Lie of the Year: Trump's claim of 'Russia hoax'
A mountain of evidence points to a single fact: Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election of 2016.
In both classified and public reports, U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered actions to interfere with the election. Those actions included the cybertheft of private data, the placement of propaganda against particular candidates and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.
Members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have held open and closed-door hearings to probe Russia’s actions. Facebook, Google and Twitter have investigated their own networks, and their executives have
concluded that Russia used the
online platforms in attempts to influence the election.
After all this, President Donald Trump says it didn’t even happen.
“This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won,” he said in an interview with NBC in May.
On Twitter in September, Trump said, “The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?”
And during an overseas trip to Asia in November, Trump spoke of meeting with Putin: “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.” In the same interview, Trump referred to the officials who led the intelligence agencies during the election as “political hacks.”
When the nation’s commander-in-chief refuses to acknowledge a threat to U.S. democracy, it makes it all the more difficult to address the problem. For this reason, PolitiFact editors have chosen Trump’s claim that the Russia interference is a hoax as the Lie of the Year for 2017.
In a poll, readers of PolitiFact also chose the claim as the year’s most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin.
It seems unlikely — though not impossible — that Russian interference changed the outcome of the election.
Trump could acknowledge the interference happened while still standing by the legitimacy of his election and his presidency, but he declines to do so. Sometimes he’ll state firmly that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia, an implicit admission that Russia did act in some capacity. Then he reverts back to denying the interference even happened.
That denial is of a different order from most presidential posturing, said Nicholas Burns, who served as ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush.
“I’ve worked for both parties,” Burns said during public testimony to the Republicancontrolled Congress last summer. “It’s inconceivable to me that any of President Trump’s predecessors would deny the gravity of such an open attack on our democratic system.
“I don’t believe any previous American president would argue that your own hearings in the Senate are a waste of time or, in the words of President Trump, a witch hunt. They’re not; you’re doing your duty, that the people elected you to do.”
Trump’s labeling of the Russia story as a hoax fits in with his pattern of dismissing critical coverage as “fake news.” He has insisted there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. Even as an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller continues, some legal experts doubt that the campaign broke any laws.
“Even if it were to turn out that the Trump campaign collaborated, colluded or cooperated with Russian agents, that alone would not be a crime, unless the campaign asked them or helped them to commit criminal acts such as hacking,” lawyer Alan Dershowitz said in an op-ed for The New York Times.
But Trump has gone farther than simply saying the campaign didn’t break laws. He has said the whole story is fake.
It’s that characterization — that Russia’s interference in the election doesn’t even exist — that is contradicted by a mountain of evidence, say foreign policy experts.
“There certainly has been some speculation in the media that has gotten ahead of the facts. That always happens. The media is littered with pundits who get paid to make speculation ahead of the facts,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a right-leaning foreign policy think tank. “That doesn’t make it fake news.”
Investigations should go forward until all the facts come out about Russia’s role in the election, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor-in-chief of Lawfare, a national security blog.
“It’s possible that the president obstructed justice. It’s also possible the president behaved wildly inappropriately without obstructing justice,” Wittes said. “And it’s important to find out exactly what happened.
“Once you say we don’t mind foreign governments interfering with your elections, then you’re on your way to yielding up significant aspects of sovereignty,” he added. “It’s an important line to defend.”
Trump’s labeling of the Russia story as a hoax fits in with his pattern of dismissing critical coverage as ‘fake news.’ He has insisted there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. Even as an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller continues, some legal experts doubt that the campaign broke any laws.