In a pair of tweets on Tuesday evening, Donald Trump insisted that Hillary Clinton’s private email server had been hacked by China. To accompany this shocking news, a reversal of multiple official reviews that found no evidence of a breach, was Trump offering zero proof. In the form of nothing. Nothing at all. As Reuters states, Trump did “not offer any evidence or further information.” Or as Newsweek said, Trump offered “no evidence to support his claims.” Or as the Washington Post reported, Trump “provided no details.”
Which is not to say that Trump produced the story directly from some orange-tinted orifice. The apparent source of Trump’s story was an “exclusive” from the Daily Caller website. According to the Caller story, a Chinese-owned company “obtained nearly all her emails.” Says who? Says “two sources briefed on the matter.” The story goes on to be a wet-dream of right-wing told-you-sos in which multiple people tried to warn the FBI that Clinton was being hacked by China, only to be blocked by … Peter Strzok. And the real hero in this story … Louie Gohmert, who in this story is fighting about three digits above his actual IQ.
And the tricky way that the Chinese got a copy of all Clinton’s emails, the way un-spotted by the FBI or by anyone else who looked into the matter, including presumably Clinton’s staff, was that each and every email included a copy that was cc’d to “a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company.”
The company isn’t named. And the sources are all anonymous—something that Donald Trump has previously claimed should be illegal. To back up the story, Daily Caller determined that, yes, there were some actual Chinese-owned companies in the Washington area and “Our Asian folks” believe the companies were around during Clinton’s time as secretary of State.
Trump’s tweets, and the Caller story, have already come in for heavy criticism. Had there been evidence that China was dipping into Clinton’s emails during her time as SOS, it would have represented genuine concern. But despite multiple investigations, no one seems to have spotted this issue. Except for the Caller’s secret sources. And Louie Gohmert.
For Trump, the Caller story works perfectly in two ways: It backs up his constant stream of “investigate the other guys” deflections, and it fits into his “Don’t try to distinguish between truth and fiction, let me sort it out” campaign to put all information, including disinformation, on the same level.
In between the two China-related tweets, Trump laid claim to the 2026 World Cup as one of his “accomplishments,” a statement that surely comes as a shock to the team that worked for nearly twenty years to land that selection.
Trump’s attack also fits handily with his stream of attacks on China, which is increasingly becoming the scapegoat for everything from Trump’s failure in North Korea to the opioid crisis.