Dark conspiracies and ‘non stories’ mark campaign’s final days

Afirestorm roared across social media and cable, print, and network news – a new Clinton email scandal just 11 days out from the election. Depending on your perspective, this was either too good, or too bad, to be true.

FBI director James Comey wrote to the chairmen of eight congressional committees informing them that the FBI had, in connection with an ‘‘unrelated case,’’ learned of the existence of emails that appeared to be pertinent to its investigation of Hillary Clinton.

We have since learned that the emails are not from Hillary Clinton, they are to her, and they were uncovered as part of an investigation into disgraced former New York Congressman, Anthony Weiner. His estranged wife is no other than Huma Abedin, Clinton’s right-hand woman.

The dust storm that this revelation has kicked up is being fuelled by gleeful Republicans, glad for an opportunity to go on the attack whatever the facts. The Clinton camp is outraged and calling for the emails to be released, sending the signal there’s nothing to hide.

This is not the only email scandal occupying the collective conscious here. Earlier this week, I literally ran in to Fox Business to talk about the latest Clinton ‘‘scandal’’. It involved an email from her campaign manager John Podesta, discussing recommendations on how to sample certain minority populations in order to ‘‘maximise what we get out of our media polling.’’

The email had been released by WikiLeaks. On the surface, it appeared to play directly into Donald Trump’s increasingly loud rhetoric that not only is the 2016 general election rigged against him, but the polls are, too.

October evenings are chilly in New York. My run – just two streets over to Sixth Avenue – kept me warm against the cold.

I didn’t break any speed records. My pace can be attributed to two things: It was a deadline day at work, and I was irritated at the sloppy way right-wing website Zerohedge.com had uncovered a non-story.

Podesta was discussing internal polling that is traditionally conducted by political campaigns to test the waters before big media buys. Clinton’s team was obviously interested in talking to a larger than normal sample of certain minority populations to tweak the messages aimed at them. It was also a 2008 email. But the ‘‘story’’ was that Podesta was actually discussing media polls – the polling that CNN, or NBC, or any number of media outlets use to measure the state of the race. And that by ‘‘oversampling’’ minorities (who typically vote Democrat), the results would be skewed, or in Trump’s parlance, ‘‘rigged,’’ to drive the narrative that Clinton is doing better than she actually is.

John Podesta’s emails were hacked by the Russians. This, just a few months after they hacked the emails of operatives of the Democratic National Committee. WikiLeaks has been dutifully posting the Podesta emails in tranches. By Wednesday of this week, we’d seen the 19th release. Apparently we have the pleasure of the company of a new Podesta leak every day until election day, November 8.

‘‘All the evidence shows that these hacks were done to favour Donald Trump’’ says Malcolm Nance, a career US intelligence officer and author of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyber-spies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 election. Why? I asked. ‘‘Trump’s policies, his positions, and his favourable view of Vladimir Putin would be a windfall for Russia and overturn 70 years of US defence policy’’ says Nance. In fact, ‘‘Donald Trump has been curried as a Russian political asset over some years, apparently with great success.’’

According to Nance, this operation is very personal to Putin, a former director of the KGB. ‘‘Getting Donald Trump elected by hacking the American political process would be the crowning achievement of all Russian intelligence operations.’’ And Putin’s deeply involved. ‘‘Putin is ‘spymaster in chief’ – in Russia nothing gets done without his permission. Below him will be a trusted agent to act as the program manager, and below him would be an information warfare management cell which would use all aspects of Russian intelligence, political and propaganda power to achieve a result.’’ Putin ‘‘fears’’ Clinton, according to Nance, because she will oppose his strategic mischief in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Ergo, a campaign to destroy her candidacy. And if that fails (which Nance thinks it will), Putin’s use of WikiLeaks ‘‘allows him to indirectly use the US Republican Party to act as his whip against Hillary Clinton for the next two years.’’

Or perhaps, the entirety of her four-year term.

With less than two weeks to go until the election, Clinton’s lead over Trump is holding. Despite the Russian interference.

For all of Trump’s complaints about the election being rigged against him, it appears that the actual rigging – by a foreign nation no less – is actually being done in service of his candidacy.