“If My Assumption That Clinton Winning Is Inevitable Is Wrong, I Owe You A Coke.”
By 
Dexter Filkins has a lenghty article arguing that Franklin Foer’s Slate piece from October 2016 about evidence about the Trump campaign’s connections with Russian ratfuckers holds up well. The history he recounts is depressing:
The F.B.I. officials asked Lichtblau to delay publishing his story, saying that releasing the news could jeopardize their investigation. As the story sat, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, decided that it would not suffice to report the existence of computer contacts without knowing their purpose. Lichtblau disagreed, arguing that his story contained important news: that the F.B.I. had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Trump’s aides. “It was a really tense debate,” Baquet told me. “If I were the reporter, I would have wanted to run it, too. It felt like there was something there.” But, with the election looming, Baquet thought that he could not publish the story without being more confident in its conclusions.
Over time, the F.B.I.’s interest in the possibility of an Alfa Bank connection seemed to wane. An agency official told Lichtblau that there could be an innocuous explanation for the computer traffic. Then, on October 30th, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., charging that the Bureau was withholding information about “close ties and coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. “We had a window,” Lichtblau said. His story about Alfa Bank ran the next day. But it bore only a modest resemblance to what he had filed. The headline— “investigating donald trump, f.b.i. sees no clear link to russia”—seemed to exonerate the Trump campaign. And, though the article mentioned the server, it omitted any reference to the computer scientists who had told Lichtblau that the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank might have been communicating. “We were saying that the investigation was basically over—and it was just beginning,” Lichtblau told me.
That same day, Slate ran a story, by Franklin Foer, that made a detailed case for the possibility of a covert link between Alfa Bank and Trump. Foer’s report was based largely on information from a colleague of Max’s who called himself Tea Leaves. Foer quoted several outside experts; most said that there appeared to be no other plausible explanation for the data.
One remarkable aspect of Foer’s story involved the way that the Trump domain had stopped working. On September 21st, he wrote, the Times had delivered potential evidence of communications to B.G.R., a Washington lobbying firm that worked for Alfa Bank. Two days later, the Trump domain vanished from the Internet. (Technically, its “A record,” which translates the domain name to an I.P. address, was deleted. If the D.N.S. is a phone book, the domain name was effectively decoupled from its number.) For four days, the servers at Alfa Bank kept trying to look up the Trump domain. Then, ten minutes after the last attempt, one of them looked up another domain, which had been configured to lead to the same Trump Organization server.
Max’s group was surprised. The Trump domain had been shut down after the Timescontacted Alfa Bank’s representatives—but before the newspaper contacted Trump. “That shows a human interaction,” Max concluded. “Certain actions leave fingerprints.” He reasoned that someone representing Alfa Bank had alerted the Trump Organization, which shut down the domain, set up another one, and then informed Alfa Bank of the new address.
A week after the Times story appeared, Trump won the election. On Inauguration Day, Liz Spayd, the Times’ ombudsman, published a column criticizing the paper’s handling of stories related to Trump and Russia, including the Alfa Bank connection. “The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had,” she wrote. Spayd’s article did not sit well with Baquet. “It was a bad column,” he told the Washington Post. Spayd argued that Slate had acted correctly by publishing a more aggressive story, which Baquet dismissed as a “fairly ridiculous conclusion.” That June, Spayd’s job was eliminated, as the paper’s publisher said that the position of ombudsman had become outdated in the digital age. When I talked to Baquet recently, he still felt that he had been right to resist discussing the server in greater depth, but he acknowledged that the Times had been too quick to disclaim the possibility of Trump’s connections to Russia. “The story was written too knowingly,” he said. “The headline was flawed. We didn’t know then what we know now.”
As we’ve discussed before, Baquet’s defense of his paper’s October 31 story is preposterous, and his decision to fire the paper’s public editor for pointing out his egregious double standards is very telling. And it’s even worse than this set of decisions — when Lichtblau presented Baquet with a story strongly implying wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton based on a set of facts in which someone asked for diplomatic passports and didn’t get them, he ran with it. The assumption that Clinton was the de facto president-elect clearly structured the Times’s campaign coverage, and it led to one disastrous decision after another.