Blaming Putin won’t help Clinton beat Trump

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and its supporters are linking Donald Trump to President Vladimir Putin. This must make the Russian president chuckle. After all, he accused Clinton of inciting protests in Moscow in 2011.

The Democrats, however, need a reality check. The suggestion of a Russian connection to the Trump campaign is unfounded, at best. And though the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers, the spoils of which were recently posted on Wikileaks, was probably the work of Russian hackers, no one is denying that this operation exposed an embarrassing tilt of the party in favor of Clinton and against Bernie Sanders.

Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said on CNN that he saw a link between the release of the hacked DNC emails just before the Democratic convention and the Trump campaign’s successful effort to remove from the Republican platform an amendment calling for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to its military. At the same time, liberal blogger Josh Marshall wrote a lengthy post about alleged links between Trump and Putin, including the Republican nominee’s dealings with wealthy Russians.

There’s plenty to “put together” to make it look ominous. Besides, as Marshall correctly pointed out, Russia’s state-owned media have been openly rooting for Trump. But is there a real Putin-Trump connection and enough evidence to say that Trump is accepting help from Putin? I don’t think so.

Trump hasn’t been linked to any official or businessman close to Putin’s inner circle. The Trump SoHo project apparently received funding from Iceland’s FL Group (now known as Baugur), which had some Russian investments but no known ties to Putin’s friends. He also has links to Alexander Mashkevich, a wealthy businessman from Kazakhstan. Mashkevich is not part of Putin’s circle of billionaire cronies.

Similarly, the business dealings in Ukraine of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, have raised eyebrows, but none involved Putin’s friends.

It’s worth remembering, too, that Ukraine and Kazakhstan are not part of Russia. Their business elites are similarly corrupt, but Putin is not the source of their wealth, which they have used to buy up expensive real estate of the kind Trump has developed.

The only Trump policy adviser with real ties is Carter Page, who advised Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, in the mid-2000s. These connections, however, are not at the highest level: Page is not pals with Gazprom chief executive officer Alexei Miller, who is close to Putin.

Put together, this appears no more damning than Clinton’s tenuous “Russia connection” — the big donations to her family foundation from investors in a uranium company whose sale to Russia’s state-owned Rosatom needed a sign-off from the U.S. government. There is no evidence that Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, lobbied in favor of the deal or helped get it approved. And Rosatom itself didn’t pay anything to the foundation.

The former Soviet Union is a big place, and a lot of business is being done there. It shouldn’t be surprising that people in the upper echelons of U.S. business and politics have connections to that part of the world. Unless these ties are to a dozen specific individuals whom Putin has made super rich in his 15 years in power, they are not politically significant.

I have no doubt that Putin would like Trump to win. The Republican candidate has called into doubt the U.S. commitment to its NATO obligations and even suggested that he might not defend alliance members.

But for now, the Russia story is being used to deflect attention from the turmoil with the Democratic camp. There is no doubt that DNC officials who — in the midst of a storm over Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state — failed to secure their own network, apparently letting in more than one hacker team.

The uproar also takes the focus away from the broader failings of the Clinton campaign, which is even in the polls with a rival who has offended almost every kind of voter, has managed a cheap, disorganized candidacy and has been caught lying. If Clinton can’t beat Trump, it’s not Putin’s fault, though it would make him happy.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.