Campaign opposition research is standard, but not ‘oppo’ from hostile nations
Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised damaging information via the Russian government has again engulfed President Donald Trump in questions about whether his campaign colluded with Moscow.
The younger Trump and his allies have argued that pursuing material that could prove useful against a political opponent is standard practice in campaigns. But while opposition research is part of modern presidential campaigns, it normally does not come from representatives of a hostile foreign power.
The president, addressing the issue last week before reporters in Paris, defended his son’s decision in June 2016 to meet with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer during the election campaign, saying “most people would have taken that meeting” and “nothing happened from the meeting, zero happened from the meeting.”
Here is how the peddling of opposition research — or oppo, as political professionals and reporters call it — typically works.
How did get here?
One of President Bill Clinton’s favorite Arkansas political sayings was, “If you see a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident.”
Many campaign accusations and revelatory news stories about a candidate or elected official are the fruits of what is euphemistically called the research division of campaigns and political parties, where low-profile aides search for dirt.
“The crackpots get routed to research,” said Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic practitioner of the dark arts of oppo.
Much of the job is fielding too-good-to-be-true (or simply unverifiable) charges via furtive phone calls, manila envelopes and untraceable email accounts. Working in the Democratic National Committee’s research department in the 2004 campaign, Sefl recalled meeting a woman with a story to tell about President George W. Bush.
“She said she worked as a dancer and accused President Bush of doing very specific drug-related activities on her,” Seflsaid.
The accuser offered no proof, and the Democrats could do little but share the tale with one another.
Where’s it come from?
As any term-paper writer knows, material is drawn from two sources: primary and secondary. The first of these include government documents, such as legal filings and financial disclosures. Remember accounts of the car elevator that Mitt Romney was building inside his oceanside home in California? Those came from renovation plans submitted to the city of San Diego, which were dug up by President Barack Obama’s campaign.
Or how about the $400 that John Edwards spent on a haircut? That too was exhumed by the Obama campaign from a campaign finance report.
And that story five days before the 2000 election on George W. Bush driving under the influence in Maine back in 1976? Chris Lehane, a former aide for Al Gore and a native of Maine, does not admit to the paternity of that leak, but he does not deny it, either.
“I told people when asking about the issue only that I was responsible for the popular vote and left the Electoral College for others,” he cheekily said in 2010 after Bush strategist Karl Rove published a memoir that accused him of being the man behind the story.
And those unflattering stories about the Clinton Foundation in this past campaign? Yes, some of them originated with Republican researchers.
In some cases, the provenance of the leaks remains murky. Obama, for example, might never have been elected to the Senate in 2004 were it not for damaging revelations about his rivals and their divorces.
Secondary source opposition research largely consists of votesand-quotes — a political figure’s policy positions and past comments that have appeared in the media. The material may lack the shock effect of original material, but it can be just as memorable.
Which brings us back to Romney — and his Irish setter, Seamus. The Romney family, as many readers of a certain New York Times columnist will recall, stowed Seamus on the roof of their car during a family vacation. This anecdote was but one element in a biographical series that The Boston Globe ran on Romney in 2007, when he first sought the White House. But it found new life when Romney became the Republican nominee in 2012.
It was the sort of story that, by the standards of an earlier political era, counted as peculiar behavior.
But has anything like happened before?
There is only one known historical parallel to the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russians, and it involves Richard M. Nixon. Running for president in 1968, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman, his eventual White House chief of staff, to “monkey wrench” peace talks in Vietnam in order to scuttle any deal that would have handed Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, a political victory in the closing days of the election.
Nixon, a former senator and vice president, had a relationship with the South Vietnamese government. Earlier in the year, he had met with the country’s ambassador and brought along Anna Chennault, a prominent Chinese-american Republican. As author John A. Farrell writes in his new book, “Richard Nixon: The Life,” which reports the “monkey wrench” instructions, the call between Nixon and Haldeman took place on Oct. 22, 1968, and Haldeman dutifully jotted down what he was told.
A group of aides to Ronald Reagan did meet in the fall of 1980 with an individual claiming to be an emissary from the Iranian government, but that person’s legitimacy was never determined.
Moscow has, however, tried to meddle in previous U.S. elections. Historian Michael R. Beschloss recounts in “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 19601963,” an account of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Kennedy presidency, that the Soviet ambassador in Washington secretly reached out to both John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, another Democratic presidential hopeful, during the 1960 campaign. The ambassador was rebuffed by both candidates.