on Halloween 2016 that researchers found “a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.” Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times then published a report stating, “The FBI ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam.”

Foer and Lichtblau both emailed with Fusion about the Alfa Bank claims in 2016, according to records released by Durham.

Clinton campaign’s Alfa Bank “October Surprise”

The Clinton campaign considered the Alfa Bank allegations as a last-minute "October surprise."

Clinton personally tweeted on Halloween 2016 that “it’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia” as she shared a link to the Slate article pushing the now-debunked claims.

“Four things you need to know about the Trump Organization’s secret server to communicate with Russian Alfa Bank,” Clinton’s tweet also said. “1. Donald Trump has a secret server (Yes, Donald Trump). 2. It was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank called Alfa Bank. 3. When a reporter asked about it, they shut it down. 4. One week later, they created a new server with a different name for the same purpose.”

The same day, Clinton tweeted, “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” She included a lengthy statement from Sullivan titled “New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”

“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan claimed in the 2016 statement. “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia … This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.”

Sullivan added: “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”

Clinton’s closing campaign argument: Trump is a Putin “puppet”

A documentary entitled Hillary released in 2020 captured the Trump-Russia-focused mindset of Clinton and her team in early October 2016.

Clinton vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is on video saying Obama had called him the prior night and had said: “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.” Clinton said that “I echo that sentiment.”

Clinton then seemed to hint at an alleged nefarious relationship between Trump and Russia, saying, “The weight of our responsibility is so huge… and I don’t say this lightly. His agenda is other people’s agenda. … I believe, you know, we’re scratching hard. We’re trying to figure it out.”

Clinton said that Trump “is the vehicle for, the vessel for all these other people, including —”

Kaine interrupted and said “Manafort, who has got all these weird connections.” Another campaign team member remarked that “this Ukraine thing is weird.” Clinton agreed, adding, “And Flynn, who is a paid tool for Russian television. This is — what scares me… In the last, you know, when I was secretary of state, actually starting when I was senator, but more as secretary of state,  the way that Putin has taken over the political apparatus, or is trying to—” 

Palmieri lamented in her 2017 article that “the sheer spectacle of Trump kept the Russia allegations from getting the attention they would have had with any previous candidate.”

But she noted that “we sought moments for Clinton and Kaine to talk about Russia when we knew they would be on live television and couldn’t be edited” and that “the debates offered the best opportunity, and Clinton took advantage, culminating with her famous line calling Trump Putin’s ‘puppet’ in the third one” as she linked to the debate transcript.

During the mid-October 2016 debate, Trump had said Putin did not respect Clinton, and she had retorted that “that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

Clinton then delivered a speech on Halloween 2016 — about a week before the election — where she put her heaviest emphasis on Trump and Russia.

“What’s most striking about all of this — and I would argue most important for voters to consider — is the relationship between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Clinton told the crowd at Kent State University in Ohio. “The U.S. intelligence community has now confirmed that the Russian government, which means Putin, is directing cyber-attacks against targets in the United States to influence the outcome of our election.”

Clinton added: “So ask yourself, why would Putin be trying to get Donald Trump elected President? Could it be because of all of the nice things Donald has said about him, or the fact that he's promised to adopt pro-Kremlin policies…?”

“We are dealing with something unprecedented in the history of our country. A foreign adversary trying to influence our presidential election. That should scare everyone, Democrat, Republican, and Independent,” Clinton declared.

Clinton campaign officials kept pushing collusion after Trump’s win

Sullivan continued pushing the Alfa Bank narrative even after Trump won, telling CNN in 2017 that “what we learned during the campaign was that very serious computer science experts, people who work closely with the United States government, had uncovered this secret hotline between the Alfa Bank — the Russian bank — and the Trump Organization.”

Sullivan was asked about Alfa Bank during late 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, saying: “I think there is ample evidence at this point in the public record of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.”

Sullivan also testified that he never saw the dossier until BuzzFeed published it in January 2017, saying “I read it with great interest” at that time. But he said that, when it came out, “I saw things in it, I thought, oh, some of those things are consistent with, you know, what I had heard previously.”

He also said he met with Fusion GPS only one time, when he and Podesta met with the Fusion co-founders in February 2017. Sullivan said Simpson called the British ex-spy “highly credible” and “really effective.”

Sullivan said the meeting “was sort of about the effort that they had put in to finding out ties between Trump and Russia and what their belief was based on the accumulation on that.”

The other person apparently at the meeting between Fusion and Sullivan and Podesta was leftwing operative and researcher Dan Jones. Podesta told congressional investigators in late 2017 that Jones “was in the process of creating a nonprofit organization, as it were, to pursue the issues around Russian intervention in the U.S. election.”

The Washington Examiner revealed that the Democracy Integrity Project was founded by Jones in January 2017, and tax records show he funded Steele, Fusion, and others, keeping a web of groups working and donor money flowing to the tune of millions of dollars for years, helping the groups continue their Russia-related research after Clinton’s defeat.

Court records show Jones says he was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017 to look into Alfa Bank allegations, and the 2018 report Jones produced concluded: “The highly unusual and consistent DNS look-ups of the Trump Organization server suggest that there was a special relationship between the Trump Organization server and servers associated with Alfa Bank.”

Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham wrote in 2021: “The Alfa-Trump conspiracy-theory has gotten a new life. Among the new things is a report done by Democrat operative Daniel Jones. … If the data and analysis held up, then partisan ties wouldn’t matter. But they don’t hold up. Jones is clearly trying to be deceptive. … The allegation that this proves a secret connect between Alfa Bank and a Trump server is clearly false.”

Clinton and her campaign blame loss on Russia — and collusion

When promoting her book, What Happened, Clinton contended in September 2017 that she was “convinced” that Trump had colluded with Russia to defeat her.

“There certainly was communication and there certainly was an understanding of some sort," Clinton told USA Today. "Because there's no doubt in my mind that Putin wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win. And there's no doubt in my mind that there are a tangle of financial relationships between Trump and his operation with Russian money. And there's no doubt in my mind that the Trump campaign and other associates have worked really hard to hide their connections with Russians."

Clinton said "I'm convinced of it” when asked if she believed there had been Trump-Russia collusion. There was, and is, zero evidence of this, Durham would later conclude.

The book Shattered by journalists Jonathan Allen and Aime Parnes gave an inside account of the Clinton campaign effort to pin the loss on the Russians.

“In other calls with advisers and political surrogates in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss. ‘She’s not being particularly self-reflective,’ said one longtime ally who was on calls with her shortly after the election. Instead, Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia," the book argued.

“That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech," the authors revealed. "Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Clinton contended in her post-mortem book What Happened that “Putin was actively trying to derail my candidacy and help elect Trump." She also sought to lend credibility to the dossier — without mentioning that it was funded by her campaign.

“The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump,” Clinton wrote of the 2016 race. “The Intelligence Community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President-elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration.”

Clinton sought to blame her loss on two main causes — Comey and Russian meddling.

“The second big factor that caused the bottom to fall out at the end of the race was the Russian plot to sabotage my campaign and help elect Trump,” Clinton wrote.

“Because no evidence has emerged yet of direct vote tampering, some critics insist that Russian interference had no impact on the outcome at all. This is absurd," she added. "The Kremlin’s information warfare was roughly equivalent to a hostile super PAC unleashing a major ad campaign, if not worse. Of course it had an impact.”