In All-Time Loathsome Podcast, Reporters Cheerfully Admit Screwing Up Russiagate

Ben Smith and Ezra Klein yuk it up on Russiagate

In late 2018 and early 2019, before the release of the Mueller report, I sometimes felt fear that if I didn’t get out of the legacy press soon, I might go on a tri-state killing spree, ending up gunned down on the Taconic Parkway. I thought those feelings were past, but a clip of Ezra Klein chuckling to former Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith about Russiagate brought them all back:

Smith, whose decision to publish the loony Steele Dossier in full despite obvious factual problems struck me as nuts at the time, and who later doubled down on the decision multiple times (including in a long Atlantic piece in 2023), now smiles and speaks of regrets. Echoing former New York Times editor Dean Bacquet, who after the collapse of the Mueller probe complained of pressure on Russia from “our readers who want Donald Trump to go away,” Smith explained Buzzfeed’s predicament:

A lot of our readers felt, and a lot of Democrats felt, like, there’s no way this guy was legitimately elected. There are two theories. One, it was Facebook. Two it was Russia. And lots of media energy went into chasing those two things. The White House felt totally under siege from, like, that set of questions. I think I have regrets about that in retrospect…

Smith was speaking on his own “Mixed Signals” podcast. Guest and author Klein, whose current hit book Abundance enumerates the many things besides galactic media misses that contributed to “the rise of Trumpism,” grinned and asked:

“Do you regret publishing the dossier? Is what you’re saying? Is that the admission here, Ben?”

“I would say I’m more ambivalent about it than I used to be.”

Mixed Signals co-host Max Tani playfully jumped in, ragging his partner. “We made news on our own podcast! You’re not supposed to make news. Ezra is supposed to make news.”

Klein described his own attitude toward Trump-Russia. “I was always very hostile to the ‘Facebook did it through disinformation’ theory,” he said. “I mean, you go back to what I said then. I never thought there was evidence that Russian disinformation, or ads, or something on Facebook, had turned the election. I thought James Comey had turned the election, which I still think is true.”

At the time I was one of just a handful of mainstream press figures expressing reservations about Trump-Russia “collusion.” Like Glenn Greenwald, who was still at The Intercept and called for an independent investigation, and Aaron Maté, who was writing for The Nation, I was neither a fan of Donald Trump (I’d just published Insane Clown President), nor had I said much beyond noting a lack of evidence and stressing caution. Still, like Glenn and Aaron, I gained leper status anyway. Any colleague who expressed similar doubts would have stood out to all of us. We’d have been glad of those private thoughts of Ezra’s. It wasn’t to be. He went on:

The Russia stuff, I always thought that was worth investigating. I mean, I guess people can debate whether or not it got too much, and it definitely became a deus ex machina for liberals. I never believed that Russia had won the election for him, and I don’t think I ever said anything that would’ve suggested I did believe that…

Liberals had gotten themselves into a weird place where they wanted some explanation for how it had happened. There was some view that Mueller was going to come out with some report, and that would be the end of this. And I think something very different in the liberal mind is a recognition that there’s something very authentic in Trump’s appeal, and nobody comes in and saves you on a horse. And I think that’s really important. I also think the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, and that the election was so incredibly close in the battleground states in 2016, contributed to this feeling that this guy was a fluke and should be treated as kind of an aberration.

I’ve run into Ben maybe once or twice, don’t know Ezra, and have heard both are nice enough guys, but what the fuck? Listen to the reasoning: “Clinton’s close electoral college loss broke the brains of audiences, who to their credit have since come to accept that Donald Trump has enough authentic appeal to win elections. At the time, however, they were so incapable of believing the election had been won organically that they gobbled up any soothing explanation and were reduced to praying for rescue by divine plot intervention. And looking back, that’s what Russiagate was, right? Not that we ever believed Russia won the election for him…”

About that: on July 13, 2017, the Center for International Studies published, “Ezra Klein: Collusion is Likely,” featuring the money quote: “I believe at this point collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign is likely. We know for a fact that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee files and released them in ways… designed to hurt Hillary Clinton… Given how razor-thin the final margin was for Trump, we know they might have literally decided the election.” A few days earlier, in Vox: “We know that foreign power conducted a large-scale and successful cyber-espionage effort against the Democratic Party… The election is tainted. The White House is tainted. Our foreign policy is tainted.”

Later that year, on October 24th, 2017, the Washington Post finally broke the story that the Steele dossier was paid Clinton campaign research. That should have been the end of the story, but not to Klein, who wrote in Vox days later: “[Russia] really did conduct social media operations designed help Trump. Both their targets and their timing were extremely sophisticated for a foreign government that has traditionally shown itself to have a poor understanding of American politics… At this point, it would be a truly remarkable coincidence if two entities that had so many ties to each other… and that were working so hard toward the same goal never found a way to coordinate.”

If you’re looking for reasons why “liberals” fell into that “weird place” of putting their faith in that “deus ex machina,” you’ll find plenty more like the above. Most interesting, though, was the caveat Klein just offered in the podcast:

The idea that he was possibly compromised or that the people around him were, I don’t think was or is, by the way, crazy. I think that the network of corruption around Donald Trump is vast and much worse than we actually know — including now, by the way, where I think crypto has created whole new vistas of potential corruption.

In the middle of a speech about how readers (but not him!) lost touch and went searching for magic collusion connections instead of facing electoral reality and embracing tough policy changes as Abundance recommends, Klein moves to a new set of possible conspirators, whose reach could be “much worse than we actually know.” The lesson of Trump-Russia was about the danger of speculative rumination in realms beyond what we “actually know,” but apparently we’re not in the lesson-learning mode yet. Incidentally I agree it’s worth investigating Trump’s crypto connections and schemes like the Trump meme coin, but aren’t we also still waiting for a full autopsy on the Sam Bankman-Fried episode? At least one candidate to replace Gerry Connolly as ranking member at House Oversight was supported by an SBF-bankrolled PAC.

A last note: in that 2023 Atlantic piece, Smith talked about complaints he received from people like Jake Tapper (who worried the dossier’s publication made the Trump-Russia story “less credible”). “I’d expected that backlash, and at first welcomed it,” he wrote. “I thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld. And, of course, I loved the traffic…”

The reason the publication of the Steele dossier freaked out a lot of people in conventional media was because it broke a longstanding taboo on publishing material one knows to be untrue or unverifiable. Of course, taboos are made to be broken, the Internet age did usher new variables into the media business, and part of the reason the dossier could be published by Smith and not at CNN or the New York Times was because, as Smith himself has said, Buzzfeed was a “slightly fringy place.”

Looking back, though, that “fringy” status of Buzzfeed just helped complete a complex end-run around the safeguards against fake news. Oppo researchers from Fusion-GPS tried to sell Steele’s reports to the Times, The New Yorker, ABC, and CNN. Those outlets passed, unable to verify the stuff. But the FBI, CIA, and NSA weren’t bound by journalistic ethics, and were able to stick Steele’s “blackmail” claim in an annex to an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017. Jim Comey then presented that Annex with the “blackmail” material to President-elect Trump in an early January briefing, ostensibly to help make him aware it was out there. After that, news of the meeting was leaked, leading to a January 10, 2017 CNN report that Smith says helped force his hand.

Once the dossier was published, other mainstream outlets felt like the choice was either report, or ignore a story that “lit up the Internet,” as The Guardian put it. It was all tidy: once Smith went public (and while his decision drew some fire, it was also backed by the Columbia Journalism Review) everyone had a justification for speculating about the unverifiable thing, which as Smith now notes, besieged that White House for a good long while. The smile as he speaks of “regrets” is so mischievously wry, it’s hard not to admire. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s really a hell of a smile, a perfect nod to a brilliant maneuver. Sure, it helped blow up the credibility of a storied industry, but wasn’t it also worth it, just a little? No wonder people hate us…