One of Rudy Giuliani's defenses of the Russian theft of Democratic e-mails ahead of the 2016 presidential election was that the information they stole and distributed through WikiLeaks was in the public interest because it revealed information about Hillary Clinton.
"They shouldn't have stolen it," he said in his recent interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo. "But the American people were just given more information about how deceptive, how manipulative her people, her campaign were ... if it hurt at all, it hurt her because the American people got information that was gotten in the wrong way, but it was all true."
McGill University political science professor Jacob Levy posted a long thread on Twitter explaining the key reason why Giuliani's argument is nonsense: the e-mails stolen by Russia didn't actually contain any information that incriminated Clinton, they just confused people into believing there must be fire in all the smoke.
Not that it matters-- no one but no one is going to change their minds about the 2016 election, or about Rudy Giuli… https://t.co/3wP1zx8nzV— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555973838.0
There are a couple of ways in which the Wikileaks dump helped Trump win, and none of them are because John Podesta'… https://t.co/DA4wRSvvm4— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555973934.0
1) The timing of the release blunted the impact what appeared at the time to be the campaign-ending scandal of the… https://t.co/HbDcUjfVDL— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555974069.0
2) It provided more smoke around the general "But her emails!" narrative, even though it was in fact entirely unrel… https://t.co/xY4jneLkZJ— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555974271.0
a couple weeks later to be the outcome-altering event that it was. The 100,000 voters at the margin didn't read Po… https://t.co/8FKMjmWKT7— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555974385.0
They were swayed by Comey's letter-- which, let's remember, turned out to be about *nothing,* the new laptop had no… https://t.co/g4gJrAW4cW— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555974485.0
Sowing chaos was a part of the Russian strategy for helping Trump... and it paid off big in this case. //fin— Jacob T. Levy (@Jacob T. Levy)1555974553.0
