Red flags failed to raise suspicion
It happens all the time during political campaigns: Somebody offers a juicy tidbit of dirt on an opponent — information that could change the course of the campaign.
What does a campaign do? What should Donald Trump Jr. have done when offered such a tidbit?
In agreeing to meet with a Russian attorney linked to the Kremlin who supposedly had information that “would incriminate Hillary (Clinton) and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” Trump Jr. failed to recognize numerous red flags that campaign operatives everywhere use to screen what’s known as “opposition research.” “Oppo” in the shorthand.
“That is not a red flag” that
Trump Jr. missed, “that’s a red banner,” said Michael Feldman, a former top adviser to Vice President Al Gore who is the founding partner of the Glover Park Group, a Washington communications strategy firm.
For starters, Trump Jr. shouldn’t have been the one meeting with the person offering the information. The meeting should have been with a low-level staffer — and held far away from campaign headquarters, not one floor below the office of the presidential candidate. Perhaps worse, campaign manager Paul Manafort, was also at the meeting along with Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner.
“That is a cardinal rule: You never have a principal or a family member meet with someone. That is just idiotic,” said Ace Smith, whose San Francisco firm SCN Strategies represents Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Kamala Harris, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and is among the best at finding and artfully using oppo research.
“You need to judge the credibility of the person, the credibility of the information,” Smith said. “It could be a complete setup.”
An email exchange setting up the Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and first reported by the New York Times stated that the information was “obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump Jr.’s response: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” The meeting happened less than a week later.
“It’s coming from a foreign government that is a strategic competitor,” said Jason Miner, who fielded many offers of campaign dirt as research director at the Democratic National Committee from 2000 to 2005. “That’s something to turn over to the authorities.”
In 2000, a member of Gore’s presidential campaign team received an unmarked package in the mail that contained what appeared to be briefing books for his GOP opponent, George W. Bush. The Gore team immediately turned the materials over to the FBI.
The Trump team not only didn’t turn the information over to authorities, Trump Jr. and several other campaign staffers and volunteers initially denied — and later admitted — having contacts with Russians during the campaign. Among them: Attorney
General Jeff Sessions and Kushner.
Aside from potential legal implications because of the contact, Trump Jr. ignored basic precautions that campaign operatives use when approached with tantalizing oppo research.
“Ninety-nine percent of it is nonsense and garbage that you couldn’t use,” said a top California GOP opposition researcher who asked that his name not be used. “But you’ve got to check it out. You don’t want to throw something out there and have it boomerang on your candidate.”
Garry South, a veteran campaign operative who worked for former Gov. Gray Davis, said a former National Enquirer reporter approached him during the 2003 gubernatorial recall election purporting to have dirt on candidate Arnold Schwarzeneggar “that was so hot, the National Enquirer wouldn’t even publish it.”
South demurred. He worried that it might be a setup, especially when the former reporter insisted on meeting with him.
In the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, Davis was the beneficiary of oppo research gone bad. At a campaign debate, GOP candidate Bill Simon said he had a photograph of Davis accepting a $10,000 check from a police organization in his office when Davis was lieutenant governor, which would have been illegal.
Simon’s campaign released the photo of Davis accepting a check. Only one problem: It wasn’t in the lieutenant governor’s office, it was taken in the home of a Southern California campaign contributor. It wasn’t illegal.
“As soon as they put that out, I knew it wasn’t real,” South said. “I had been chief of staff to the lieutenant governor. I had redecorated the office after Gray took over. That photo wasn’t vetted properly at all.”
But, “the things that sound the craziest are often true,” said Michael Rejebian, a longtime opposition researcher and co-author with his partner Alan Huffman of “We’re With Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics,” a book about oppo.
He once got a tip that the spouse of a mayoral candidate in Mississippi once owned a brothel. No way, Rejebian initially thought.
Not only did it prove to be true, but the candidate coowned the brothel and was once a prostitute herself. She initially lied after being confronted with the evidence and lost her race.
Even after decades in the business, Rejebian and South are baffled when campaigns don’t properly vet the oppo research they’re given.
“It’s sort of like you want so badly for this to be true,” South said. “You want so badly to find the smoking gun to shoot your opponent that there’s a willing suspension of disbelief that you have something so hot, so toxic, so explosive that you don’t have to go through the due diligence to ascertain whether it is real and factual.”