Today is the tenth anniversary of one of the two things that former President Bill Clinton believes cost his wife Hillary the 2016 election.
Ten years ago, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How Foreign Governments and Businesses Made Bill and Hillary Rich, was published. Its revelations launched an FBI investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s family foundation. The book rocked official Washington, prompted widespread media coverage, including front-page write-ups in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Later reporting would confirm how much the book spooked the Clinton campaign team, which may have been why her campaign pursued the “Steele Dossier” attempt to tie their opponent, Donald Trump, to Russia.
The book even spawned a graphic novel – style treatment, a Fox News prime time special, and a documentary film.
To mark the book’s tenth anniversary, joining Peter Schweizer, the book’s author, and his co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down is Steve Bannon, who was a co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute and now runs a daily show of his own called “The War Room.”
Back in 2015, Bannon was a big part of the book’s aggressive rollout strategy, which also included pre-publication sharing of some of its chapters with the New York Times, which then produced its own frontpage story on the sale of Uranium One to the Russians while Hillary was Secretary of State. Could that kind of media support for an investigative journalism book happen today?
“It was pretty amazing, the research that you and the team did to actually pull it all together,” Bannon says. “That’s why the book was so powerful.” He adds that since then, “the media ecosystem has changed.” He notes that the lesson the legacy media learned from the experience with Clinton Cash was not to report on stories that might in some way benefit Donald Trump, a tendency they would repeat in 2020 with the Hunter Biden laptop story, and again in 2024 with the lack of attention paid to Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental capacity.
On a recent podcast appearance, for example, former NBC host Chuck Todd loudly denied that the mainstream media missed the story of Joe Biden’s mental demise — calling it “right-wing-manufactured” spin. “I just refuse to accept this stupid premise because it’s a right-wing-manufactured, right-wing premise in order to stain the media,” Todd claimed.
Bannon believes the emerging new media needs to look past Todd’s brand of partisan boosterism. Clinton Cash and Schweizer’s later books, which were largely ignored by legacy media outlets, were nevertheless highly influential. “Our lesson is… If you do the work, people will find the story.”
“I think that our media has got to be better,” Bannon says. “We have to make sure that we’re not just falling in line and making the same mistakes they make. We need to be very fair about what President Trump does.”
Schweizer agrees, observing “corruption cuts both ways.”
“I think one of the big myths that the media has kind of pushed out is that the Trump movement and the movement he represents is personality-driven and that Trump can do whatever he wants,” Schweizer says. “I think a lot of people who champion the reform agenda of Trump want to hold him accountable too, because we understand issues of corruption… It’s part of our fallen human nature.”
Clinton Cash told a story that was “unfathomable and unacceptable to the mainstream media. And they said ‘never again,’ Schweizer says. “That’s why they ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story and why they ignored Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.”
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