WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton greenlighted the plan to give allegations against Donald Trump to a reporter ahead of the 2016 election, Clinton’s campaign manager testified in federal court on May 20.
“We told her we have this and we want to share it with a reporter. She agreed to that,” said Robby Mook, the campaign manager.
The allegations purportedly showed a secret back channel between Trump’s business and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
Several stories were published about the claims. Hours after the stories were published, Clinton herself promoted them.
“Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” Clinton wrote in a Twitter post on Oct. 31, 2016.
Neither she nor Jake Sullivan, a top campaign official, mentioned that the allegations were passed to the media by the campaign.
The allegations stemmed from Rodney Joffe, a technology executive who hoped to score a position in the government if Clinton won the election, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the campaign who is on trial for allegedly lying to the FBI.
Sussmann informed his colleague Marc Elias of the allegations in the summer of 2016, who passed them on to the campaign in August of that year, Elias told the court this week.
“I thought that if there was a news account of the allegations,” it would “benefit the campaign,” Elias said.
Both Sussmann and operatives with Fusion GPS, a firm tapped by the campaign, worked to seed stories about Trump and Alfa Bank in media outlets, succeeding when Slate and the New York Times published stories hours before Clinton promoted the allegations on Twitter.
Mook says he was briefed by Elias on the claims, which he was told came from people with expertise in cyber matters. He does not recall being told any names and said campaign officials did not have the subject matter expertise to judge the claims themselves. He spoke with Sullivan and John Podesta, another campaign official, about spreading the allegations to media outlets.
Mook said the campaign didn’t immediately act on the allegations because of worries they weren’t credible. Officials ultimately decided, despite not being completely confident in the allegations, to give them to a reporter so the reporter could “run it down,” or verify them.
“My recollection is it was a still-unnamed campaign staffer … with our press department” who contacted the press, Mook said.
He said he couldn’t recall exactly when Clinton approved the move.
“All I can remember is she agreed with the decision. Can’t remember when. Sometime in the fall, before the election,” he said, marking September or October as the months.
By John Haughey and Zachary Stieber
