You haven’t seen Donald Trump’s tax returns, but you’ve seen the Democratic National Committee’s emails. There may be a connection: Mr. Trump is not as rich and independent as he says, and his business empire has partly been financed in recent decades by Russian interests that perhaps now favor his rise to the White House.
No, that doesn’t make Mr. Trump the “Siberian candidate.” If he were, he would disguise the fact. His campaign manager wouldn’t be a longtime adviser to Vladimir Putin’s recently deposed pet Ukrainian strongman. His foreign-policy adviser wouldn’t be a Gazprom intimate. His staff wouldn’t conspicuously have rewritten the GOP platform in a way that pleases Moscow on Ukraine. Donald Trump Jr. wouldn’t have bragged in a 2008 promotion to investors that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
The truth is, Mr. Putin is as much or more an “asset” to Mr. Trump as the other way round. It pays Mr. Trump to be associated with the world’s flashiest tough guy. Plenty of Americans want the same in their leader.
Mr. Trump is a classic demagogue. He has made his way by breast-beating about American dilemmas as if he discovered them. We won’t enforce our immigration law but won’t change it either. NATO’s role is uncertain and America shoulders a disproportionate burden. Trade raises our standard of living but costs some Americans their jobs (as all competition does). This editorial page has warned for 30 years about too big to fail. If it were as easy to solve these dilemmas as Mr. Trump pretends, they would have been solved by now.
Put aside the practical arguments prominent Republicans use for, grudgingly, supporting Mr. Trump: His tax plan is good. He would blow up a status quo incapable of productive change or evolution. He’s not Hillary Clinton. The problem is, these supporters who lend him credibility nevertheless can’t believe anything Mr. Trump says. He lies not only to voters in the time-honored way, to gather a coalition to get him into office. He has a history of lying in his business, to his partners, customers, lenders and subcontractors. He sent his wife out to tell the American people “your word is your bond.” She stole the line from Michelle Obama.
Mr. Trump may occasionally tell the truth but you would never know it. His supporters are only guessing about what he intends, if anything, in office.
The hell of our situation, of course, is that his opponent is Hillary Clinton. What was originally intriguing about her email server was the option she created for herself-the option to delete inconvenient official emails so they would never become public property or recoverable by investigators.
An option is valuable even if you never exercise it. To this day, we don’t know why the late Clinton administration official Sandy Berger stole and destroyed three versions of a Clinton terrorism memo while returning two other versions to the National Archives.
Investigators learned enough to elicit Berger’s guilty plea, but they never established motive. They never established whether he was acting on another’s behalf. They never established whether he stole and destroyed other documents, though it was his behavior on previous visits that aroused the suspicions of Archive employees.
Somehow Mrs. Clinton and her entourage will be skipping out on even this modicum of justice. Never mind that, with deliberation and foresight, after deciding which emails to turn over, she and her lawyers made sure that their servers and devices were wiped clean to “preclude complete forensic recovery,” in the words of FBI chief James Comey.
That may have seemed convenient to Mrs. Clinton at the time but creates a giant risk for voters. A complete record may yet exist that Mrs. Clinton doesn’t know about. Hackers may have broken into her server-Mr. Comey seemed to suggest it was highly likely. Before or after she takes the oath, foreign agencies may begin posting unredacted versions of the censored emails the State Department has been publishing. They may post nonpersonal “personal” emails the State Department has never seen. They may post fake “deleted” emails that Mrs. Clinton would be unable to prove are fake.