A reporter really asked Hillary Clinton if Russia was behind this weekend’s terror attacks.
Monday morning, Hillary Clinton held a press conference, and Bloomberg Politics reporter Jennifer Epstein chose to ask an intensely speculative question:
“Are you concerned that this weekend’s attacks or potential incidents in the coming weeks might be an attempt by ISIS or ISIS sympathizers, or really any other group — maybe the Russians — to influence the presidential race in some way and presumably try to drive votes to Donald Trump, who is, as you’ve said before, widely seen as perhaps being somebody who they would be more willing to — or seen as an easier person to be against?”
This weekend’s Islamist-minded attackers sympathizing with ISIS? That seems likely. So far investigators have not found a clear connection between any particular terrorist group and 20-year-old Dahir Adan, who stabbed nine people in a St. Cloud shopping mall, but since 2014 they have arrested nine Somali immigrants from Minnesota for plotting to join ISIS. Ahmad Khan Rahami, who placed the bombs in New York and New Jersey, spent several weeks in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Quetta, Pakistan — two locations with no shortage of Islamist extremists — in 2011.
An effort by ISIS to influence the election? That’s plausible. Osama bin Laden released a video days before the 2004 election, his first new video in more than a year. Some believed that al-Qaeda thought the video would help George W. Bush win reelection; others believed it was meant to help John Kerry by mocking the president.
But the Russians manipulating Somali and Syrian immigrants to commit terror attacks against American targets, with the ultimate goal of electing Trump? That seems outlandish. Yes, Russian intelligence agents have been widely blamed for leaking a rash of hacked documents embarrassing to Democrats. And yes, there is broad speculation that those leaks were intended to help Trump’s campaign. But orchestrating terrorist attacks on American soil is a far cry from illegally hacking and leaking Democratic e-mails.
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Besides, it isn’t as if Islamists lack the motivation to commit such attacks as it is. There’s plenty of evidence that ISIS and al-Qaeda are urging their followers and adherents to violence against Americans. They don’t need Russian intelligence to militarize them — killing infidels is a core tenet of their ideology.
The media just spent a few days mocking the supreme implausibility of the “birther” conspiracy theory, and deservedly so. But notions of shadowy groups and hidden agendas are an increasingly obvious blind spot for journalists.
Notions of shadowy groups and hidden agendas are an increasingly obvious blind spot for journalists.
To most of the press corps covering the candidates, Alex Jones is a self-evident lunatic, it’s nutty to think Vince Foster was murdered, the administration’s false statements about Benghazi in 2012 were a series of innocent mistakes, and there’s no discernable malevolence in the IRS’s decision to target Tea Party groups. What’s more, in the eyes of the press, the wildest fringe theories reveal a great deal about the Republican party as a whole; NBC News concluded in August that “Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Far Outside GOP Mainstream.”
When presented with a conspiracy theory that depicts Republican skullduggery or Democrats as unfairly victimized, however, the media is prone to give it a respectful hearing.
The New York Times credulously reported on claims that the word “rats” in a 2000 George W. Bush campaign ad was a “subliminal attempt to discredit Mr. Gore.” Salon and others asked if George W. Bush wore a communications device during a presidential debate. Democratic congressman John Conyers conducted his own investigation into the “abuse and manipulation of electronic voting machines” in the 2004 election in Ohio, and The New Yorker reported that John Kerry believed “proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines.” Harry Reid claimed that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid his taxes, and The New Yorker speculated that Romney’s (eventually released) tax returns hid “politically explosive investments.”
#related#As for the notion of a fringe theory representing a party’s mainstream, in 2006, a survey found 50.8 percent of Democrats believed that “the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”
For what it’s worth, Clinton didn’t refer to Russia in her answer; she only said, as she has before, “We know that Donald Trump’s comments have been used online for recruitment of terrorists.” But the question itself revealed much more. At a time when Islamists are blowing up New York streets and stabbing people in Minnesota shopping malls, some reporters would rather focus on what seems to be the real danger: a sinister Russian hand plotting the election of a Republican president.
— Jim Geraghty is National Review’s senior political correspondent.