Russia, Suspected in Hacking, Has Uneasy History With Hillary Clinton

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/us/politics/russia-putin-clinton-emails-hacking.html

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PHILADELPHIA — Follow along with our coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

Donald J. Trump’s apparent endorsement on Wednesday of Russian cyberspying against Hillary Clinton has pulled President Vladimir V. Putin fully into the American political fray. But Mr. Putin’s relationship with Mrs. Clinton has been tense at least since 2011, when, as secretary of state, she accused him of rigging an election and he accused her of meddling in Russian politics.

Mr. Putin — who was then the prime minister, plotting his return to the presidency — said her words were a “signal” to protesters, encouraging them to take to the streets, which they did in large numbers. Her remarks also annoyed the White House, which at that time still clung to the hope that President Obama’s policy of “resetting” relations with Russia could be salvaged.

That episode, late in Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, is important to understanding why Mr. Putin’s government could have a motive for hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers and leaking emails to damage her electoral prospects against Mr. Trump.

But it also speaks to the hard-line stance toward Russia and Mr. Putin that Mrs. Clinton staked out in the Obama administration. At the same time that she was condemning Russia over its elections, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was planning to travel to Moscow to meet Mr. Putin; her harsh words complicated his diplomacy.

Above all, the bitter exchange attests to a combustible relationship between two ambitious, self-confident leaders, both unafraid to exercise power — one a former K.G.B. officer who emerged from the shadows; the other a famous female politician who spent decades on the public stage.

“In our administration, Secretary Clinton always had a tougher line toward Putin and the Russians than other senior administration officials,” said Michael A. McFaul, an adviser on Russia who served as United States ambassador to Moscow. “It was Putin’s strong belief that we, with Clinton in the lead, were trying to meddle with his regime.”

It was one of several instances where Mrs. Clinton was more hawkish than her boss — differences the White House and the Clinton campaign have so far played down but which may loom larger in the general election. Certainly, Mrs. Clinton has been open in saying she would push back harder than Mr. Obama has against Mr. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and Syria.

Mrs. Clinton’s first meeting with Mr. Putin as secretary of state set the stage for a stormy relationship. When she went to see him in his dacha outside Moscow on March 19, 2010, he kept her waiting in front of a ceramic mantelpiece, facing a forest of cameras and boom microphones.

Mr. Putin finally turned up for what was billed as a brief photo opportunity, only to lecture her in front of the reporters about how the United States needed to lift sanctions against American companies doing business in Iran. And when Mrs. Clinton started to defend the Obama administration’s policy, he promptly ordered the news media out of the room.

Mrs. Clinton laughed off the episode, telling reporters what has become an oft-repeated story about their relationship. “Prime Minister Putin,” she recalled asking him amid his harangue about trade policy, “tell me about what you’re doing to save the tigers in Siberia.”

Eyes brightening, Mr. Putin motioned her to his private office downstairs, where he showed her a map of Russia. Pointing to various regions, he delivered a fervent lecture about endangered tigers and polar bears. He asked her whether Bill Clinton would go on a bear-tagging expedition with him in Siberia. If Bill was not available, he said, maybe Hillary would go?

Diplomats traveling with her were impressed. “It’s like he sizes somebody up and sees them as a worthy adversary or counterpart,” said William J. Burns, a former ambassador to Moscow who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy at the State Department. “I’ve seen him with other people who he didn’t see that way, and he’d be much more dismissive and snarky.”

In retrospect, though, the meeting planted the seeds for future tensions. Eight months later, Mrs. Clinton canceled her attendance at a meeting he organized in St. Petersburg to save the tigers. Her excuse was that she had to stay in Washington to lobby the Senate to ratify a new arms reduction treaty.

A year later, Mrs. Clinton was traveling in Lithuania when reports of ballot tampering and other fraud emerged after parliamentary elections in Russia. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted,” she said in a statement, drafted by her spokeswoman, Victoria J. Nuland, a career diplomat and Soviet expert known for her sharp-edged views about Russia.

“Putin was livid that she had spoken out,” Mr. McFaul said.

High-ranking Russian officials even called the White House to ask whether she was speaking for the United States. That created a tempest in the West Wing, since Mr. McFaul had signed off on Mrs. Clinton’s statement. Although the president was also skeptical of Mr. Putin’s intentions, he, too, had hoped to keep the reset policy alive a little longer.

There was no evidence that Mrs. Clinton had any regrets. Shortly before she left the State Department, she asked her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, to draft a three-and-a-half-page exit memo from her to Mr. Obama, warning him that the reset policy was dead, that relations with Russia would deteriorate under Mr. Putin and that the United States needed to push back hard.

Advisers to Mrs. Clinton said they were confident she would pursue such a strategy as president. Mr. Trump’s latest comments — in which he said he hoped Russia would find and expose thousands of emails that Mrs. Clinton did not hand over to the State Department — only highlighted the chasm between their positions, according to these aides.

“What Trump said today is reckless and demonstrates he is unfit for the Oval Office,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former top State Department official and foreign-policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton. He said that he was confident that Mrs. Clinton would strongly defend the interests of the United States and its allies against any aggression by Mr. Putin.

By 2014, after Russia had annexed Crimea and sent its tanks and troops to menace Ukraine, Mrs. Clinton’s exit memo to the president looked prescient. Speaking at a Democratic fund-raiser in California in March 2014, she likened Mr. Putin’s behavior to Hitler’s conquest of the Sudetenland in 1938.

When Mr. Putin was asked about that comparison by a French television station three months later, he replied: “It’s better not to argue with women. Ms. Clinton had never been too graceful in her statements.”