From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:
No, Hillary Clinton, I Don’t Believe You.
Officials from the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. have said they were unaware that Perkins Coie facilitated the research on their behalf, even though the law firm was using their money to pay for it. Even Mrs. Clinton only found about Mr. Steele’s research after Buzzfeed published the dossier, according to two associates who discussed the matter with her. They said that she was disappointed that the research — as well as the fact that the F.B.I. was looking into connections between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia — was not made public before Election Day.
Really? The campaign spent some as-yet-unknown but probably considerable sum on research that they think could take down Trump, and it never gets mentioned to her in any conversation during the campaign? The only way that is true is if it was a deliberate effort to keep her out of the loop and preserve her “plausible deniability.” If you’re doing that, then you know what you’re doing is wrong, or at the very least, supremely controversial.
You know why I’m so skeptical? Because Ken Vogel of the New York Times says he tried to nail down the Clinton campaign’s payment for the dossier for quite some time, but Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying, ‘you or your sources are wrong.’” In other words, the Clintons lied about this exact topic before. We have no reason to believe them now.
Some delightful spin about that lie:
On Tuesday, the veteran Democratic consultant Anita Dunn, who is working with Perkins Coie, explained Mr. Elias’s earlier response. “Obviously, he was not at liberty to confirm Perkins Coie as the client at that point, and should perhaps have ‘no commented’ more artfully,” Ms. Dunn wrote in an email.
See, “you or your sources are wrong” is not a “no comment” or “I cannot confirm or deny that.”