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Clinton calls Trump a 'creep' in her new book, 'What Happened'
Hillary Clinton's new book, 'What Happened,' published Sept. 12 and aims to "pull back the curtain" on her losing presidential bid. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
THE MORNING PLUM:
Today Hillary Clinton’s new book about the 2016 campaign is getting released. This means a lot of very smart people will suddenly decide that they can’t keep these two ideas in their heads at the same time:
  1. Hillary Clinton, her weaknesses as a candidate, and the mistakes she made were partly to blame for her loss.
  2. There are other reasons she lost, and it is not only appropriate for her — and us — to discuss them; it’s desirable, because they have major implications for the future of our democracy.
Clinton’s book, by most accounts, tries to balance those two basic claims. I have not read it, so I can’t say whether it balances them fairly, or whether she feints toward blaming her own failings while dodging accountability for herself via an overemphasis on other causes. But a lot of Twitter traffic today suggests an unwillingness to allow space for the notion that both those claims can even be reconciled or discussed simultaneously at all. That’s absurd, and it could have terrible consequences.
To see why, let’s look at one claim the book makes that we can discuss in isolation (before assessing its overall balance in a future post): Her book reportedly has an extensive discussion of Russian interference in the election, and, crucially, it points a finger at congressional Republicans for failing to show a united front against it. As Jonathan Allen summarizes:
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, gets hit for “playing defense” for [President] Trump on Russia. “I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security,” Clinton writes of the Kentucky Republican. “McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway.” …
[There] is a 50-page, point-by-point chronology of Russia’s involvement in the election and the Trump operation’s efforts to capitalize on it. That chapter — called “Trolls, Bots, Fake News and Real Russians” — puts it all in one place for the first time.
In an interview with USA Today, Clinton says she is “convinced” that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian sabotage. That goes too far — while we do know that top Trump officials were willing and eager to collude, we don’t know much of what happened beyond that. Let’s hope her book states clearly that the accusation remains largely unproven and subject to investigation.
However, Clinton is right to raise questions about the conduct of Republican lawmakers — McConnell in particular — when confronted in 2016 with the intelligence community’s conclusion and warning that Russia was trying to tip the election. The Post has reported that during the campaign, Obama administration officials privately presented evidence — which had been amassed by our intelligence services — of Russian interference to a bipartisan group of lawmakers, and asked them to present a united front against it. And then:
The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests. According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
There is more to this story, and as Brian Beutler has argued in a post that puts together much of what is known about it, this matters not just for the blame game, but also for purposes of accountability. In this sense alone, Clinton is right to raise the issue: Even if Russian interference didn’t make the difference, we really do need to know more about the Republican refusal to join in a bipartisan effort to stop Russia from sabotaging our election and democracy. But she is also right to do so for another reason: Any failure of accountability could have consequences for the future.
The larger context is this: Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge that Russian sabotage of the election even happened at all. Yet our intelligence services have warned that Russia will hit our democracy in the future. It’s unclear how seriously the administration is taking the threat of more sabotage; some elections experts have warned that a lot more needs to be done, and state officials report getting too little security guidance from the administration. As the 2018 elections get closer, discussion of this topic will escalate. The difference between now and 2016 is that there are now major investigations underway into possible Trump campaign collusion with the last round of sabotage, and it is now public that the intel services say Russia will strike again. One would hope media scrutiny will make it harder for congressional Republicans to dodge their responsibility to take this subject more seriously this time, and to prod Trump to do the same.
If Clinton’s book can force more attention to this topic, that’s a good thing. Whatever one thinks of Clinton’s own culpability for her loss (my own effort to balance the blame is here), discussion of Russian meddling and Republican unconcern about it shouldn’t be overshadowed by some silly idea that focusing on these things constitutes Clinton dodging blame.