LAST WEEK BROUGHT A DOOZY of a Trump administration scandal, one that deserves a special place in the record books for its perfect combination of lying and gullibility, desperation and conspiracy theorizing. It’s at once so brazen and so dumb that future generations looking back on it will have trouble believing it could have happened at all.
The background here is Donald Trump’s obsession with proving that the accusations of collusion between his 2016 campaign and Russia were a “hoax” and a “witch-hunt” concocted by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the “Deep State.” Last week, the staggeringly unqualified toady serving as Trump’s director of the FBI, Kash Patel, breathlessly announced that his team had “uncovered” long-ignored proof “buried in a back room at the FBI.” It is a smoking gun: “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
Hot damn! It’s like a real-life re-enactment of Patel’s children’s book, The Plot Against the King, in which Wizard Kash thwarts a plot by the evil Hillary Queenton to unseat good King Donald by accusing him of “working with the Russionians” to steal the throne. (I am not making that up.)
But wait: As Patel notes, this evidence had already been included as a classified “annex” to the 2023 report by special counsel John Durham, who had been hired as a special prosecutor in 2020 by Trump and his then-attorney general, Bill Barr. If this evidence is as potent as Patel says, then why would Durham—who was hired to blow the lid off the supposed “Russiagate hoax”—have relegated it to a mere annex?
Because, it turns out, Wizard Kash’s “smoking gun” is not only ridiculously fake (as Durham concluded), it actually blows a massive hole in the Trump/Patel “Russia hoax” theory.
THE SUPPOSED “SMOKING GUN” comes from materials provided to U.S. intelligence by a Dutch spy agency that had hacked a Russian spy agency and copied a trove of materials, including memos and reports based on American emails obtained by Russian hackers. (Got that?) Some of them had to do with “confidential conversations” between then-Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two staffers of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, Leonard Benardo and Jeffrey Goldstein. Among this trove were some emails purporting to be from Benardo discussing a Clinton campaign plan to “smear Donald Trump” by tying him to the Russian hackers who were (correctly) believed to have broken into Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails.
Here is the first of those emails:
(There is a second version of the same email which includes an added line after “as far as credibility is concerned”: “Anyway it should last as long as the Olympics accusations,” presumably referring to a controversy about bribery at the 2016 Rio Olympics.)
The second email is dated two days later:
These emails, it should be noted, were mentioned in the recently declassified 2020 report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, revealed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last month in her own flailing (and failed) attempt at an exposé of the “Russia Hoax.” That report, originally drafted in 2017 under the auspices of none other than Kash Patel (then senior counsel for the HPSCI), asserted that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, “possessed a campaign email discussing a plan approved by Secretary Clinton to link Putin and Russian hackers to candidate Trump in order to ‘distract the [American] public’ from the Clinton email server scandal.”
My first thought was that if such an email existed, it had to be a Russian forgery: Even allowing for argument’s sake that such a plan was really discussed, no Clinton campaign staffer could have been dumb enough to send an email about it amid intense concerns about hacking. My first thought was, it turns out, correct. Even so, I had not imagined that the SVR could have been dumb enough to plant so crude and obvious a fake.
Honestly, I’m disappointed in you, Russian spymasters. This is not like they showed us on The Americans. Couldn’t you have found an actual speaker of American English to vet your Hillary fanfic? Were you using Google Translate, 2016 vintage? “Politicization is on the table”? “A long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump”? (A tip for the SVR: No sane American would be talking about the challenge of “demonizing” Vladimir Putin in 2016, when he had already unleashed a war in Eastern Ukraine, grabbed Crimea, and killed scads of journalists and political opponents.) “Americans are more keen on their own woes”? (Hahahaha.) “Hillary is hardly good-looking as far as credibility is concerned”? And the cherry on top: “The FBI will put more oil into the fire.” That’s a literal translation of the Russian phrase podlit’ masla v ogon’. The common English phrase is “add fuel to the fire”; there’s also the more rarely used “pour oil on the fire.” It’s amusing that the second fake email has Benardo referring to the Russian spies as “incompetent bumbling idiots.” Why, yes, tovarishchi; you’re telling on yourselves.
Since Durham (whatever his biases) is not a bumbling idiot, his assessment—according to the newly declassified annex to his report—was that the emails, of which no traces were found in the Open Society’s records, were most likely not authentic; instead, they were “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others.” Indeed, as the annex notes, the first two paragraphs of the July 25 email purporting to be from Benardo is lifted almost word for word—except for the line, “At the same [sic], politicization is on the table”—from an email sent on the same date by Tim Maurer, a cyber expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Democracy, to someone soliciting his opinion on a Vice article about the Russian connection to the DNC hack. For anyone with more than three working brain cells, this should put to rest any chance of the Benardo email not being fake—unless we believe that Maurer and Benardo had a psychic link and wrote emails with identical text on the same day.
IN AN ATTEMPT to kinda, sorta validate the possible existence of a “Clinton Plan” to smear Trump, the Durham annex points out that around that time, in late July 2016, Clinton staffers really did discuss a strategy of (1) bringing attention to the Russian hacking of American political organizations in an apparent attempt to interfere in the election, (2) pointing out Trump’s disturbing Russia-friendly rhetoric and hostility to NATO as well as similarities between Trump’s language and methods and those of “Putin-supported European right-wing candidates.”
But that conclusion hardly takes a lot of detective work, considering that this strategy was completely out in the open. On August 5, 2016, the Clinton campaign ran an almost two-minute video ad on the Trump/Putin connection, with superimposed text that said, “We don’t know why Russia is trying to influence this election . . . or why Donald is inviting them to.” The video highlighted Trump’s praise for Putin and disparagement of NATO, Kremlin-connected Trump campaign advisers such as Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, Russian attempts at election-meddling via the DNC hack and email dump—and, of course, Trump’s infamous “Russia, if you’re listening. . .” invitation to find Clinton’s missing emails at a news conference on July 27.
So yes, the “plan” existed, but there was nothing insidious about it—and it followed on the heels of media coverage such as a June 17 Washington Post article exploring the Trump-Putin “bromance” and Trump’s financial ties to Russia. Franklin Foer’s article titled “Putin’s Puppet” had appeared in Slate on July 4, discussing Trump’s “odes to Putin,” the Kremlin-controlled Russian media’s Trump cheerleading, the DNC hack, and the presence of “advisers and operatives who have long careers advancing the interests of the Kremlin” in Trump’s inner circle. Team Clinton would have been extremely negligent not to capitalize on all this, especially after the “Russia, if you’re listening. . .” remark.
What would make the Benardo emails compromising—if they were real—is the suggestion that the strategy involved (1) the deliberate concoction of a Trump/Putin link as a smear tactic against Trump and (2) the intent to distract public attention from the issue of Clinton’s emails. But none of that is present in the actually existing messages from Clinton staffers, who discuss the issue of Russian election interference and Trump’s Russia friendliness as a matter of genuine concern—and never mention Clinton’s emails in the same context.
THE OBVIOUS FAKENESS of the evidence here hasn’t stopped the MAGA media from trying to validate Patel’s “smoking gun.” An article in the Federalist takes great umbrage at a New York Times story which correctly notes that the declassified “Durham annex” disproves the Clinton plan allegations. Look: Here’s a passage that says some intelligence officers interviewed by Durham’s team, “well-versed in the Sensitive Intelligence assessment, said that their best assessment was that the Benardo emails were likely authentic”! (First: That was early in the Durham investigation, before evidence to the contrary emerged. Second: If these officers believed a native English speaker could have written the purported Benardo emails, maybe not all the incompetence is on the Russian side of the business.) The Federalist also latches on to a heavily redacted passage which seems to say that a 2017 CIA assessment “did not assess” the hacked emails “to be the product of Russian fabrications.” Maybe it didn’t—in which case, again, the CIA needs to hire better language experts. But whatever CIA analysts may have said in 2017 is irrelevant. In 2025, we know these messages were Russian fabrications, because they were partly patched together from identical passages lifted from real emails by other people.
Claims that American intelligence agencies had known all along about a “Clinton Plan” to concoct a Trump/Russia conspiracy are hardly new; they have circulated since the fall of 2020. On September 29 of that year, then-DNI John Ratcliffe declassified the information that, as of July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies had been in possession of “Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee” and the CIA chief John Brennan had briefed President Obama and other intelligence chiefs about it. (Ratcliffe did add that “the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication” was unknown.) Sen. Lindsey Graham, to whom Ratcliffe wrote about this declassification, publicly released the Ratcliffe letter the next day—hours before the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Outside the MAGA camp, most people were appalled that Ratcliffe and Graham were laundering unverified intelligence at best and Russian disinformation at worst. But for Trump supporters, Hillary’s evil plan was self-evidently real, as was the Deep State conspiracy to aid and abet it—and John Ratcliffe had provided the receipts.
And now, the plot twist: Kash Patel, a man so passionately devoted to this theory that he literally wrote a kids’ book about it, unveils the document that should supply the final proof—but instead, it provides a definitive debunking. It’s like a mystery novel where the murderer almost succeeds in implicating someone else, only to plant a clue so obviously fake it gives him away.
Of course, in a mystery novel, the truth comes out and the story is over. In our reality, pro-Trump media (and their left-wing useful idiots like Matt Taibbi) will continue to insist that the fake clue is real, and Wizard Kash will say he’s got even more magic up his sleeve—that is, more “explosive” evidence from that FBI backroom. No doubt it will be enough to keep the base distracted for a little while longer.