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THEOn October 28, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey dropped a bomb in the middle of the presidential race. With only 11 days to go until Election Day, he announced that his agents were investigating a batch of newly discovered emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server.
The highly erratic intervention led nowhere, but it was enough to wreak havoc down the stretch of the contest, putting Clinton on the defensive and giving Donald Trump an artificial advantage. To this day, many Democrats, and Republicans, are convinced that he played a major role in Trump’s unexpected victory.
Twenty days before Election Day 2020, the Trump campaign dropped what it hoped was a similar bomb amid the current race. On October 14, the New York Post (owner: Rupert Murdoch) splashed with the headline yelling “Biden Secret Emails.”
The newspaper alleged that a laptop had been discovered in a computer repair shop in Delaware, the home state of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. On its hard drive, the Post said, personal emails from Biden’s son Hunter Biden were stored that pointed to inappropriate conflicts of interest between young Biden’s business interests in Ukraine and the old man’s diplomatic work as then vice president.
It was a case of Clinton’s email reduction. Like the 2016 saga, Hunter Biden’s emails were flimsy in content and, in this case, of dubious provenance.
The cast of characters involved in the “discovery” of the laptop was like a list of some of Trump’s most discredited associates. At the center of the ploy were former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has been charged with fraud and money laundering related to the border wall with Mexico; and Rudy Giuliani, who has his own questions to answer about his blush-inducing appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
The way the Hunter Biden story was put together from inside the New York Post also drew attention. The New York Times reported that the Post reporter who wrote most of the account declined to attach his name due to doubts about the credibility of the material.
The lead firm of the story, Emma-Jo Morris, recently worked as a producer on the Fox News Show of Trump loyalist Sean Hannity. The second signature, Gabrielle Fonrouge, had little to do with the article and only learned that her name was on it after it was published, the Times reported.
Such machinations over a controversial story are nothing new within the Post’s newsroom, a former newspaper employee told The Guardian. “When I saw that Hunter Biden piece I had memories of how horrible that place was. That happened to me there. I would wake up and think: ‘I didn’t write that story,’ ”said the journalist.
The Hunter Biden story was a transparent effort to replicate the undoubted success of Clinton’s 2016 emails. But as the work of dirty political stunts, it was too obvious to impress many.
“He’s brash and desperate,” was the assessment of Elaine Karmack, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was also tired. Hunter Biden’s allegations were fully aired during the impeachment. If you want a real October surprise, you have to invent something new, ”he said.
If it missed its mark, Biden’s ruse at least signaled how far Trump and his friends are willing to go to cling to presidential power. Karmack predicted that more dirty tricks are yet to come.
“We have 10 days to go, who knows what else they could prepare. You have a president who has his back to the wall and is acting weirder and weirder, ”Karmack said.
John Weaver, John Kasich’s chief strategist during his presidential battle with Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016 and now a co-founder of the anti-Trump group of disgruntled former Republicans, the Lincoln Project, urged the nation to prepare for a wild ride in the last days. “The next two weeks we will see dirty tricks on a scale that we cannot imagine, nor would we want.”
Weaver noted that dirty tricks in American politics are as old as the nation. They date back to the 1796 contest.
In that race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, vying to replace George Washington as president, Alexander Hamilton, acting on behalf of Adams and his Federalist party, adopted the pseudonym Phocion. He then wrote a defamatory article in the United States Gazette accusing Jefferson of having an affair with a slave.
If that sounds bad, it was nothing compared to what we’re witnessing today, Weaver said. “What we’re seeing from Trump is on a scale, and at the crossroads of norms and the will to blatantly do things, and the pettiness of it, on another level. Even when Hamilton and Jefferson clashed, they had respect for the new institutions they had just helped establish; now there is no respect for any institution. “
Hunter Biden is just the slim end of the wedge. The Trump cabal has also been trying to reheat the grotesque “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that spread in 2016 by claiming that Hillary Clinton was at the center of a pedophile ring, this time with the Bidens at the center.
The lie was aired this week by Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo, and Trump alluded to it when he refused to expose the cult conspiracy theory QAnon at an NBC News town hall.
The litany of dirty tricks comes out of there. They come in all shapes and sizes – manipulating digital material to create misinformation is a favorite. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease official in the US, found himself on the receiving end of that technique in a Trump re-election announcement that crudely took his words out of context to make it appear he was backing the president.
For Karmack, the most insidious dirty tricks of this cycle have been directed at the electoral process itself. Trump has repeatedly and falsely described the United States voting system, and voting by mail in particular, as riddled with fraud; in fact, the amount of verified fraud is infinitesimally small.
Polls where voters are encouraged to cast absentee ballots began to appear suspiciously in Los Angeles and other parts of California. It turned out to be the work of the local Republican Party, which state officials duly ordered to remove them as illegal.
“Misinformation about how to vote is the worst dirty trick I see,” Karmack said. “Voting is already confusing in the pandemic, and if you add more confusion to that, efforts to suppress voting could be successful in some places.”
While Trump and his allies are busily intensifying their distortion efforts, an important contrast to 2016 is that there are far fewer signs that the tactics will work this time. So far, the FBI has resisted pressure from the White House to do another Comey and announce a Bidens investigation, much to Trump’s fury.
The media has also proven to be much more disciplined in dealing with Trump’s fireball of lies and misinformation. The Hunter Biden story was handled carefully by most of the media, in stark contrast to the breathless handling of Clinton’s emails four years ago.
If the mud that is thrown against the wall does not stick in the same way it did then, it is possible that the covert tactics will backfire on the increasingly embattled president. Every dirty trick pulled is a distraction from Trump’s core message on the economy.
“Time is being wasted on Hunter Biden, QAnon and all this other circus activity,” Weaver said. “Voters don’t care about those things, and Trump seizes his own reelection opportunities every minute he spends on it.”
