MORE INSIDIOUS AND SUBTLE, but even worse, was what Newsweek and its Clinton-adoring writer Kurt Eichenwald did last night. What happened – in reality, in the world of facts – was extremely trivial. One of the emails in the second installment of the WikiLeaks/Podesta archive – posted yesterday – was from Sidney Blumenthal to Podesta. The sole purpose of Blumenthal’s email was to show Podesta one of Eichenwald’s endless series of Clinton-exonerating articles, this one about Benghazi. So in the body of the email to Podesta, Blumenthal simply pasted the link and the full contents of the article. Although the purpose of Eichenwald’s article (like everything he says and does) was to defend Clinton, one paragraph in the middle acknowledged that one minor criticism of Clinton on Benghazi is possibly rational.
Once WikiLeaks announced that this second email batch was online, many news organizations (including the Intercept, along with the NYT and AP) began combing through them to find relevant information and then published articles about them. One such story was published by Sputnik, the Russian government’s international outlet similar to RT, which highlighted that Blumenthal email. But the Sputnik story inaccurately attributed the text of the Newsweek article to Blumenthal, thus suggesting that one of Clinton’s closest advisors had expressed criticism of her on Benghazi. Sputnik quickly removed the article once Eichenwald pointed out that the words were his, not Blumethal’s. Then, in his campaign speech last night, Trump made reference to the Sputnik article (hours after it was published and spread on social media), claiming (obviously inaccurately) that even Blumenthal had criticized Clinton on Benghazi.
That’s all that happened. There is zero suggestion in the article, let alone evidence, that any WikiLeaks email was doctored: it wasn’t. It was just Sputnik misreporting the email. Once Sputnik realized that its article misattributed the text to Blumenthal, it took it down. It’s not hard to imagine how a rushed, careless Sputnik staffer could glance at that email and fail to realize that Blumethal was forwarding Eichenwald’s article rather than writing it himself. And while nobody knows how this erroneous Sputnik story made its way to Trump for him to reference in his speech, it’s very easy to imagine how a Trump staffer on a shoddy, inept campaign – which has previously cited InfoWars and white supremacist sites among others – would have stumbled into a widely-shared Sputnik story that had been published hours earlier on the internet and then passed it along to Trump for him to highlight, without realizing the reasons to be skeptical.
In any event, based on the available evidence, this is a small embarrassment for Trump: he cited an erroneous story from a non-credible Russian outlet, so it’s worth noting. But that’s not what happened. Eichenwald, with increasing levels of hysteria, manically posted no fewer than 3 dozen tweets last night about his story, each time escalating his claims of what it proved. By the time he was done, he had misled large numbers of people into believing that he found proof that: a) the documents in the WikiLeaks archive were altered; b) Russia put forgeries into the WikiLeaks archive; 3) Sputnik knew about the WikiLeaks archive ahead of time, before it was posted online; 4) WikiLeaks coordinated the release of the documents with the Russian government; and 5) the Russian government and the Trump campaign coordinated to falsely attribute Eichenwald’s words to Blumenthal.
In fact, Eichenwald literally has zero evidence for any of that. The point is not that his evidence for these propositions is inconclusive or unpersuasive; the point is that there is zero evidence for any of it. It’s all just conspiracy theorizing and speculation that he invented. Worse, the article, while hinting at these claims and encouraging readers to believe it, does not even expressly claim any of those things. Instead, Eichenwald’s increasingly unhinged tweets repeatedly inflated his insignificant story from what it was – a misattribution of an email by Sputnik that Trump repeated – into a five-alarm warning that an insidious Russian plot to subvert U.S. elections had been proven, with Trump and fake WikiLeaks documents at the center.
