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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: CIA headquarters is named for George Herbert Walker Bush, who was defeated for re-election by Bill Clinton in 1992, something for which we feel major elements of the Agency have never forgiven the Clinton family. Much of the negative “buzz” surrounding the e‑mail server investigation has come from Fox News, headed by Roger Ailes, who was George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager.
These are details worth bearing in mind as we examine the continued progress of “Clinton Derangement Syndrome.”
QUICK: How many of you knew that Hillary Clinton had the 11th most liberal voting record as a U.S. Senator (out of 100 Senators.)?
The punditry has been even more irresponsible than is usually the case, succumbing to CDS to a greater extent than in the past. This program examines to the extent to which media coverage is deliberately slanted.
In connection with Hillary Clinton’s e‑mail server, we highlight the following details, generally either unknown and/or underreported in the mainstream media:
FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”
In discussion of the “e‑mail scandal,” CNBC’s “Morning Joe Scarborough” deliberately distorted statements by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Ignatius opined: ” . . . . My only point is I couldn’t find a case where this kind of activity had been prosecuted and that’s just worth noting as we assemble our Clinton e‑mail — and more thing, Joe, legally there is no difference between her using her private server and if she’d used State.gov, which is also not a classified system. The idea that, oh this would have been fine if she used State.gov, not legally, no difference. . . . Ignatius responded by explaining that experts he spoke with dismissed as far-fetched claims Clinton committed a criminal offense. . . . As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this, where people informally and inadvertently draw classified information into their phone conversations or their unclassified server conversations, where there had been a prosecution. . . .”
But during the rebroadcast of the segment, Morning Joe cut away from Ignatius’ explanation mid-sentence. During the initial broadcast, Ignatius said (emphasis added): “As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this, where people informally and inadvertently draw classified information into their phone conversations or their unclassified server conversations, where there had been a prosecution.”
Scarborough, a former Republican member of the House of Representatives, has a long history of hyping the supposed Clinton email “scandal”despite all evidence to the contrary. He edited Ignatius’s statement as follows: “ . . . . As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this, . . . ”
It is of more than passing interest that echoes from the “Fox News” chamber are rippling outward, featuring slanted coverage by The New York Times and Washington Post. The latter outlets have contracted with Peter Schweizer, a Koch brothers political spear carrier and former aide to Sarah Palin for accessing his book Clinton Cash. Obviously, this raises serious questions about their objectivity.
As Bernie Sanders continues his attacks on Clinton, it is worth noting the extent to which Citizens United has propelled much of the anti-Clinton propaganda. The centerpiece of the Citizens United case was an anti-Hillary documentary! (Citizens United is a frequent target of Sanders’ rhetorical flourishes.) Of the links between Fox News, New York Times and Washington Post collaborator Peter Schweitzer and the Koch brothers, their anti-Clinton campaign and the Citizens United milieu:
” . . . . Bardella declined to answer whether Schweizer was speaking in a fundraising capacity for [Schweizer’s organization] GAI, or whether Schweizer or GAI received any funds from Koch-affiliated organizations.
Stephen Bannon, the director of conservative propaganda films like the Sarah Palin biopic “The Undefeated” and a frequent collaborator with Citizens United Productions, chairs GAI’s board. Another GAI board member is Ron Robinson, who also sits on the boards of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation.
Citizens United Productions was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – the decision that rolled back significant campaign finance law pertaining to independent expenditures. At the center of that landmark case was a political documentary-cum-attack ad on Hillary Clinton called “Hillary: The Movie,” released ahead of the 2008 primary. Now nearly eight years later ahead of the 2016 primary, Schweitzer has published what could be considered the follow-up, Hillary: The Book. . . .”
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of FBI Director James Comey’s association with Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential campaign.
- Comey’s pivotal role in the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton “E‑Mail scandal.”
- An overview of “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” over the years, which debunks the notion that Hillary is “GOP Lite.” ” . . . . Indeed, when Clinton served in the Senate, she was considered the 11th most liberal senator. That’s basically in the top 20 percentile in terms of liberal votes. That’s lightyears away from being a DINO. . . .”
- CNBC’s Chris Burke and his major support for George W. Bush’s campaign. (CNBC airs the “Morning Joe” program.)
- Review of the CIA’s links to The New York Times and Washington Post.
1. Beginning with discussion of Hillary Clinton’s e‑mail server, we highlight the following details, generally either unknown and/or underreported in the mainstream media:
FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”
Media are exploiting news that two emails Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department from her time as secretary of state may be retroactively classified as “top secret” to push myths about Clinton’s handling of government information and scandalize her email use. Here are the facts.
FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”
Intelligence Community IG Says Two Emails From Clinton’s Server Should Be Marked “Top Secret”
Intelligence Community Inspector General Says Two Emails From Clinton’s Server Contain “Top Secret” Information. The inspector general for the Intelligence Community (ICIG), I. Charles McCullough, reportedly informed leaders of key congressional oversight committees that two classified emails previously discovered on Clinton’s server contain top secret information. As McClatchy reported:
The inspector general for the Intelligence Community notified senior members of Congress that two of four classified emails discovered on the server Clinton maintained at her New York home contained material deemed to be in one of the highest security classifications — more sensitive than previously known.
The notice came as the State Department inspector general’s office acknowledged that it is reviewing the use of “personal communications hardware and software” by Clinton’s former top aides after requests from Congress. [McClatchy DC, 8/11/15]
State Department: It Remains Unclear Whether Material In Two Emails Should Be Retroactively Classified. NBC noted that the State Department is still working with the intelligence community to determine whether the information in the two emails should in fact be labeled as classified:
Clinton aides have maintained that nothing on her server was classified at the time she saw it, suggesting that classified messages were given the label after the fact.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said that was the case with two emails, adding that it remained unclear “whether, in fact, this material is actually classified.”
“Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,” Kirby said Tuesday. “They were not marked as classified.” [NBC News, 8/12/15]
MYTH: Clinton Received Emails Marked As “Top Secret”
Fox Anchor Bret Baier: “ ‘Top Secret’ Was Marked On The Emails” Sent To Clinton. During the August 11 edition of Special Report, host Bret Baier claimed that “ ‘top secret’ was marked on the emails” that Clinton received during her time as secretary of state:
MIKE EMANUEL: The breaking news of the hour is that the intelligence inspector general has told top lawmakers on Capitol Hill that two of those four classified emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server were top secret in nature. And they’re still studying the other two to figure out what the relevant classification should be. Bret?
BRET BAIER: ‘Top secret’ marked on the emails. FBI inquiry obviously already ongoing to classified information improperly stored, they said, on her private server. And also, Mike, a thumb drive held by her attorney?
EMANUEL: Well that’s absolutely correct. All of her emails have been stored by her personal attorney. And a lot of folks on Capitol Hill have been asking, why is that still out there? Why is that not controlled by the intelligence community or by the State department, this existing in the possession of a personal attorney. And so lots more questions on Capitol Hill and throughout the intelligence community this evening. [Fox News, Special Report, 8/11/15]
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell: ICIG “Contradicted Clinton’s Repeated Claim That Nothing On Those Private Emails Was Classified.” On the August 12 edition of NBC’s Today, Andrea Mitchell argued that the ICIG’s statement “contradicted” Clinton’s “repeated past denials”:
ANDREA MITCHELL: More controversy for Hillary Clinton today indeed. Despite her repeated past denials, the intelligence community’s Inspector General now says two of her emails should have been classified ‘top secret,’ the highest level of U.S. intelligence, even as the FBI is finally getting control of that private server.
VOICEOVER OF MITCHELL: Hillary Clinton, in New Hampshire Tuesday, has aides confirm she has turned over her private server to the FBI. In addition, her attorney David Kendall gave the FBI two thumb drives containing her emails. All of this, as the intelligence community’s watchdog contradicted Clinton’s repeated claim that nothing on those private emails was classified.
[CLIP OF HILLARY CLINTON: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials.]
MITCHELL: Clinton has said there was no classified markings on any of her emails.
[CLIP OF CLINTON: I am confident that I have never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received.]
MITCHELL: But the Inspector General has now told Congress two of Clinton’s emails should have been classified ‘top secret,’ with code words indicating electronic eavesdropping from satellites, so sensitive it could not be shared with foreign allies. [NBC, Today, 8/12/15]
FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”
Government Officials: None Of The Emails Were Marked As “Classified” When They Were Sent.The Washington Post reported that when the ICIG first “found information that should have been designated as classified” in four emails from Clinton’s server — two of which he now says contain “top secret” information — government officials acknowledged that the emails were not marked as classified when they were sent (emphasis added):
The Justice Department said Friday that it has been notified of a potential compromise of classified information in connection with the private e‑mail account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used while serving as secretary of state.
A Justice official said the department had received a “referral” on the matter, which the inspector general of the intelligence agencies later acknowledged came from him.
The inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, said in a separate statement that he had found information that should have been designated as classified in four e‑mails out of a “limited sample” of 40 that his agency reviewed. As a result, he said, he made the “security referral,” acting under a federal law that requires alerting the FBI to any potential compromises of national security information.
[...]
Officials acknowledged that none of the e‑mails reviewed so far contain information that was marked classified when they were sent. But a new inquiry would prolong the political controversy Clinton is facing over her unorthodox e‑mail system. [The Washington Post, 7/24/15]
IG Memo On Classified Information In Emails: “None Of The Emails ... Had Classification Or Dissemination Markings.” A memo from the ICIG clearly stated that “none of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings”:
Since the referenced 25 June 2015 notification, we were informed by State FOIA officials that there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton. We note that none of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network. Further, my office’s limited sampling of 40 of the emails revealed four contained classified IC information which should have been marked and handled at a SECRET level. [Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, 7/23/15]
MYTH: Emails Weren’t Marked As “Classified” Because Clinton Used A Private Server Instead Of State Dept. Email
Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy: Emails “Were Never Classified” Because Clinton Used A Private Server Rather Than The State Department’s Email System. Throughout the August 12 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy repeatedly blamed the lack of classification on Clinton’s use of a private server instead of “the State Department email system,” arguing the emails “were never classified because she never submitted it” (emphasis added):
STEVE DOOCY: The problem here is the fact that she didn’t want her bosses at the White House to know what she was writing about, it is perceived.
ANDREW NAPOLITANO: She also didn’t want her colleagues in the State Department to know.
DOOCY: Right. So she had her own server, which is, you know, against protocol. Her spokespeople, and she herself has said, you know, it wasn’t classified at the time. But that ignores how the process works. The reason you use the State Department email system is so that it is classif — it is vetted before you hit ‘send.’
NAPOLITANO: She is probably going to argue that because the phrase, boom, ‘top secret’ was not stamped on each document, it wasn’t top secret. That’s not what the law says. Before every person in the federal government, from the president to a file clerk, gets a national security clearance, they have a 30 minute in-person interview with an FBI agent who explains, if there’s doubt about whether it’s classified or not, it’s classified.
DOOCY: Let me just add this one thing. It was never classified because she never submitted it. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/12/15]
FACT: Emails Originated In State Dept. System And Questions About Retroactive Classification Would Have Occurred Regardless Of Clinton’s Server Use
Emails Originated With State Department Employees And Were Forwarded To Clinton. The State Department’s statement on the retroactive “top secret” designation made clear that the emails at issue originated with State Department employees, not Clinton herself:
The following is attributable to Spokesperson John Kirby:
“The State Department takes seriously its obligations to protect sensitive information, holding its employees to a high standard of compliance with regulations and procedures.
“The Intelligence Community has recommended that portions of two of the four emails identified by the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General should be upgraded to the Top Secret level. Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton. They were not marked as classified.
“These emails have not been released to the public. While we work with the Director of National Intelligence to resolve whether, in fact, this material is actually classified, we are taking steps to ensure the information is protected and stored appropriately.” [Twitter.com, 8/11/15]
Clinton Campaign: Emails Originated From “Unclassified .Gov Email System.” A fact sheet released by the presidential campaign for the former secretary of state explains that the emails at issue originated on “the unclassified .gov email system”:
Would this issue not have arisen if she used a state.gov email address?
Even if Clinton’s emails had been on a government email address and government device, these questions would be raised prior to public release.
While State Department’s review of her 55,000 emails brought the issue to the Inspectors Generals’ attentions, the four emails were on the unclassified .gov email system. They were not on the separate, closed system used by State Department for handling classified communications. [hillaryclinton.com, “Updated: The Facts About Hillary Clinton’s Emails,” accessed 8/12/15]
Vox: Whether Or Not Emails Should Have Been Marked Classified Is Part Of “Bureaucratic Turf War.” Vox pointed out how the intra-agency disagreement over whether the emails were appropriately categorized “is a bureaucratic fight about how the State Department has handled the emails, not about Hillary Clinton” (emphasis added):
The State Department has been ordered by a federal judge to make public the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton turned over to the agency. So the State Department has Freedom of Information Act experts sifting through the documents to make sure that no information will be released that is either classified or sensitive (meaning not technically classified but also not covering material that the government doesn’t want in the public domain).
This has caused a bureaucratic turf war between the department and the intelligence community, which believes at least one email that’s already been released contains classified information and that hundreds of others in the full set may also have material that’s not ready for public consumption. For a couple of months, the inspectors general of the State Department and the combined intelligence community agencies have been battling Patrick Kennedy, the lead State Department official, over who has access to the documents and the authority to release or withhold them.
Now, according to the Times and other publications, the IG team is asking the Justice Department to get involved in reviewing whether State has mishandled the emails. If Clinton was sending information that was, or should have been, classified — and knew that it was, or should have been, classified — that’s a problem. But no one has accused her of that so far. Given the anodyne nature of what she sent in the emails we’ve already seen, it’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that any sensitive information was sent to Clinton, not by her (though it’s not clear whether forwarding such emails would constitute a legal issue for her). [Vox, 7/28/15]
MYTH: Hillary Clinton’s Email Use Is Comparable To David Petraeus’ Crimes
Doocy: Clinton’s Email Use Is “The Same Thing That David Petraeus Pleaded Guilty To.” On the August 12 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, Doocy hyped the debunked claim that Clinton’s email use was similar to Gen. David Petraeus’ illegal mishandling of confidential information:
DOOCY: Big question is — Will this Department of Justice go ahead and fully prosecute? Because, keep in mind, she had unauthorized, for a home server, top secret documents, which was a direct violation of the U.S. laws. It’s the same that David Petraeus pleaded guilty to. He had the same stuff at his house. She had at it at her house. He got, you know, they ran him up the flag pole, will they do the same for her? [Fox News, Fox & Friends,8/12/15]
Fox Judicial Analyst Implies Clinton’s Email Use Is Worse Than Petraeus’ Crimes. Appearing on the August 12 edition of Fox & Friends, senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano claimed “it’s a grave situation” for Hillary Clinton, arguing that Gen. Petraeus only had “the lowest level materials in a desk drawer” while Clinton “had top secret materials in the server in her barn”:
NAPOLITANO: Here’s why it’s a grave situation. A federal judge ordered the State Department to reveal — to make public — emails she had given back to the State Department. The recipients of those e‑mails was the inspectors general of State Department and of the intelligence community. They randomly sampled 40 of them. Among the 40, they found four that were classified.
[...]
They then revealed that they then sent that to FBI to commence either a criminal or a national security investigation, and they sent it to the Senate and House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. Last night they revealed that two of the four were top secret. What does top secret mean? The government has three classifications — the highest is top secret. Meaning if it’s revealed, it could cause grave harm to national security. The middle is secret, meaning if it’s revealed, it could cause serious harm to national security. The bottom is confidential, meaning if it’s revealed, it could cause some hard to national security. General Patreaus was indicted, prosecuted, and convicted for having confidential, the lowest level materials in a desk drawer in his house. Mrs. Clinton, it has now been revealed, had top secret materials in the server in her barn at Chappaqua. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/12/15]
FACT: Experts Have Debunked The Comparison — Petraeus Knowingly Mishandled Classified Documents, Whereas Clinton Had Authorization To Use Private Email, And There’s No Evidence She Knowingly Emailed Classified Information
Petraeus Pled Guilty To Violating 18 U.S.C. § 1924, “Unlawfully And Knowingly” Moving Classified Materials “With Intent To Retain Such Documents ... At Unauthorized Locations.” Petraeus pled guilty to one count of violating Title 18, United States Code, Section 1924:
Between in or about August 2011 and on or about April 5, 2013, defendant DAVID HOWELL PETRAEUS, being an employee of the United States, and by virtue of his employment, became possessed of documents and materials containing classified information of the United States, and did unlawfully and knowingly remove such documents and materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents and materials at unauthorized locations, aware that these locations were unauthorized for the storage and retention of such classified documents and materials;
All in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1924. [U.S. v. Petraeus, Bill of Information, 3/3/15]
NY Times: “There Has Never Been Any Legal Prohibition Against” Using Personal Email Accounts. Despite having previously scandalized Clinton’s use of private emails as “alarming,” the Times later clarified that “there has never been any legal prohibition” against the practice and that “[m]embers of President Obama’s cabinet” use a “wide variety of strategies” to handle their emails:
Members of President Obama’s cabinet have a wide variety of strategies, shortcuts and tricks for handling their email, and until three months ago there was no law setting out precisely what they had to do with it, and when. And while the majority of Obama administration officials use government email to conduct their business, there has never been any legal prohibition against using a personal account. [The New York Times, 3/13/15]
State Dept: Clinton Preserved And Provided Emails In Line With 2009 Regulation And How We Handled Records At The Time. At the March 3 daily press briefing, State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf explained that Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of documents as part of the State Department’s “process of updating our records management” and emphasized that Clinton is the only former secretary of state to have done so. From Harf’s briefing:
HARF: When in the process of updating our records management — this is something that’s sort of ongoing given technology and the changes — we reached out to all of the former secretaries of state to ask them to provide any records they had. Secretary Clinton sent back 55,000 pages of documents to the State Department very shortly after we sent the letter to her. She was the only former Secretary of State who sent documents back in to this request. These 55,000 pages covered her time, the breadth of her time at the State Department. [State Department Daily Press Briefing,3/3/15]
Clinton: “I Am Confident That I Never Sent Or Received Any Information That Was Classified At The Time.” Clinton told reporters on July 26 that she never sent or received information that she knew was classified at the time:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said she never knowingly sent or received classified information using her private email server and did not know what messages were being cited by intelligence investigators as examples of emails containing classified information.
[...]
“I am confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received. What I think you’re seeing here is a very typical kind of discussion, to some extent disagreement among various parts of the government, over what should or should not be publicly released,” she said. [Associated Press, 7/26/15]
Director Of Project On Government Secrecy: “There’s No Comparison Between The Clinton Email Issue And The Petraeus Case.” Steven Aftergood told The Washington Times that “[e]veryone agrees that there was no information in the Clinton emails that was marked as classified,” and therefore Clinton’s actions bear no resemblance to Petraeus’s:
While officials combing tens of thousands of emails that moved through Mrs. Clinton’s server have pointed to the presence of “hundreds” of pieces of classified information — apparently none of the messages had any official classification markings on them.
It’s a situation that has triggered heated debate over the extent to which such information wasn’t necessarily classified at the time Mrs. Clinton was emailing it.
“To the best of my understanding, there is no comparison between the Clinton email issue and the Petraeus case,” says Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Everyone agrees that there was no information in the Clinton emails that was marked as classified. So it would be difficult or impossible to show that those who sent or received the emails knowingly or negligently mishandled classified information.” [The Washington Times, 8/2/15]
Government Secrecy Expert: “There’s No Case” Against Clinton If She Didn’t Knowingly Misuse Classified Information. William Jeffress, an attorney who has handled government secrecy cases, told Time:
Legally, the question is pretty clear-cut. If Clinton knowingly used her private server to handle classified information she could have a problem. But if she didn’t know the material was classified when she sent or received it she’s safe.
[...]
Clinton has explicitly and repeatedly said she didn’t knowingly send or receive any classified information. “The facts are pretty clear,” she said last weekend in Iowa, “I did not send nor receive anything that was classified at the time.” Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III, disagrees, saying some of the material was in fact classified at the time it was sent. But in his letter last week to Congressional intelligence committee leaders, McCullough reported that, “None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings.” And there has been no indication Clinton knew she was sending and receiving anything classified.
The public doesn’t yet know the content of the classified emails, and the State Department and the inspectors general have tens of thousands still to review. If evidence emerges that Clinton knew she was handling secrets on her private server, “She could have a problem,” says William Jeffress, a leading criminal trial lawyer at Baker Botts who has represented government officials in secrecy cases. Barring that, says Jeffress, “there’s no way in the world [prosecutors] could ever make a case” against her. [Time, 7/29/15]
MYTH: Clinton Is The Subject Of A Federal Criminal Investigation
Fox’s Chris Stirewalt: Clinton Might Be “The Subject Of A Federal Criminal Investigation.” On the August 12 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, digital editor Chris Stirewalt claimed that Clinton might become “the first major party nominee that is the subject of a federal criminal investigation.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 8/12/15]
FACT: IG Referral To Justice Department Was Not Criminal, And FBI Isn’t Targeting Clinton Herself
Reuters: Inspector General Referral Is Not Criminal. Reuters reported on July 24 that there was “no criminal referral over [the] Clinton emails”:
The Justice Department said Friday it has received a request to examine the handling of classified information related to the private emails from Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, but it is not a criminal referral. [Reuters, 7/24/15]
AP: U.S. Official Said That Request Of DOJ “Doesn’t Suggest Wrongdoing By Clinton Herself.” The Associated Press quoted an anonymous U.S. official who noted that the referral did not implicate Clinton in any wrongdoing:
The New York Times first reported the referral. The Clinton campaign said Friday that she “followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials.” Spokesman Nick Merrill said emails deemed classified by the administration were done so after the fact, not when they were sent.
One U.S. official said it was unclear whether classified information was mishandled and the referral doesn’t suggest wrongdoing by Clinton herself. [Associated Press, 7/24/15]
Wash. Post: Officials Say Clinton “Is Not A Target” Of FBI Probe. The Washington Post reported that government officials said Clinton is “not a target” of the FBI’s investigation:
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attorney has agreed to provide the FBI with the private server that housed her e‑mail during her four years as secretary of state, Clinton’s presidential campaign said Tuesday.
[...]
The inquiry by the FBI is considered preliminary and appears to be focused on ensuring the proper handling of classified material. Officials have said that Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, is not a target.
The FBI’s efforts have included contacting the Denver-based technology firm that helped manage the Clintons’ unusual private e‑mail system. [The Washington Post, 8/11/15]
2. A piece by longtime political critic Norman Ornstein highlights The New York Times’ coverage of Hillary Clinton.
“The New York Times’ Botched Story on Hillary Clinton” by Norm Ornstein; The Atlantic; 7/28/2015.
I have read The New York Times since I was a teenager as the newspaper to be trusted, the paper of record, the definitive account. But the huge embarrassment over the story claiming a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton for her emails—leading the webpage, prominent on the front page, before being corrected in the usual, cringeworthy fashion of journalists who stonewall any alleged errors and then downplay the real ones—is a direct challenge to its fundamental credibility. And the paper’s response since the initial huge error was uncovered has not been adequate or acceptable.
This is not some minor mistake. Stories, once published, take on a life of their own. If they reinforce existing views or stereotypes, they fit perfectly into Mark Twain’s observation, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” (Or perhaps Twain never said it, in which case the ubiquity of that attribution serves to validate the point.) And a distorted and inaccurate story about a prominent political figure running for president is especially damaging and unconscionable.
I give kudos to the paper for having a public editor. Margaret Sullivan’s long analysis of the multiple miscues was itself honest and straightforward. But it raised its own questions, for me at least, especially surrounding the sourcing. Here is what top editor Matt Purdy said about the story’s sources: They were “multiple, reliable, highly placed” and included some “in law enforcement.” What does that mean? First, it means that some of the sources were not in law enforcement. If they were from Congress, and, perhaps from Trey Gowdy’s special committee on Benghazi, it would not be the first time that committee has been a likely source for a front-page Times story on Clinton.
“We got it wrong because our very good sources got it wrong,” Purdy said. Excuse me—how are these “very good sources” if they mislead reporters about the fundamental facts? Were the congressional sources—no doubt “very good” because they are eagerly accessible to the reporters—careless in reading the referral documents, or deliberately misleading the reporters? We know that a very good reporter formerly with The Times, Kurt Eichenwald, read the memos from the inspectors general about the Clinton emails and quite readily came to the conclusion that this had nothing to do with a criminal referral, but instead reflected a fairly common concern regarding the recent release of particular documents under Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, long after Clinton left the State Department.
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, does not fault his reporters. “You had the government confirming that it was a criminal referral,” he said. That raised another question. What is “the government?” Is any employee of the Justice Department considered the government? Was it an official spokesperson? A career employee? A policy-level person, such as an assistant attorney general or deputy assistant attorney general? One definitively without an ax to grind? Did the DOJ official tell the reporters it was a criminal referral involving Clinton, or a more general criminal referral? And if this was a mistake made by an official spokesperson, why not identify the official who screwed up bigtime?
When very good sources get a big story wrong, and reporters, without seeing the documents, accept their characterization of the facts and put it on the front page, they have an obligation to tell readers more about who those sources were and about why they got it wrong. And as Eichenwald notes, the subject of whether the documents were a criminal referral, and whether they involved Hillary Clinton directly, were not the only major errors in the story—for example, the Times story inaccurately says that the private Clinton email account was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. A combination of errors on a huge, front-page story—and there is no fault on the part of the reporters? Hmmm.
This story, of course, also has a larger context. Michael Schmidt’s March story, the first on the private Clinton email server, was itself “not without fault,” The Times’ public editor concluded.* And The Times, going back to the multiple, front page stories on Whitewater in the 1990s—claiming massive malfeasance that was seriously exaggerated—has raised many eyebrows over its decades-long treatment of the Clintons, in news pages and columns.
One might argue that this should make the paper and its editors especially sensitive to avoiding overreach and inaccuracies in stories about the Clintons. I won’t make that claim. Rather, the paper of record needs to be deeply sensitive at all times to inaccurate reporting and needs to respond with more than the usual buried corrections. The Times’ editorial page rightly holds public figures accountable for malfeasance and misfeasance. The same standards should apply to The Times. This story demands more than a promise to do better the next time, and more than a shrug, as Matt Purdy and Dean Baquet gave, with Purdy blaming the sources and Baquet saying of his reporters, “I am not sure what they could have done differently on that.”
I am. Holding a story until you are sure you have the facts—as other reporters did, with, it seems, “government officials” shopping the story around—or waiting until you can actually read the documents instead of relying on your good sources, so to speak, providing misleading and slanted details, is what they could have done differently. If reporters are hot to publish their scoops, it is up to editors, in Washington and New York, to put the brakes on. And that is especially true if reporters have previously made mistakes and overreached on stories. Someone should be held accountable here, with suspension or other action that fits the gravity of the offense. I want, and need, the old New York Times, the leader of responsible journalism, the paper of record back.
3. Fox News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have all signed a contract for exclusive agreements with the author of an upcoming book about Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It wasn’t surprising that Fox signed up for the deal since the author, Peter Schweizer, runs a right-wing knock off of the Government Accountability Office (called the “Government Accountabiltiy Institute”) and previously served as an adviser to Sarah Palin. For the New York Times and Washington Post, the decision raised a few eyebrows:
“. . . . Still others defended the agreement, noting that it was no different from using a campaign’s opposition research to inform one’s reporting — so long as that research is fact-checked and vetted. A spokesperson for the Times did not provide comment by press time. . . . ” LOL.
So with the New York Times and Washington Post also jumping on board with this book, the question is raised of whether or not we’re about to see a full blown zombie ideas apocalypse of Clinton-era conspiracy theories already or if this is just a teaser for the 2016 zombie invasion?
After all, one of the biggest threats to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is probably some sort of dormant 1990’s PTSD manifesting itself as a vague ‘Clinton Fatigue’. But ‘Clinton Fatigue’ is just not very likely to be a major factor unless the GOP scandal machine can create a new scandal that has some legs (which is what this new book seems to be attempting). But if they can’t dig up a new scandal with teeth, the obvious back up plan is to just throwing everything at the fan and hope the splatter ends up making Hillary unelectable and that’s obviously going to include a big rehashing of the scandals, real and otherwise, from the 90’s. Will The New York Times and Washington Post be on board for a full fledged 90’s rehash? Based on signing up for exclusive deals with a former Palin adviser it seems like the answer is a ‘maybe’.
But just throwing old s@#t at the Hillary-fan doesn’t come without enormous risks that don’t exist for most other politicians. Why? Because the other side of a story from the 90’s, the Clintons’ side, is that a vast right-wing conspiracy spent eight years doing everything they could to destroy the Clintons and it didn’t work. And it’s not some casual risk for the GOP that the ‘right-wing conspiracy’ historical interpretation wins the day because we’ve just spent the eight years watching the GOP go even crazier than they were were in the 90’s while operating in ‘Taliban’ mode.
That’s all why, in a strange way, Hillary Clinton is a kind of nightmare candidate for the contemporary GOP specifically because getting attacked by a vast right-wing conspiracy is sort of her ‘brand’ at this point and the GOP has spent the last 6 1/2 years blatantly behaving like a vast right-wing conspiracy against Barack Obama. Granted, it was pretty blatant in the 90’s too, but this is now fresh in people’s minds. And don’t forget: the GOP’s crazy far right “firebrand“s from from the 90’s are now the moderates of a party that publicly acts like a vast right-wing conspiracy. The party has just gotten so much crazier over the past two decades and anyone like Hillary that prompts a ‘then and now’ comparison of the 90’s GOP with today’s GOP just invites a very unfavorable comparison because the GOP of the 90’s was totally insane by objective standards and yet so much more sane then than it is today.
So, the way the political chess board is set at this point, just as the Clinton-era 90’s scandals are bound to be targets of media focus, the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ itself, which was always in part a media-based phenomena, is also guaranteed to be part of the discussion. It’s really just a question of whether or not Fox News and the traditional right-wing mediasphere compromise the bulk of the vast right-wing conspiracy this time around or whether or not the mainstream media institutions like The New York Times and Washington Post decide to jump on board too. This recent decision by the New York Times and Washington Post may not bode well but there’s a lot of time between now and the 2016 elections with many, many more zombie ideas that they’ll get to choose to promote or ignore. A Clinton-conspiracy zombie apocalypse takes a while to play out. Whether it involves or few missteps or one long shamble remains to be seen.
The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters, the On Media blog has confirmed.
“Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich” will debut on May 5. But the Times, the Post and Fox have already made arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to pursue some of the material included in his book, which seeks to draw connections between Clinton Foundation donations and speaking fees and Hillary Clinton’s actions as secretary of state. Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative research group, and previously served as an adviser to Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
Fox News’ use of Schweizer’s book has surprised no one. The bulk of the network’s programming is conservative, and the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, is owned by News Corporation. But the Times and Post’s decision to partner with a partisan researcher has raised a few eyebrows. Some Times reporters view the agreement as unusual, sources there said. Still others defended the agreement, noting that it was no different from using a campaign’s opposition research to inform one’s reporting — so long as that research is fact-checked and vetted. A spokesperson for the Times did not provide comment by press time.
In an article about the book on Monday, the Times said “Clinton Cash” was “potentially more unsettling” than other conservative books about Clinton “both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book.”
Both the Times and the Post initially did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. However, at 2 p.m., hours after the initial publication of this item, spokespeople from both newspapers sent statements in which editors defended the decisions to work with Schweizer.
“We had access to some material in the book, but we wanted to do our own reporting,” Times Washington bureau chief and political director Carolyn Ryan said.
“We made an arrangement with Peter Schweizer’s publisher so we could read his book before publication because we are always willing to look at new information that could inform our coverage,” said Post National Editor Cameron Barr. “Mr. Schweizer’s background and his point of view are relevant factors, but not disqualifying ones. What interests us more are his facts and whether they can be the basis for further reporting by our own staff that would be compelling to our readers. There is no financial aspect to this arrangement.”
On Monday, a source with knowledge of the arrangements told the On Media blog that CBS’ “60 Minutes” and ABC News turned down offers for similar exclusive access to portions of the book’s contents. A “60 Minutes” spokesperson said only, “We do not discuss the stories we are working on.” An ABC News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
HarperCollins is marketing “Clinton Cash” as a “meticulously researched” book that “raises serious questions of judgment, of possible indebtedness to an array of foreign interests, and ultimately, of fitness for high public office.” In it, Schweizer seeks to show how donations to the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees paid to former president Bill Clinton may have influenced Hillary Clinton’s decisions at the State Department.
Clinton’s defenders are already slamming the book. Media Matters For America, the liberal watchdog group founded by Clinton ally David Brock, published a report on Monday detailing “ten incidents of significant errors, retractions, or questionable sourcing by Schweizer.”
“Schweizer is a partisan right-wing activist whose writings have been marked with falsehoods and retractions, with numerous reporters excoriating him for facts that ‘do not check out,’ sources that ‘do not exist,’ and a basic failure to practice ‘Journalism 101,’” Brock said in a statement. “Buyers should beware and consider the source.”
...
4. Guess where Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash”, gave one of the featured speeches last summer. Hint: the folks putting on the event are just a pair of citizens that plan to spend almost a billion dollars from their personal cash piles on uniting the country in 2016. It’s a pretty big hint:
Citizens United goes all the way back to Whitewater. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
“Look Who Was Featured Speaker at the Koch Summit” by digby; Hullabaloo; 5/01/2015.
Peter Schweizer author of “Clinton Cash”, who they humorously call a “researcher.” And there’s audio of it:
[A]ccording to audio obtained by The Undercurrent and Lady Libertine from a source who was present, Schweizer spoke at a political strategy summit for the Koch brothers last summer, urging donors to relentlessly pursue the left and rallying them ahead of a big fundraising pitch. His own organization, the Government Accountability Institute receives funding from Koch-funded groups.
Schweizer told the crowd:
That debate is going to come down to the question of independence versus dependence… The left and the academic sphere is not going to let up. The question is, are we going to let up? And I would contend to you that we cannot let up.
Asked if “Clinton Cash” was motivated by this strategy of relentless pursuit, Kurt Bardella, whose firm, Endeavor Strategies, represents Schweizer, said:
As he has in several speeches as a lifelong conservative, Schweizer was espousing his view that conservatives should be informed, engaged, and active.
Kevin Gentry, the emcee and a vice president of the Charles Koch Foundation, later named “competitive intelligence,” the business terminology equivalent of opposition research, as one of the enumerated Koch political investment areas.
...
You can find a transcript at the link
He’s a Koch hitman:
Schweizer’s speech, entitled “The Stakes: Who Will Define the American Dream,” teed up the Kochs’ appeal to raise $290 million in donations for their fundraising hub, Freedom Partners, its affiliated network of non-profits, and a newly created super-PAC called Freedom Partners Action Fund. Bardella declined to answer whether Schweizer was speaking in a fundraising capacity for GAI, or whether Schweizer or GAI received any funds from Koch-affiliated organizations.
Stephen Bannon, the director of conservative propaganda films like the Sarah Palin biopic “The Undefeated” and a frequent collaborator with Citizens United Productions, chairs GAI’s board. Another GAI board member is Ron Robinson, who also sits on the boards of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation.
Citizens United Productions was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – the decision that rolled back significant campaign finance law pertaining to independent expenditures. At the center of that landmark case was a political documentary-cum-attack ad on Hillary Clinton called “Hillary: The Movie,” released ahead of the 2008 primary. Now nearly eight years later ahead of the 2016 primary, Schweitzer has published what could be considered the follow-up, Hillary: The Book.
5. Given the alarming levels of Hillary Derangement Syndrome already afflicting much of the US media establishment, you have to wonder if Steve Burke, the Comcast executive who oversees the NBCUniversal TV and entertainment unit (and who also happens to have been a major George W. Bush fundraiser), is in any way trying to ensure stuff like this happens.
“MSNBC’s Morning Joe Edits Out David Ignatius’ Debunking Of Clinton Email ‘Scandal’ ” by Craig Harrington and Timothy Johnson; Media Matters; 9/4/2015.
Ignatius: “I Couldn’t Find A Case Where This Kind Of Activity Had Been Prosecuted... Legally There Is No Difference Between [Clinton] Using Her Private Server And If She’d Used State.gov”
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius thoroughly debunked arguments that Hillary Clinton should be charged with a crime as a result of her use of a private email system while serving as secretary of state. When MSNBC re-aired the first hour of its program later in the morning, the bulk of Ignatius’ debunking had been edited out.
On the September 4 edition of Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski continued their efforts to stoke controversy around Hillary Clinton’s email practices while serving as secretary of state. Both Scarborough and Brzezinski suggested that guest David Ignatius was simply “getting tired” of the wall-to-wall media coverage directed at Clinton after the columnist authored an August 28 op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that “this ‘scandal’ is overstated.” Ignatius responded by explaining that experts he spoke with dismissed as far-fetched claims Clinton committed a criminal offense.
But during the rebroadcast of the segment, Morning Joe cut away from Ignatius’ explanation mid-sentence. During the initial broadcast, Ignatius said (emphasis added), “As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this, where people informally and inadvertently draw classified information into their phone conversations or their unclassified server conversations, where there had been a prosecution.”
When the segment re-aired, Ignatius is heard saying, “As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this,” before the show skipped forward to a remark by co-host Mika Brzezinski about Clinton aide Cheryl Mills.
Significantly, the rebroadcast failed to include the conclusion of Ignatius’ thought, which is that Clinton’s email practices do not amount to a prosecutable offense, according to several expert attorneys he talked to. Here are Ignatius’ unedited remarks (emphasis added):
[see video of full]JOE SCARBOROUGH: David, so you have over the past week or two turned a bit in some of your editorial, in some of your op-eds, you’ve said you would rather hear Hillary’s policy positions than more talk about the servers, you said you don’t think she faces any criminal prosecution. You haven’t exactly said nothing is here, move along, move along, but you’ve certainly –
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Getting tired of it, which is what they’re hoping.
SCARBOROUGH: — Yeah, I mean aren’t you playing into what the Clinton sort of scandal response team wants, which is so much stuff comes at you that at some point you just say, “Come on, let’s just move on.”
DAVID IGNATIUS: Joe, I’ve tried to respond as a journalist but in particular I’ve tried to look at what is a real prosecutable offense here. There are violations clearly both of administrative procedure and probably technically of law and how classified information was handled. As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this, where people informally and inadvertently draw classified information into their phone conversations or their unclassified server conversations, where there had been a prosecution.
[CROSS TALK]
SCARBOROUGH: But this isn’t happenstance. This is a very calculated move to say if you want to communicate with the Secretary of State, as Edwards Snowden said, whether you are a foreign diplomat or a spy chief from another country or a leader of another country, which they all did, you’ve got to come to this unsecured server, whether it is in Colorado or wherever it is, and there is a standard in the U.S. Code under prosecutions for this sort of thing which is gross negligence. It’s not a know or should have known -
[...]
IGNATIUS: This issue comes up surprisingly often because there is an administrative problem where people do these things and their security officers summon them and warn them and issue reprimands and it goes in their file and it’s a serious personnel administrative problem. My only point is I couldn’t find a case where this kind of activity had been prosecuted and that’s just worth noting as we assemble our Clinton e‑mail — and more thing, Joe, legally there is no difference between her using her private server and if she’d used State.gov, which is also not a classified system. The idea that, oh this would have been fine if she used State.gov, not legally, no difference.
Here is how Morning Joe re-aired the segment:
Scarborough, a former Republican member of the House of Representatives, has a long history of hyping the supposed Clinton email “scandal”despite all evidence to the contrary. He recently claimed that Clinton intentionally timed a press conference to coincide with a mass-shooting in Virginia and falsely claimed that Clinton whitewashed a foreign country’s ties to international terrorism in exchange for a charitable donation to her family foundation. As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn’t remember a case like this, where people informally and inadvertently draw classified information into their phone conversations or their unclassified server conversations, where there had been a prosecution. . . .
6. Republican James Comey–a Mitt Romney supporter in 2012–is taking actions that are causing serious problems for the Obama administration and for the Hillary Clinton candidacy. In particular, the e‑mail scandal appears to have been Comey’s baby.
He has also ruffled feathers with the altogether complicated Apple “ISISphone” controversy. That consummately important case, Byzantine in its complexity and multi-dimensionality (to coin a term) will be dealt with in a future program.
Comey was previously the general counsel for Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that helped capitalize Palantir, which (their disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding) makes the Prism software that is at the epicenter of “L’Affaire Snowden.” (CORRECTION: In past programs and posts, we incorrectly identified Comey as general counsel for Palantir, not Bridgewater.)
The Bridgewater/Palantir/Comey nexus is interesting, nonetheless. Palantir’s top stockholder is Peter Thiel, a backer of Ted Cruz and the man who provided most of the capital for Ron Paul’s 2012 Presidential campaign. Ron Paul’s Super PAC was in–of all places–Provo Utah, Romney country. Paul is from Texas. The alleged maverick Paul was, in fact, close to Romney.
Recall that “Eddie the Friendly Spook” is a big Ron Paul fan and Bruce Fein, Snowden’s first attorney and the counsel for the Snowden family, was the chief legal counsel for Ron Paul’s campaign.
The possible implications of these relationships are worth contemplating and will be discussed at greater length in future programs.
“Comey’s FBI Makes Waves” by Cory Bennett and Julian Hattem; The Hill; 3/09/2016.
The aggressive posture of the FBI under Director James Comey is becoming a political problem for the White House.
The FBI’s demand that Apple help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers has outraged Silicon Valley, a significant source of political support for President Obama and Democrats.
Comey, meanwhile, has stirred tensions by linking rising violent crime rates to the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on police violence and by warning about “gaps” in the screening process for Syrian refugees.
Then there’s the biggest issue of all: the FBI’s investigation into the private email server used by Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of State and the leading contender to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
A decision by the FBI to charge Clinton or her top aides for mishandling classified information would be a shock to the political system.
In these cases and more, Comey — a Republican who donated in 2012 to Mitt Romney — has proved he is “not attached to the strings of the White House,” said Ron Hosko, the former head of the FBI’s criminal investigative division and a critic of Obama’s law enforcement strategies.
Publicly, administration officials have not betrayed any worry about the Clinton probe. They have also downplayed any differences of opinion on Apple.
But former officials say the FBI’s moves are clearly ruffling feathers within the administration.
With regards to the Apple standoff, “It’s just not clear [Comey] is speaking for the administration,” said Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism and cybersecurity chief. “We know there have been administration meetings on this for months. The proposal that Comey had made on encryption was rejected by the administration.”
Comey has a reputation for speaking truth to power, dating back to a dramatic confrontation in 2004 when he rushed to a hospital to stop the Bush White House from renewing a warrantless wiretapping program while Attorney General John Ashcroft was gravely ill. Comey was Ashcroft’s deputy at the time.
That showdown won Comey plaudits from both sides of the aisle and made him an attractive pick to lead the FBI. But now that he’s in charge of the agency, the president might be getting more than he bargained for.
“Part of his role is to not necessarily be in lock step with the White House,” said Mitch Silber, a former intelligence official with the New York City Police Department and current senior managing director at FTI Consulting.
“He takes very seriously the fact that he works for the executive branch,” added Leo Taddeo, a former agent in the FBI’s cyber division. “But he also understands the importance of maintaining his independence as a law enforcement agency that needs to give not just the appearance of independence but the reality of it.”
The split over Clinton’s email server is the most politically charged issue facing the FBI, with nothing less than the race for the White House potentially at stake.
Obama has publicly defended Clinton, saying that while she “made a mistake” with her email setup, it was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
But the FBI director has bristled at that statement, saying the president would not have any knowledge of the investigation. Comey, meanwhile, told lawmakers last week that he is “very close, personally,” to the probe.
Obama’s comments reflected a pattern, several former agents said, of the president making improper comments about FBI investigations. In 2012, he made similarly dismissive comments about a pending inquiry into then-CIA Director David Petraeus, who later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for giving classified information to his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell.
“It serves no one in the United States for the president to comment on ongoing investigations,” Taddeo said. “I just don’t see a purpose.”
Hosko suggested that a showdown over potential criminal charges for Clinton could lead to a reprise of the famous 2004 hospital scene, when Comey threatened to resign.
“He has that mantle,” Hosko said. “I think now there’s this expectation — I hope it’s a fair one — that he’ll do it again if he has to.”
Comey’s independent streak has also been on display in the Apple fight, when his bureau decided to seek a court order demanding that the tech giant create new software to bypass security tools on an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two terrorist attackers in San Bernardino, Calif.
Many observers questioned whether the FBI was making an end-run around the White House, which had previously dismissed a series of proposals that would force companies to decrypt data upon government request.
“I think there’s actually some people that don’t think with one mindset on this issue within the administration,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D‑Del.), the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s top Democrat, at a Tuesday hearing. “It’s a tough issue.”
While the White House has repeatedly backed the FBI’s decision, it has not fully endorsed the potential policy ramifications, leaving some to think a gap might develop as similar cases pop up. The White House is poised to soon issue its own policy paper on the subject of data encryption.
“The position taken by the FBI is at odds with the concerns expressed by individuals [in the White House] who were looking into the encryption issue,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
This week, White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco tried to downplay the differences between the two sides. The White House and FBI are both grappling with the same problems, she said in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“There is a recognition across the administration that the virtues of strong encryption are without a doubt,” Monaco said on Monday. “There is also uniformity about the recognition that strong encryption poses real challenges.”
7. The so-called progressive sector continues to parrot the disinformation about Clinton being “GOP-lite.” How many of you knew this?: ” . . . . Indeed, when Clinton served in the Senate, she was considered the 11th most liberal senator. That’s basically in the top 20 percentile in terms of liberal votes. That’s lightyears away from being a DINO. . . .”
“Ready for Hillary Derangement Syndrome” by Bob Cesca; The Daily Banter; 4/13/2015.
. . . . One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the pervasiveness of Hillary Derangement Syndrome, from both the left and the right (though as you’ll see, the right’s derangement is far worse). Sunday’s Political Twitter turned in it’s most insufferable day since the tan suit debacle last Labor Day — everyone weighing in with both recycled old boilerplate criticisms of Clinton, as well as some truly despicable new ones. Let’s begin with the left.
Hillary is Republican-lite.
No, no she’s not, actually. Admittedly, she’s not Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑VT) either. Then again, Bernie Sanders would be unelectable nationally. Nevertheless, this caricature of Clinton mainly has to do with her foreign policy positions — at least the ones we know of. And other than her 2002 vote in support of the Iraq Authorization for Use of Force (AUMF), she’s largely in line with President Obama on predator drones, intervention, NSA operations and so forth.
That aside, watch carefully to see if any Republicans release a video favorably showing two men holding hands. Elsewhere, Clinton will likely appoint center-left justices to the Supreme Court; she’ll veto any legislation to repeal Obamacare; and she’ll continue the Obama administration’s approach to the climate crisis. All of that aside, the whole “GOP-lite” meme is just another version of the “both parties are the same” meme — it’s good for some RTs on Twitter, but makes little sense in terms of a break-down of Clinton’s positions on the issues. Indeed, when Clinton served in the Senate, she was considered the 11th most liberal senator. That’s basically in the top 20 percentile in terms of liberal votes. That’s lightyears away from being a DINO. . . .
Uncle Sam and The Swastika
Not sure, but doesn’t the Secretary of State have declassification authority in any case?
Check out the latest member of Donald Trump’s opposition research team. It’s an informal membership:
“We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton...WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”
Well, it sounds like we’ll just have to wait what Assange comes up with. And who knows, maybe WikiLeaks will even release something about Donald Trump, although that assumes there’s much of anything about him in the WikiLeaks treasure trove. It also assumes that Assange wouldn’t actually prefer a Trump presidency. And while Assange hasn’t come out and endorsed Trump yet, he definitely doesn’t seem very keen on criticizing him:
“Trump is a completely unpredictable phenomenon—you can’t predict what he would do in office…
And that basically summarizes Assange’s thoughts on Trump. Or at least the thoughts he was willing to share when directly asked.
So the WikiLeaks party line on the US 2016 election appears to be something along the lines of, “who knows what a Trump presidency will bring, but you can be sure that Hillary will be a complete disaster!” That sure sounds like a ‘non-endorsement endorsement’ of Donald Trump. Imagine that.
Donald Trump was tweeting about the ‘big speech’ he has planned for Wednesday that he promises will focus on “the failed policies and bad judgement of Crooked Hillary Clinton”. And if another tweet he made in the middle of the night about a new salacious tell-all book from a Clinton White House Secret Service agent is any indication of the content of that speech, it sounds like we might be getting a rehash of a book the Clinton-era Secret Service veterans have already denounced as bogus:
“The former supervisor of the presidential protective division said that at best Byrne is working from office rumors that he’s cinematically written himself into. People spend decades on presidential details and don’t rack up the number of amazing scenes Byrne claims to have witnessed in just a few years as a uniformed officer.”
Oh look, it appears the “let’s soak the rubes who will believe (and pay for) anything with another anti-Clinton book”-club has a new member. Welcome to the party, Gary Byrne!
So we’ll see if Donald Trump’s big anti-Hillary speech is basically just a a rehashing of all the 90’s Clinton conspiracies we’re now familiar with plus whatever fun new allegations he finds in Byrne’s book to make it appear that Hillary was protecting Bill in his various sexual indiscretions. It was basically guaranteed that such an argument is going to be made by whoever the GOP nominee ended up being, so if that argument isn’t made by Trump tomorrow you can be sure it will be made at some point. But it’s worth noting that Donald Trump suddenly has a new reason to ensure that the allegations he eventually makes against the Clintons are as salacious as he can possibly come up with. Why? To help distract from the fact that Donald Trump was just accused of raping an underage girl in a federal lawsuit:
“Trump has long admitted to being friendly with Epstein, telling New York Magazine several years ago, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life.””
So we have a new anti-Clinton book coming out by an author of highly questionable credibility right around the same time Donald Trump is facing a new federal lawsuit for raping a 13 year old 20 years ago at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex parties. And we’re not even half way through 2016.
Beyond the immediate question of whether nor not these charges against Trump have any truth behind them, one of the interesting questions Donald Trump is probably asking himself at this point is what exactly the right-wing media is going to do with these charges if Trump loses and loses big. Because if Hillary Clinton was facing anyone other than Trump, you can bet we would be hearing about Jeffery Epstein and the ‘Lolita Express’ nonstop throughout this entire election cycle due to the fact that Bill Clinton also knew Epstein. With Trump at the top of the ticket the story can’t really get any play. But that won’t be an issue if Trump loses and loses so big he effectively burns his bridges with the GOP.
The Epstein scandal potentially cast a bad light on Bill Clinton and potentially portrays Trump as a rapist, so any story related to Epstein is sort of a no go zone for both campaigns. But if Hillary becomes president, do we really expect the right-wing media to lay off the Epstein angle as much as it has already when that story completely fits the narrative the right-wing media machine has built up of Bill Clinton as not just a horndog but a violent, predatory rapist horndog. If Hillary wins, isn’t puffing up that narrative going to be a central right-wing media focus from day one. And won’t that mean throwing Trump under the right-wing media bus too? It unclear how that can be avoided, but it’s also unclear why the right-wing media will care about doing that if Trump ends up trashing the party. Who knows, trashing Trump could end up being part of the healing process. Plus, Just image the GOP in ‘Taliban’-mode against Hillary. It’s going to be nuts.
So as salacious as the politics of 2016 already is, if you’re Donald Trump you probably shouldn’t assume 2017 isn’t going to get worse.
@Pterrafractyl
With the stories floating about how big right-wing money interests (re: Koch Bros.) are sacrificing interest in this year’s presidential election cycle to focus on Senate/House/local State elections, combined with the main headline in my local paper today about how Trump’s campaign is off to a pitiful fundraising start; it seems to me that the final part of your post above hints very closely at GOP strategy. If they burn ties to Trump, then they can highlight their recovery and supposed separation from Trump’s rhetoric, and then focus on tarnishing the Clintons further with this story thereby making a strong challenge after her first term, along with causing massive legislative gridlock related to that controversy.
Combine that with the information Daniel Hopsicker is reporting about voting machine fraud and there’s quite a recipe for political disaster in 2018 and 2020 with the right wing boa constrictor tightening its choke hold. I’d suspect deals being made regarding tentative domestic support for Clinton’s policies (to an extent) if she goes along with international NATO posturing against Russian interests illustrated by all the recent joint military exercises and continued concessions for international finance such as the TPP.
@Sampson: You can bet that the name “Epstein” will be a household name for the next 4 to 8 years if Hillary wins. But considering the number of powerful people around the globe that could be implicated via guilt by Epstein-association, it’s going to be interesting to see how a sustained media campaign on that topic unfolds. But it’s coming.
Another one of the interesting aspects of the GOP’s Trumpian gambit this year is that, while losing the 2016 race could have a long-term impact on the makeup of the Supreme Court, as you point out, there are some clear potential benefits to losing too. And one of the biggest potential benefits is for the right-wing base to be super fired up in 2020. And why is 2020 so important? Because it’s a redistricting year AND a presidential election, something that only happens every two decades. And that is exactly the kind of situation that should give the Democrats a boost for the entire 2020–2030 decade simply because the Democratic base has the utterly baffling habit of not voting nearly as much when it’s not a presidential election year. The GOP’s 2010 route wasn’t just a great midterm victory for the GOP where we saw the rise of the Tea Party. After the epic gerrymandering that year it basically became impossible for the Democrats to win back the House this decade. That redistricting scenario could basically flip in 2020, and if President Trump assumes office in 2017 the odds of a 2020 outcome in favor of the the Democrats that happening will be a lot higher than if we have another President Clinton.
So we have this unusual scenario where the 2016 election is a ‘must win’ election simply because of the unusually high number of Supreme Court justices that could get appointed over the next four years, but winning in 2016 is probably going to make winning in 2020 too a lot harder and the 2020 election could have a significant impact on which party controls the House from 2020–2030. Those are both substantial prizes, so you have to wonder how much the potential prize of a better 2020 turnout for the GOP if Trump loses in 2016 is impacting the GOP power brokers’ cost/benefit analysis regarding a Trump loss. He is offering insanely huge tax cuts for the super-rich, after all, but he’s also potentially risking serious brand damage to the GOP, the ultimate Golden Goose for the oligarchy. Just today George Will officially left the GOP and called fro Republicans to work to ensure Trump loses and focus on 2020 instead so at least some of the GOP establishment is still pushing to move things in that direction.
Another part of what must make the Clintons hard to risk assess for the oligarchy is the reality that the Clintons are, in one sense, two of the most prominent figures of “the Establishment” of the last couple of decades simply be holding a number of powerful offices and doing so under an unrelenting right-wing character assassination program. But at the same time, as the “vast right-wing conspiracy” made very clear throughout the 90’s and beyond, Bill and Hillary Clinton are two of the most hated figures by “the Establishment” that we’ve ever seen in US political history. As a result, you’d probably be pretty hard pressed to find to establishment figures that have more reason to hate the establishment than Bill and Hillary Clinton and that’s not something the establishment can easily ignore unless Hillary makes it clear that they have nothing to fear, which would be a massive mistake since the Clintons’ enemies are sort of one of their biggest selling points.
That’s all part of why it’s going to be fascinating to see not just how many of the GOP’s power brokers and mega donors try to keep their distance from the Trump campaign, but how many of them basically place a bet on Hillary now and try to curry favor by actively bashing Trump and promoting her. It will be especially interesting because one of the cleverest trick plays the right-wing could do to actually help Trump win is have a bunch of sleazy conservative power brokers publicly jump on board the Hillary train which could have the effect of trying to portray her as the ultimate Establishment insider. It’s sort of a win-win move: get on Hillary’s good side while indirectly assisting Trump by introducing a sleaze factor, although there could be consequences for backing Hillary if Trump ends up winning.
Regarding the possibility that Hillary will be offered by establishment factions various deals along the lines of “we’ll back your domestic program if you back our international agenda”, you can be sure that there are at least going to be attempts to make deals of that nature, especially the closer we get to the election if it looks like Hillary is going to win. But while power brokers might be able to offer such a deal, there’s no way to make such a deal that actually applies to the elected GOP officials in the House and Senate who are going to be in permanent “burn the witch!” mode. The political calculus for elected GOP officials will mandate “burn the witch!” behavior if they want to be reelected. The GOP base simply expects that.
So let’s hope Hillary isn’t foolish enough to make a deal, especially one the MIC can’t even back up like a pledge to keep the GOP from going into “burn the witch!” mode. Plus, she has also got to be aware of just how easily the situations in Ukraine and Syria could blow up into even bigger nightmares and the reality that’s she’s the one that will take the blame when things go sour. It certainly wouldn’t help her reelection chances.
The Clintons have a rather unusual hybrid ‘outside’/‘insider’ status and that’s one of the undersold potential strengths of a second Clinton administration. They know where the bodies are buried in part because so many powerful people have been trying to send them to the political graveyard for decades. There really was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that really did do everything it could to destroy the Clintons and it’s still operating. It’s just mostly been focused on Obama in recent years. And that same “vast right-wing conspiracy” of far-right oligarchs and power-brokers is ALSO one of the key forces that basically ensure the US is a politically dysfunctional democracy. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” isn’t just conspiring against the Clintons and Obamas. It’s primarily conspiring against all of us. The Clintons just got in the way of that in the 90’s and become a prime target.
Given all that, we would be hard pressed to find a political power couple with both the motivation to undercut and expose that vast right-wing conspiracy but also the experience to pull it off. Of course, whatever she does will be highly dependent on whether or not the progressive base just checks out after the election and doesn’t check back in until 2020. That’s the kind of scenario that guarantees 2018 will be a nasty election year and would create the kinds of political conditions that traditionally lead a Democratic president to veer more to the right in order to cater to the more right-leaning mid-term election voters. So avoiding the repeat of 2010, where the left just went AWOL for the mid-terms, is probably one of the best things the US left can do to create the political space for the Clintons to keep to a progressive agenda. And there’s no reason that can’t include applying pressure to find de-escalating solutions to the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria in addition to keeping the heat on the vast right-wing conspirators who will be doing their best to trash the place.
So let’s ensure she manages to keep the MIC and war mongers in check by having the progressive base keep her and the entire Democratic party in check. This is where the Bernie revolution could find its future calling. If they stay engaged and build the Democratic party through 2018 and 2020, that can happen. It’s one of the counterintuitive aspects of democracy, but the politicians often are free to be great politicians until the people force them to do it. Let’s force her to be great.
FBI Director James Comey Breaks Federal Prosecutor Rules by Smearing but Not Indicting Clinton Over Emails
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/fbi-director-james-comey-breaks-federal-prosecutor-rules-smearing-not-indicting
FBI director James Comey’s decision not to indict Hillary Clinton over the fact that 110 of 30,000 private emails she sent while Secretary of State were classified (an error rate of 0.36 percent) is now a full-on national political frenzy.
The Associated Press now alleges Clinton lied—for saying there were no classified emails. House and Senate Republicans are demanding Comey immediately testify. House Speaker Paul Ryan told Fox News that “people have been convicted for less.” The New York Times’ front page called Comey’s testimony “an attack ad, ready-made.” And Donald Trump, who initially attacked Comey’s decision as “rigged,” then posted videos of his comments.
But what almost nobody is questioning is whether the FBI director crossed the line, abusing his discretion and his power, by smearing Clinton in the press and interfering in a political campaign. The Department of Justice’s manual for federal prosecutors bars them from making statements about people who aren’t indicted.
“It goes beyond discretion,” said an ex-Connecticut public defender. “It’s completely improper when there’s not going to be a trial.”
The Department of Justice’s voluminous U.S. Attorneys Manual has sections restricting press comments when there’s no indictment in all but the most exceptional cases, barring prosecutors from interfering in political campaigns. It states that prosecutors should not name unindicted defendants, and even cites federal court rulings chastising prosecutors for doing exactly that.
Comey, a Republican appointed as FBI director by President Obama, crossed all three of those lines. Very few commentators noted that Comey shouldn’t have said anything at all, and how unusual it was that he did. One exception was Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
“The first notable thing in FBI director Jim Comey’s statement on the Clinton email flap is that he issued it,” he wrote. “Normally, the FBI does not issue reports on its investigative findings separate from Justice Department decisions regarding what to do with those findings. Much less does it make public its recommendations, particularly in a fashion that effectively preempts the Justice Department’s prosecutorial decisions with respect to those recommendations.”
Comey’s hubris didn’t stop there, Wittes noted. The man who drew Obama’s attention because as an FBI official he privately opposed the Bush administration’s torture proposals, told the press Tuesday that, “I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.”
Beyond the fact that the DOJ prosecutors’ manual states that all statements have to be cleared through department filters, Comey’s assertion that his remarks are called for as matter of great public interest—“Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way”—falls flat upon close scrutiny. What he presented was extremely political, and if the DOJ prosecutors’ manual is to be taken seriously, equally unprofessional.
What Did Comey Say?
Comey began his remarks by calling them “unusual” but justified in a case of “extreme public interest.” He explained that the heart of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a series of private email servers while Secretary of State concerned 30,000 replies to other department officials.
“From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received,” Comey said. “Eight of those chains contained information that was top secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained secret information at the time; and eight contained confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional emails were ‘up-classified’ to make them confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the emails were sent.”
This tiny number of classified emails is what’s fueling the political frenzy, like the AP calling Clinton a liar and GOP demands in Congress for additional hearings. For perspective, those 110 out of 30,000 emails represents an error rate of 0.36 percent. Congressional Republicans, who are looking for any way to attack the Democratic presidential nominee, claim that Clinton intentionally withheld emails from them. Comey said that wasn’t quite right, yet he also took a swat at Clinton’s legal team.
“The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her emails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related emails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total emails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014,” he said. “It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related emails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.”
But then Comey went in for the political hit, judging Clinton in the media and the court of public opinion at the same time he was building toward his conclusion that there would be no indictment because nothing she did deserves to be prosecuted.
“They were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey said, referring to Clinton’s tech-support staff. “For example, seven email chains concern matters that were classified at the top secret/special access program level when they were sent and received… Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
Then came a series of additional slaps and smears.
“None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at departments and agencies of the U.S. government or even with a commercial service like Gmail,” Comey said. “Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”
Comey then hit the State Department for allowing Clinton to use private emails, without acknowledging that former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell did the same thing.
“The security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government,” he said, essentially calling the department an unindicted co-conspirator.
Then came more guilt-by-association.
“We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account,” he said, which translated, means people she was communicating with were likely targeted by hackers. He speculated, “Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”
Then Comey backtracked, concluding that none of this carelessness rose to the level of a criminal violation that could be prosecuted.
“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said.
J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghost
Mainstream media and Republicans fawned over Comey’s comments, even as GOP congressional leaders claimed their sense of justice was offended because the opposing party’s presidential nominee would not face federal charges.
Virtually nobody outside of legal circles and academia questioned the appropriateness or outrageousness of Comey’s comments.
One academic legal blogger, Stetson University College of Law professor Ellen Podgor, noted that most FBI investigations with no indictments don’t issue public statements; that the FBI’s investigation was one-sided; that Comey cited hypotheticals without facts; that his accusations about her lawyers were unnecessary and unprofessional; and that it is Congress’ responsibility to upgrade the IT protocols of federal agencies like the State Department.
“When they do provide an announced recommendation of non-indictment, the FBI should limit their statement to just that,” she said. “There is no need to tarnish a person’s reputation in the process—especially when there is no concrete evidence to support the hypotheticals.”
Other practicing lawyers were more blunt.
“The Department of Justice policies are you don’t comment on people you don’t indict. You don’t punish them in the press,” said an ex-Connecticut public defender. “The other thing is the DOJ policy is you don’t do things to affect elections, period. I don’t see anybody questioning this. Everybody thinks the FBI is sacrosanct.”
“I think it was highly inappropriate,” said John Williams, a civil rights lawyer from New Haven, Connecticut. “I suppose he will get away with it because [as FBI director] he is not a prosecutor. And you do get that all too often. Law enforcement will issue a press release and the prosecutor will not say anything.”
“It’s like a perp walk, but this is worse, because they’re saying we will not arrest them,” Williams said. “To hold a press conference where he [Comey] makes comments on the behavior of the person who will not be indicted? That’s not appropriate. I don’t recall ever seeing that by a FBI director. It harkens back to J. Edgar Hoover’s days.”
Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who has unquestioned integrity has the following to say about special interests discrediting Hillary’s:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/what-explains-underlying-distrust-hillary-clinton
What Explains the Underlying Distrust of Hillary Clinton?
Given her history of being under relentless attack, it’s understandable that Clinton seeks to minimize small oversights. But that’s a mistake.
By Robert Reich / RobertReich.org July 15, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s 6‑point lead over Donald Trump in last month’s CBS News poll has now evaporated. As of mid-July (even before Trump enjoys a predictable post-convention bump in the polls) she is tied with him. Each garners the support of 40 percent of voters.
This is astounding, given that Trump’s campaign is in shambles while hers is a well-oiled machine; that he’s done almost no advertising while she began the month spending $500,000 a day on ads; and that Republican leaders are deserting him while Democrats are lining up behind her.
The near tie is particularly astonishing given that Trump has no experience and offers no coherent set of policies or practical ideas but only venomous bigotry and mindless xenophobia, while Hillary Clinton has a boatload of experience, a storehouse of carefully-crafted policies, and a deep understanding of what the nation must do in order to come together and lead the world.
What happened? Apparently the FBI’s recent report on Clinton’s email heightened what already were public concerns about her honesty and trustworthiness. Last month, on that same CBS poll, 62 percent of voters said she’s not honest and trustworthy; now 67 percent of voters have that view.
So as the Republican convention prepares to nominate the least qualified and most divisive candidate in American history, the Democrats are about to nominate among the most qualified and yet also most distrusted.
What explains this underlying distrust?
I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old. For twenty-five years I’ve watched as she and her husband became quarries of the media – especially, but not solely, the rightwing media.
I was there in 1992 when she defended her husband against Jennifer Flower’s charges of infidelity. I was in the cabinet when she was accused of fraudulent dealings in Whitewater, and then accused of wrongdoing in the serial rumor mills of “Travelgate” and “Troopergate,” followed by withering criticism of her role as chair of Bill Clinton’s healthcare task force.
I saw her be accused of conspiracy in the tragic suicide of Vince Foster, her friend and former colleague, who, not incidentally, wrote shortly before his death that “here [in Washington] ruining people is considered sport.“
Rush Limbaugh claimed that “Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton,” and the New York Postreported that administration officials “frantically scrambled” to remove from Foster’s office safe a previously unreported set of files, some of them related to Whitewater.
I saw Kennth Starr’s Whitewater investigation metastasize into the soap opera of Bill Clinton’s second term, featuring Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, and Juanita Broaddrick, among others – culminating in Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Hillary’s very public (and, presumably, intensely private) humiliation.
Then, more recently, came the storm over Benghazi, which led to inquiries about her email server, followed by the questions about whether or how the Clinton Foundation charitable work and the Clintons’ own for-profit speeches might have intersected with her work at the State Department.
It is worth noting that despite all the stories, allegations, accusations, insinuations, and investigations spread over a quarter century – there has never been any finding that Hillary Clinton engaged in illegal behavior.
But it’s understandable why someone who has been under such relentless attack for a large portion of her adult life might be reluctant to expose every minor error or misstep that could be blown up into another “scandal,” another media circus, another interminable set of investigations generating half-baked conspiracy theories and seemingly endless implications of wrongdoing.
Given this history, any sane person might reflexively seek to minimize small oversights, play down innocent acts of carelessness, or not fully disclose mistakes of no apparent consequence, for fear of cutting loose the next attack dogs. Such a person might even be reluctant to let their guard down and engage in impromptu news conferences or veer too far off script.
Yet that reflexive impulse can itself generate distrust when such responses eventually come to light, as they often do – as when, for example, Hillary was shown to be less than forthright over her emails. The cumulative effect can create the impression of someone who, at worst, is guilty of serial cover-ups, or, at best, shades the truth.
So while Hillary Clinton’s impulse is understandable, it is also self-defeating, as now evidenced by the growing portion of the public that doesn’t trust her.
It is critically important that she recognizes this, that she fight her understandable impulse to keep potential attackers at bay, and that from here on she makes herself far more open and accessible – and clearly and fearlessly tells all.
Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few.” His website is http://www.robertreich.org.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/18/why_a_member_of_the_democratic
Cornel West is heading to Philadelphia next, where he will serve on the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee, but he has announced he won’t be backing the party’s presumptive nominee. West talks about why he is backing the Green Party’s Jill Stein over Hillary Clinton.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: You are endorsing Dr. Jill Stein. You were a surrogate for Bernie Sanders. You spoke all over the country for him.
CORNEL WEST: Yes, yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What made you decide to support the Green Party presidential candidate as opposed to Hillary Clinton?
CORNEL WEST: Well, I’ve never been tied to one party or one candidate or even one institution. And that’s true even with one church as a Christian. I’m committed to truth and justice. And Brother Bernie, no doubt, was the standard-bearer for truth and justice during the primary at a national level, at a highly visible level. Once he endorsed Hillary Clinton, who, for me, is a neoliberal disaster, it was clear—
....AMY GOODMAN: What happened with the Democratic platform? You were one of the people on the committee. A lot of people don’t know how this stuff is made, how the sausage is made. Explain what happened. What did you win? What did you lose?
CORNEL WEST: Well, I was blessed to be put on the committee by Brother Bernie Sanders. We had wonderful deliberations. Brother Elijah Cummings was very fair. He was the chairperson. But we lost TPP. We lost Medicare for all. We lost, of course, Israeli occupation and Israeli settlements included within the platform, keeping track while precious Palestinian brothers and sisters—
AMY GOODMAN: What about them? You lost—what do you mean, you lost them?
CORNEL WEST: We lost them, in that we made the case, and we lost the vote.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you looking for?
CORNEL WEST: We were looking to include them within the platform, so at least it was on paper. Now, of course, putting it on paper is different than putting it in practice. A declaration is different from the execution. But we lost over and over again, because the Clinton people lined up and voted against it. That’s why I, of course, abstained, initially, at the move from writing the draft, and then we took it to the platform committee in Orlando. I was also a member of the platform committee. And I had to abstain again, because—even though they didn’t allow for abstention; it was just no or yes. But there’s no way, based on moral grounds, those based on my own moral conscience, that I could support that platform.
And once my dear brother moved into his endorsement, his strong endorsement of the neoliberal disaster that Sister Hillary represents, there was no way that I could stay with Bernie Sanders any longer, had to break with the two-party system.
@Tiffany Sunderson–
Never forget the nature of the fabric from which Amy Goodman was made:
https://spitfirelist.com/news/sheesh-democray-now/
Best,
Dave
Behold the latest chapter in Julian Assange’s quest to get Donald Trump elected President: WikiLeaks just released a new searchable database of Democratic National Committee emails. Since the database consists of 19,252 emails so, as you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of content available to the public. Content like innocent donors’ credit card, social security, and passport numbers:
“The new leak is part of the organization’s ongoing Hillary Leaks series, which launched in March as a searchable archive of more than 30,000 emails and attachments sent to and from Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. The original email dump included documents from June 2010 to August 2014. The new release includes emails from January 2015 to May 2016.”
It appears that WikiLeaks’s management is of the opinion that donating to the Democratic Party is a crime worth of having your sensitive personal info dumped on the web. Either that or they got so carried away with the thrill of helping the Trump campaign that they released all that info without fully vetting it. Maybe there are other explanations, but those two scenarios somehow seem the most likely.
Holocaust denier and Julian Assange associate, Israel Shamir, runs the Wikileaks Russian department. I’m inclined to point the finger at Shamir over Putin and Russian intelligence regarding 20,000 stolen emails from the DNC computer servers. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention Sanders supporters are up in arms, the Trump team is euphoric and the destabilization of Hilary Clinton picks up momentum. Plus Putin gets smeared as well. Several different itches getting scratched with this one, very bad news indeed.
@Dennis and Pterrafractyl–
Don’t forget who else is in Russia: a very high-profile CIA officer (and former NSA contractor) named “Edward.” I think his last name begins with an “S.”
It was, of course, Snowden’s journey to Russia, effected by Sarah Harrison and WikiLeaks, that put the final nail in the coffin of Barack Obama and (ahem) Hillary Clinton’s reboot with Russia.
Connecting some dots: The Clinton e‑mail non-scandal was an outgrowth of the Benghazi investigations (nine of them by the GOP), which grew out of the so-called Arab Spring.
In FTR #733 https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-733-wikileaks-soup-the-roveing-reporter-a-night-in-tunisia/
and FTR 734 (https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-734-a-night-in-tunisia-pt-ii-are-karl-rove-and-wikileaks-working-with-the-muslim-brotherhood/) we noted that Karl Rove was acting as a top advisor to the prime minister of Sweden at the time that WikiLeaks landed on Karl Lundstrom’s server.
The launch of the Arab Spring stemmed from a leaked State Department cable.
Karl Rove was also channeling money to Bernie Sanders: https://spitfirelist.com/news/bern-this-why-is-karl-rove-a-bernie-bro/
Karl Rove was very friendly with Paula Broadwell, whose affair with David Petraeus led to his ouster at CIA RIGHT after the 2012 Presidential election. This placed Michael J. Morell, who briefed Dubya on intelligence matters and who was WITH Dubya on the morning of 9/11, at the head of CIA. https://spitfirelist.com/news/benghazi-david-petraeus-michael-j-morell-and-the-destabilization-of-the-obama-administration/
Assange, like Snowden, is a big Ron Paul fan: https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-755-the-adventures-of-eddie-the-friendly-spook-part-2-dramatis-personae-part-2-wikifascism-part‑3/
Ron Paul is very close to Mitt Romney: https://spitfirelist.com/news/nazi-linked-pied-piper-ron-paul-all-roads-lead-to-romney/
Although he is from Texas, Paul’s Super PAC was in Provo, Utah.
It was largely capitalized by Peter Thiel, the largest stockholder in Palantir which–its disclaimers notwithstanding–makes the PRISM software at the core of L’Affaire Snowden.
Peter Thiel is now a Trump delegate.
James Comey, head of the FBI, was a big supporter of Mitt Romney.
He was the former general counsel for Bridgewater Associates, which provided a big chunk of start-up capital for Palantir.
https://spitfirelist.com/news/is-comey-destabilizing-the-democratic-party-for-the-gop/
David Duke has been a big supporter of Trump.
Duke has been networking with Snowden presidential selection Ron Paul for decades.
Carl Lundstrom (who financed the Pirate Bay site at which WikiLeaks landed) arranged a speaking tour for David Duke.
Jermas/Shamir is part of a Russian and Ukrainian fascist milieu that networks with David Duke.
A conspiracy?
Nah, couldn’t be.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.
Best,
Dave
Dave I cannot disagree with any of your obversations. In fact it’s overwhelmingly depressing. The fascist lineage of Dulles, Project Paperclip, Muslim Brotherhood, Republican ethnic outreach, Yockey, CIA-Bush family endures through Rove, Assange, Snowden, the Pauls, Thiel, IS etc. in other words the Underground Reich. If Trump wins America it will be followed by Le Pen in France and it will be much worse than just the visuals of Nazi arm salutes in the aftermath.
@Dennis–
Depressing it most assuredly is, my friend.
And, for me, infuriating.
I’ve been watching this stuff gain momentum for decades and people just don’t learn.
Of course, referring to the Bernie Bots as “people” is, admittedly, a reach.
Watching their predictably disgusting antics in Philadelphia brings to mind Dr. Johnson’s observation centuries ago: “Those who make beasts of themselves escape the pain of being human.”
Saint Bernard and his camp followers think they invented the wheel.
In fact, the problem of concentration of ownership is not only much older, but much more deeply entrenched than they imagine.
Just listen to the conclusion of the original “Uncle Sam and the Swastika” broadcast, recorded on May 23, 1980.
https://spitfirelist.com/archives/f‑511b_edit.mp3
The problem most assuredly will not be corrected quickly, if ever, and certainly not by a bunch of intemperate lint-heads who couldn’t tell a dirt road from a chicken with lips.
I agree with the bulk of the stated goals of Sanders’ campaign. I would also like to live forever.
The two have the same chance of taking place.
Do not fail to note how the Assangeholes are manifesting “technocratic fascism,” as set forth by David Golumbia.
https://spitfirelist.com/news/smart-technology-is-actually-a-stealthy-euphemism-for-surveillance-a-world-where-we-no-longer-exert-control-over-objects-weve-bought-from-corporations-but-corporations‑e/
Oh well, gotta keep on working. BTW–do not fail to note that the James Stewart Martin book is available for download for free.
Best,
Dave
Donald Trump speculated that Russian hackers may have also hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server in addition to the Democratic National Committee emails during a press conference this morning. He provided no evidence of that, but did proceed to call for Russia to release those emails if they have them. So the speculation over whether or not Donald Trump has some sort of special relationship with the Kremlin (or is simply the Kremlin’s preferred US president without any special relationship) probably isn’t going away any time soon:
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
In tangentially related news, someone claiming to be “Anonymous Official” appears to have hacked comedian Sarah Silverman’s twitter account and posted an anti-Hillary video after to Silverman, who was an enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporter throughout the primary, called the “Bernie or Bust” supporters “ridiculous” and endorsed Hillary Clinton at the Democratic national Convention.
So Anonymous, or at least some faction of Anonymous, might be climbing aboard the Trump Train which is something to keep in mind now that Donald Trump is openly calling for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and dump the documents. Especially given the recent Anonymous civil war over whether to hack or back Trump:
“She also said that there were many Trump supporters within Anonymous and “those people will not want to see anything that brings him down.””
As we can see, Anonymous has its pro-Trump and anti-Trump contingents. And while there is a Bernie Sanders contingent too, it’s really not clear at all that anyone in Anonymous is backing Hillary. Maybe that changed now the Bernie endorsed Hillary and Trump is poised to destroy the world but there’s no indication so far.
So with pro-Trump DNC email dumps from Wikileaks and the ongoing hysterics over Hillary’s email server amazingly emerging as big issues in the 2016 race and Donald Trump now calling for more hacks and data dumps, it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s a pro-Trump/anti-Trump civil war of sorts gripping Anonymous and the results of that Anonymous civil war could potentially have a huge impact in determining the next US President.
Because the 2016 race apparently wasn’t f*#! up enough already.
Julian Assange made a bit of news during his interview on Bill Maher’s show on Friday: First, Assange reiterating that Wikileaks ‘saved Edward Snowden’s ass’ by escorting him from Hong Kong to Russia (contrary to Snowden’s claims that he was merely trapped in Moscow on route to Latin America). Second, and more topically, when asked why Wikleaks isn’t released anything on Trump like his still undisclosed tax returns, Assange replied “we’re working on it”:
““I know Edward is trying to get a pardon at the end of the Obama presidency,” Assange argued. “He’s playing that game, I understand.””
LOL. Well, that’s possible that Edward Snowden is angling for a pardon although it’s unclear what Snowden has been doing to try to get that pardon. But in making that comment, Assange does raise the obvious question of whether or not he’s trying to arrange for some sort of special favor from a future President Trump (this is ignoring Assange’s history of crypto-far-right politics and associates that would naturally align him with someone like Trump anyway).
Of course, if Wikileaks really was “working on” getting Trump’s tax returns hacked and leaked that would be a strong indication that Assange isn’t actually hoping for President Trump’s blessings. Fortunately, for Assange, Wikileaks isn’t actually working on leaking Trump’s taxes. It was all a joke:
“Assange has not followed up, but was expected to make a “major” announcement — presumably about Clinton — during a video interview to be broadcast at the Green Party Convention being held in Houston Saturday.”
Yep, it was all a joke. Haha. And then Assange speaks the next day at the Green Party convention, a party that is, at best, deeply confused about the winner-take-all nature of the US electoral system or, more likely, is basically dedicated to helping Republicans win in the hopes of creating such a massive GOP-led disaster that the public suddenly experiences a green epiphany.
So we went from Assange joking about releasing leaks on Trump, to Wikeleaks denying it, to Assange speaking at the Green Party convention in less than 24 hours. What’s next for Wikileaks and their campaign to make Trump president? Well, since he’s already proclaimed that he has a lot more information to release about Hillary, what’s next would appear to be something for Julian to decide, at a time of his choosing. A time that will no doubt be chosen to maximize the odds of a Trumpian presidency.
Now that we have Donald Trump once again hinting at violence as the solution to a Hillary Clinton presidency along with Roger Stone suggesting that the election will be rigged and the government invalid and Julian Assange making it clear that he wants to do whatever he can to ensure Hillary Clinton loses and has more documents that he’s sitting on for the right “October Surprise” moment to politically damage her, it’s probably worth noting that Roger Stone just claimed he’s in contact with Assange:
“I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
Well, since Wikileaks is now clearly working as the unofficial hacking squad for Trump campaign’s dirty tricks team it does kind of make sense that Assange would be in communication with the campaign’s unofficial dirty tricks organizer. It may be sleazy but it makes sense, especially if there’s a quid pro quo being arranged between the Trump campaign and Assange.
Plus, Roger is a master dirty trickster so he probably has a lot of useful advice for Assange’s planned October Surprise, which raises the question of what specifically Roger is recommending to Julian regarding the nature and timing of planned leaks. Is Wikileaks going to try and help Trump trigger a bloody ‘American Spring’ this Fall? Now that the Trump campaign’s central strategy appears to be preemptively delegitimizing a Clinton presidency and/or prepping the Trump base for acts of political violence it’s a pretty big question.
Glenn Greenwald is now playing the “Jew card” against Hillary and claiming she is insufficiently anti-semitic compared to... George W!
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/12/george-w-bush-v-clinton-led-democrats-on-palestinians-equality-and-the-israeli-occupation/
@CarobSteviaMatte–
I think Citizen Greenwald’s fascist credentials (his well-groomed, well-publicized “progressive” image notwithstanding) are legion (see the program description in the upper right-hand of this page and check out the program.) I would add, however, that being critical of Israeli policy vis a vis the settlements and Palestinians, in and of itself, by no means connotes anti-Semitism.
There was a recent full-page ad in the New York Times by numerous former chiefs of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, heads of both Shin-Bet (Israel’s military intelligence agency) and Mossad (Israel’s civilian foreign intelligence service) criticizing Israeli policy in this regard in strong terms.
http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2016/07/israeli-military-and-intelligence.html
One termed the failure to arrive at a two-state solution “an existential threat.”
There were five or six of EACH!
They could not be called anti-Semites.
I will be updating my coverage of the fascist element in Israel and the Zionist movement later in the year.
A key to understanding politics is “follow the money.”
In Israel, as in most places, there has been an enormous concentration of wealth.
Roughly 20 individuals and institutions control the country.
I think it is FUNDAMENTALLY important to grasp that the chief financier of Netanyahu is Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson is also the #1 individual campaign contributor to the GOP.
(The Koch brothers have an overall greater financial political war chest, but Adelson is the largest individual donor.)
One of the principal sources of Adelson’s largesse is a booming casino business in Macao, a former Portugese colony that was set aside in the 1944 Breton Woods Conference as, in effect, a gold bullion money-laundering epicenter.
This was at a time when Antonio Salazar was the fascist dictator of Portugal. https://spitfirelist.com/news/bormann-jews-in-ukraine-and-israel-gold-warriors-bubie/
It would be difficult to think of a better money-laundering vehicle than a bunch of casinos.
It is no accident that both the GOP and the Likud sent representatives to the congress of Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale in the late ’90s.
Ehud Barak–former Prime Minister and Defense Minister of Israel and its most decorated veteran–recently noted that “the seeds of fascism” have been sown in Israel. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2016/0523/Is-fascism-rising-in-Israel
The deputy chief of the Israel Defense Force said–on Holocaust Rembrance Day, no less–that what happened in Europe in the 1930s was happening in Israel now. Neither he nor Barak can be characterized as anti-Semites. http://www.timesofisrael.com/a‑holocaust-remembrance-day-to-remember/
The best thing for the Underground Reich is to maintain the situation as is, with young people increasingly susceptible to the “International Jewish Conspiracy” meme.
In 200 years, I’m afraid, Hitler’s birthday will be celebrated as an international holiday. It will be said that “Yes, Hitler went too far, but he was just trying to save Germany from experiencing the fate that befell the United States.”
This after the U.S. has been brought low by a series of WMD terrorist and/or cyber-terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda, ISIS or other Muslim Brotherhood linked and/or inspired terrorist groups. (Probably assisted by Nazi/White supremacist elements.) They will rationalize this in their PR comminiques after the acts have been committed as striking back at the international Zionist conspiracy.
Best,
Dave
Mr. Emory, if you haven’t already you may want to fire up a “Badjacketing Hillary Clinton” FTR series.
The anti-Putin/Russia propaganda campaign is hitting its stride with these Olympic games and giving plenty of malcontents enough material for their daily 2‑Minute Hate sessions. It appears Wacky-Leaks is a key component in this Putin-Hate casserole now being served on a television near you. Astro-turfing is trending up on FB as well in which supposed grassroots left-wing pages are touting this Trump/Putin allegiance in an attempt to manipulate opinion to being favorable for arming right-wing Ukrainian fascists. Hillary’s going to be forced into action on some phony Russian issue or will be forced away from making any attempts at reconciliation, much like what was done to the Obama administration.
Roger Stone appears to be expanding on the “it’s all rigged” meme that’s emerging as the Trump’s path to victory: In addition to in-person voter fraud (a GOP fixation which is almost non-existent in the US) and electronic voting machine voter fraud (a far more serious possibility), Stone is asserting the polls are all rigged against Trump too.
So you know all those polls that have been showing a growing gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump? Yeah, those are all rigged according to Roger so if Trump is behind big on election day and loses big, it’s because the polls and the votes were all rigged:
“We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls. The computerized voting machines can be hacked and rigged and after the experience of Bernie Sanders there is no reason to believe they won’t be. Don’t be taken in.”
So there we have it: According to Roger Stone, the polling industry and basically all electronic voting machines are rigged. And not just rigged but primarily rigged against Trump. And evidence for this includes...the GOP apparently rigging the Wisconsin votes including the Wisconsin GOP primary:
That’s some fascinating evidence for why all this rigging would be done in favor of Hillary Clinton. So is Scott Walker assumed to be rooting for the Clinton campaign at this point? That would appear to be one of Stone’s assumptions. But beyond that, Stone must be assuming that almost all GOP governors are planning on rigging their state elections against Trump since, as he suggested, its the party in control of each state that ultimately controls the electronic voting machines and their code:
Now, if there is some sort of organized vote rigging in a state it’s not unreasonable to assume that the party in control of the state government is going to be one doing the rigging. But when you consider that the GOP has a systematic advantage in winning state governments (due to the overwhelming number of states that elect their governors in off-year elections) and 70 percent of state legislatures, 60 percent of governors, and 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state are controlled by the GOP, by Roger Stone’s own logic the campaign that should be freaking out about electronic voting machine fraud is the Clinton campaign unless Stone is suggesting that GOP governors like Kasich are secretly going to try to rig the vote for Clinton, it would seem that the campaign that should be seriously concerned about the GOP rigging the vote in states like Ohio is the Clinton campaign. Which is probably a reasonable Clinton campaign concern. Especially now that Roger Stone is not simply laying the groundwork for trying to delegitimize a Clinton victory by declaring polls and electronic voting machines all rigged, he’s also laying the groundwork for the GOP to steal the election even if Trump is way down in the polls on election day.
How so? Well, recall the mystery following the 2012 election when someone from Anonymous claimed to have witness and thwarted an attempted GOP vote-rigging scheme. Well, whether or not that was true, there’s nothing stopping a pro-Trump Anonymous faction from declaring the same thing this year as cover for a real pro-Trump vote-rigging scheme. Think about it: Let’s assume the GOP just goes all out and rigs the vote (electronically and via all its other voter-suppression techniques) enough to give Trump a tight victory despite polls showing Hillary with a substantial lead. Well, thanks to Stone’s “it’s all rigged” campaign, when everyone is scratching their head trying to figure out Trump’s incredible come from behind victory when all the polls showed him way behind, Roger Stone will be there saying “hey, I’ve told you guys all along that those polls were all rigged and now our Anonymous friends stopped the planned vote rigging too. We won, losers!” Who knows, maybe Julian Assange will join in the fun.
And while that kind of outcome might not pass muster with most of the country and would probably lead to a major challenge to the election result, it could be enough to satisfy the GOP base. And at that point, it’s presumably back to Stone’s Plan B (where “B” is for “Bloodbath”) in the event of any election result challenges, but Plan B from the much more advantageous position of having allegedly won.
So that’s where are. The campaign out to burn down society has declared that nothing is real. Nothing except the metaphysical certainty that Donald Trump can’t lose.
Here is an alternative view to the right wing attacks on Hillary Clinton that gets minimal media attention:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/08/23/the-latest-clinton-email-story-just-isnt-a-scandal/?utm_term=.2c0409e7852b
The latest Clinton email story just isn’t a scandal
There’s a new round of “revelations” concerning Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department today, and since it involves some people sending emails to other people, it gets wrapped up with that other story about Clinton. Are you ready for the shocking news, the scandalous details, the mind-blowing malfeasance? Well hold on to your hat, because here it is:
When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, many people wanted to speak with her.
Astonishing, I know.
Here’s the truth: every development in any story having to do with anything involving email and Hillary Clinton is going to get trumpeted on the front page as though it were scandalous, no matter what the substance of it actually is. I’ll discuss some reasons why in a moment, but we could have no better evidence than the treatment of this particular story.
Let’s briefly summarize what’s so earth-shaking that it gets front-page treatment on both the New York Times and the Washington Post today, not to mention untold hours of breathless cable news discussion. There are actually two stories in one.
The first is that a federal judge has ordered the State Department to speed up its review of approximately 15,000 previously undisclosed emails that the FBI retrieved off of Clinton’s server. We have no idea what’s in them. It could be something horrifying, or it could be utterly banal. My money’s on the latter, but it’ll be a while before we know.
The second story is that Judicial Watch, an organization that has been pursuing Clinton for many years, has released a trove of emails it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, emails that supposedly show how donors to the Clinton Foundation got special access, and presumably special favors, from Clinton while she was at State.
The only problem is that the emails in question reveal nothing of the sort. What they actually reveal is that a few foundation donors wanted access, but didn’t actually get it.
Let’s look at that story. It mentions three specific requests sent to Clinton aide Huma Abedin by Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, on behalf of people who had contributed to the Foundation:
A sports executive who had donated to the foundation wanted to arrange for a visa for a British soccer player to visit the United States; he was having trouble getting one because of a criminal conviction. Abedin said she’d look into it, but there’s no evidence she did anything and the player didn’t get his visa.
Bono, who had donated to the foundation, wanted to have some kind of arrangement whereby upcoming U2 concerts would be broadcast to the International Space Station. Abedin was puzzled by this request, and nothing was ever done about it.
The Crown Prince of Bahrain, who had donated to the foundation, wanted to meet with Clinton on a visit to Washington. Abedin responded to Band that the Bahrainis had already made that request through normal diplomatic channels. The two did end up meeting.
And that’s it. If there were anything more scandalous there, have no doubt that Judicial Watch would have brought it to reporters’ eager attention. So: Nobody got special favors and nobody got “access,” except for the second-highest-ranking official of an important U.S. ally in the Middle East (Bahrain is, among other things, the site of an American naval base that is home to the 5th Fleet and the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command). While Bahrain has donated money to the Clinton Foundation to fund a scholarship program that the Foundation administers, it’s safe to say that the Crown Prince meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State is not an unusual occurrence.
Here I’ll insert my usual caveat, which is that Clinton was wrong to use a private system for email while she was at the State Department. Among other things, it was a violation of departmental policy. It will also be remembered as one of the most colossal political screw-ups in modern times. In an effort to save herself the hassle of endless FOIA requests and lawsuits from the likes of Judicial Watch (I don’t believe her assertion that she wanted to use a private system for the sake of convenience), she created monumental political trouble for herself, to the point that it’s the one thing that might keep her from winning the White House.
But that doesn’t mean that any story touching on her emails deserves screaming headlines and dark insinuations, and this one certainly doesn’t. So why isn’t it on page A14 where it belongs? The most important reason is the oldest one: the “Clinton Rules,” which state that any allegation about Bill and/or Hillary Clinton, no matter how outlandish and no matter how thin the evidence for it, should be treated as serious and worthy of extended attention and unrestrained speculation. In 2016, that’s even more true for anything involving anybody’s emails.
And it means that the most common habits and occurrences will often be cast in sinister terms, even when there’s nothing out of the ordinary about them. Do powerful people, organizations, and countries donate money to the Clinton Foundation so they can rub shoulders with Bill Clinton? You bet they do. That’s the whole model: exploit Clinton’s celebrity to raise money which can then be used to make progress on important issues like climate change and global health. It’s also the model every celebrity uses when they try to raise money for their pet causes, whether it’s George Clooney or Peyton Manning or even Donald Trump.
Likewise, a healthy portion of Huma Abedin’s job as Clinton’s closest aide seems to have consisted of fielding requests from people who wanted to get her boss’s time and attention. That’s the way it is with many powerful people, in politics or any other realm. If we were able to see all the emails from the office of any senator, Democrat or Republican, we’d see the same thing: a steady stream of people asking, on their own behalf or someone else’s, for the senator’s time. Donors, businesspeople, advocates, constituents, they all want to talk to the person whose picture is on all the walls.
If we find cases where someone actually received some favor or consideration they didn’t deserve, then depending on the details it might actually be scandalous. But an email discussion of Bono’s wacky idea to send U2 concerts to the International Space Station is not a scandal.
With the US media establishment clearly intent on doing whatever it can to help Donald Trump become president by fixating on Rorschach ‘scandals’ like Hillary Clinton’s email server or who made donations to the Clinton Foundation, it’s worth noting that it was just reported that one of the two major candidates was forced to pay a $2,500 IRS penalty over a political contribution made by their charitable foundation over a donation that foundation made to a government official who was investigating this candidate over corruption and fraud charges. It’s also worth noting that there hasn’t actually been much reporting on this report mostly likely because it’s about Donald Trump:
“The sequence began when Bondi herself solicited a donation from Trump. That solicitation was reported this year by the Associated Press. That request came as Bondi was considering allegations that Trump University — a real estate seminar business — had defrauded customers in Florida.”
Yes, this comedy of “errors” all started after Florida’s Attorney General solicited Donald Trump for a donation as she was considering fraud allegations against him. A comedy of errors that appears to involve both making the illegal donation and then lying about it to the IRS:
And after all that, he ends up only paying only a $2,500 fine.
So, given the fact that the press has apparently already decided that, despite any evidence, the Clinton Foundation is some sort of giant money-laundering front for the purpose of hiding all the money the Clintons get from dictators around the world to finance her goal of corrupting everything and creating a global dictatorship intent on killing freedom everywhere, one might expect that there would be all sorts of attention to this story about Trump actually getting caught making “pay for play” donations to an Attorney General who was investigating him over fraud allegations and then lying about it to the IRS. How could there not be? If Hillary Clinton gave a white nationalist rant about how Latinos are a threat to democracy, that would be pretty big news, right? And yet somehow Trump getting caught doing exactly the kind of thing the press is obsessed with suggesting that Hillary might be doing is a total none-story. Again! Don’t forget that this isn’t the first time there’s been reporting on this topic that made it very clear that Trump was buying off Florida’s Republican Attorney General. It’s only popped up again because the IRS fine wasn’t known before.
So somehow what should be a blockbuster story about Donald Trump engaging in exactly the kind of behavior the press is obsessed with associating with Hillary Clinton is getting basically ignored again. Just a couple months before the election. It’s an amazingly deranged situation:
“I should be clear here that while the Times is possibly the worst offender because of the scale of the failure and the influence the Times exerts far beyond its own pages, it’s far from alone. They’re just the tip of the spear of the generalized failure to apply even a small fraction of the scrutiny to Trump that they have to the Clintons or to make an honest evaluation of the fact that the story they were sold by various right wing groups — critical ones funded by none other than Breitbart’s Steve Bannon (now Trump’s campaign manager) — simply didn’t pan out.”
Part of what’s so sad about all this is that the bizarre decisions of the mainstream media to basically ignore Trump’s established patterns of criminality — because that would be a ‘dog bites man’ story — and instead hyperfocus on every last speculative allegation against Hillary Clinton, is both the average public and the elites are simultaneously using Hillary Clinton as sort of Wickerwoman for the purpose of purification through ritual immolation: There seems to be this sentiment that if the public rejects Hillary (by voting third-party or voting for Trump), they have effectively rejected that entire power establishment that Hillary has come to represent in the minds of so many voters. Hillary is the pro-elites/pro-super-rich/pro-oligarch “Establishment”. She is its avatar in the minds of a large swathe of voters. And if she loses in November, the American “Establishment” loses. At least the perception held by a number of voter. At the same time, the mainstream press and right-wing press — which is overwhelming owned by the super-rich and largely pushes a pro-super-rich agenda — has been engaging in full-throated Clinton Derangement Syndrome for years, where stories about alleged and/or suspected corruption (i.e. right-wing rumor mongering) are breathlessly covered while the far more extensive, and documented, stories about rampant systemic corruption (like almost everything the GOP does these days) gets ignored. By portraying Hillary as the Witch Queen of the American Establishment, the rabble gets a fake purging of the Establishment and the Establishment gets a real purging of any meaningful discussion about the role it’s played in creating a government loathed by so much of the public.
In a way, this whole farce demonstrates one of the most important and saddest facts of the current American situation: while the US public is, rightly, extremely distressed about how the US established has behaved and basically captured the country over the last 40 years or so, it’s also very clear that the US public basically has no meaningful idea of who the “Establishment” is and how it operates. There’s no recognition of the very real Establishment factionalism and the reality that the Clintons usually been on the genuinely populist reformist side of the Establishment which is why she is so hated by the far more powerful pro-oligarchy side of the Establishment. When the Clintons have failed as leaders (like agreeing to overturn Glass-Steagall), it’s almost always been when they agreed to the demands of the dominant right-wing pro-oligarchy Establishment faction, the same faction that’s been trying to destroy the Clintons for decades. In other words, their the Clintons’ biggest failings have occurred when they compromised with their biggest enemies — the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, so to speak — because the “vast right-wing conspiracy” is the biggest enemies of the American public too. But when the American public kept voting for Republican presidents in the 80’s and a Republican Congress in the 90’s, it’s not like the Clintons had that much of a choice. Somehow the profound role the GOP played (and the public who kept voting Republicans into power) in basically forcing the Clintons to compromise with “the vast right-wing conspiracy” gets completely forgotten. Clinton Derangement Syndrome basically lets the Establishment media and power structure avoid having to look at itself in the mirror. It’s a remind that “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” is as much like Alzheimer’s as it is Schizophrenia.
Beyond that, what this whole situation highlights is the reality that the “Reagan Revolution” and its various remanifestations over the last 40 years — the assault on any government programs helping the non-rich and the massive shift of wealth to the upper 0.01% — has basically been one big intra-Establishment fight between the center left New Deal faction of the Establishment and the far-right Oligarchs-for-Oligarchs-Only faction of the Establishment. And the neo-feudal oligarchs won! A while ago. The decades of Clinton Derangement Syndrome is both a symptom of, and cause for, the wild success of the far-right Establishment faction victory.
So now, after witnessing both the good and the bad the Clintons for decades, we have an opportunity to use Hillary’s presidential run as an excuse for reexaming the past quarter of a century of American politics and power. Not just the role the Clintons have played as a power couple in shaping American policy but also the role played by that vast network of millionaires and billionaires, think-tanks, armies of lobbyists, and the strong rightward lurch of the American government since Ronald Reagan declared government the enemy of the public. We could examine where the Clintons opposed that vast right-wing power establishment and where they worked with them. And we could use that analysis to finally break down the meme that “both parties are in a secret cabal to work together to destroy the Republic (except Donald Trump)” and replace it with the recognition that we have a non-homogeneous Establishment prone to factionalism, understanding that factionalism is critical to understanding both the Clintons’ legacy and how our country works in general and that the New Deal faction is basically the only one that has a meaningful shot of “fixing” things for the American public without first burning the entire country down. We could also meaningfully examine where a far-right “blood and soil” race-baiter like Donald Trump fits into this non-homogeneous Establishment and what that tells us about the forces behind him. We could use Hillary Clinton’s run as a great excuse to do that which the “vast right-wing conspiracy” hates seeing the most: learn about and meaningfully analyze how our government works behind these sad and superficial meme pumped out by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and dutifully repeated by its useful idiots in the mainstream press.
We could do all that. Or we could feverishly speculate about what might have been in Hillary’s emails.
September 5, 2016 The Washington Post: Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
https://www.washingtonpost. com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/ 09/05/trumps-history-of- corruption-is-mind-boggling- so-why-is-clinton-supposedly- the-corrupt-one/?utm_term=. e96c3ed5c0ef
September 9, 2016 Dailey Mail (UK) article titled — Clinton camp raises money off Matt Lauer ‘failure’ to challenge Trump
The article states “Instead of stopping Trump in his tracks during the session at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan, Lauer accepted his answer and immediately moved onto the next question — even though Clinton had told him during her interview beforehand that Trump had backed the war.”
NOTE: The article explains Hillary’s position on classified. If the header had classified she did not open it. Implicitly, if a trailing e‑mail had a classification she could not see it before opening it.
http://dailym.ai/2cmw40q
Here’s a reminder that there’s a decent chance the contemporary GOP isn’t planning on accepting a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court. Ever again:
““This is the strongest argument I can make” for Pat Toomey’s re-election, McCain said, and that is “so we can make sure there is not three places on the United States Supreme Court that will change this country for decades.””
Yes, John McCain’s pledge that the GOP would block ALL Supreme Court nominees from Hillary Clinton was made as part of a campaign pitch to give fellow GOP Senator Pat Toomey a boost in the polls. As McCain put, that pledge was the strongest argument he could make for Toomey’s re-election. And presumably McCain’s own re-election. So rigging the Supreme Court by permanently blocking Democratic nominees is apparently one of the pledges Republicans Senators are now openly using to appeal to voters. Voters who are probably motivated by a sense that ‘Washington doesn’t work’ and want to elect politicians who will ‘blow things up’ to fix it. Deeply confused voters.
So, as we can see, the GOP’s infamous 2009 GOP’s ‘Taliban mode’ proclamation is repeating itself a little early this election cycle...because it’s now part of the election season sales pitch.
Check out FBI director James Comey’s latest gift to the Trump campaign: In an investigation unrelated to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server — specifically, the investigation of Anthony Weiner, ex-husband of Hillary’s long-time top aide Human Abedin — the FBI come across a number of emails from Clinton that they previously hadn’t reviewed in their investigation of her server. So Comey decided that not only should the FBI examine those emails in relation to the previously concluded email server investigation to see if there are any classified emails or something in there. Comey also decided to inform Congress about this development. So, despite there being no indication that the FBI has actually discovered any classified information in these emails, the media is very predictably inundated with stories about how the FBI just reopened the email server investigation:
“Comey’s announcement appears to restart the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s server, which previously ended in July with no charges. The explosive announcement, coming less than two weeks before the presidential election, could reshape a campaign that Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has been leading in public polls.”
So that’s one more “October Surprise” of sorts. Or rather, one more “October ‘Surprise’ “.
@Pterrafractyl–
Don’t forget that Comey was a Mitt Romney supporter and got his appointment through “derivatives” of the “Conga Line Ops” I talked about in FTR #885.
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-885-what-the-hell-does-dave-emory-mean-by-the-earth-island-boogie-part-2-the-conga-line-ops/
Comey was seen as acceptable to the obstructionist GOP, due to his actions rebuffing Ashcroft on wiretapping.
That in the wake of Eddie the Friendly Spook’s “op.”
Interesting, is it not, that Comey doesn’t seem compelled to go after all the paramilitary right-wingers threatening intimidation and/or violence during the election and/or during its aftermath?
Also: Read “The Making of Donald Trump” by David Cay Johnston.
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Donald-Trump-David-Johnston/dp/1612196322
Trump is so crooked, as the late Hunter S. Thompson might have said, that he “has to screw his pants on in the morning.”
Why isn’t Comey going after him?
Best,
Dave
What a god damn mess days before the election! Two words keep
rolling around my brain. “Cults” and “spies”!
In and of itself the Trump phenomenon is a toxic mix of Jonestown, the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Socialist Party.
But the Anthony Wiener-Huma Abedin marriage resembles a marriage of convenience between two intelligence networks, neither of them democratic. Reactionary publications like Breitbart make the point that Abedin’s mother is an advocate of sharia law. And Weiner himself seems like a mind-controlled hand grenade lobbed into the Democratic party.
At politico.com Garrett M. Graf referred to James Comey’s former
employer “Bridgewater — whose corporate culture of high-achieving
intellectuals resembles a moneyed management cult that shares more
in common with the 1970s personal-improvement fad est than it does
with a typical Wall Street firm.”
As Dave often says “spies rhymes with lies.”
Cults and spies, what a god damn mess!
@Dave: Jane Meyer has a piece in the New Yorker that ads some rather explosive context not just to the vague nature of Comey’s letter to Congress but also the decision to write the letter at all: The Department of Justice, and specifically Attorney General Loretta Lynch, preferred that Comey not release that information, in keeping with the Department of Justice’s long-standing policies regarding these kinds of politically toxic disclosures right before an election, but Comey did it anyway:
“On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e‑mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise.”
Yes, amazingly, given the biggest legal questions raised by this entire situation are legal questions about the Director of the FBI. And keep in mind that there are reports that ALL of the newly discovered emails might be duplicates of emails that the FBI has already looked at, which means this very vague disclosure, all the very predictable political fallout that would follow, may have been based on information that was so preliminary the FBI didn’t even know if it had new emails on its hands. It’s another day for our 2016 bizarro election, albeit an especially bizarre bizarro day.
And with 10 days to go in the election, it’s clear that this issue is going to be evolving over the coming days as we learn more about how much, or how little, the FBI knew about the new emails it was using as a basis for creating a major political event. And how much this decision may have violated DOJ policy. But as Josh Marshall notes, one of the major factors influencing Comey’s decision is probably a “cover you ass” reflex instilled in Comey after an endless barrage of criticisms from the GOP over his decision not to prosecute Hillary over the email server back in July. But as Marshall also notes, he’s hearing unconfirmed reports that, if confirmed, would be rather substantial given appearance that Comey was operation outside the bounds of DOJ policy: Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee who has already declared that the GOP has years of investigations lined up for Hillary Clinton if she wins, may have gotten wind of this new email cache and pressured Comey write the letter:
“I put myself largely in camp one. But I think both sides have decent arguments on their side. One point that seems clear to me from the totality of what we’ve seen is that Comey is more sensitive to avoiding present or future criticism than addressing the equities behind the DOJ and FBI protocols that counsel against what he did. He’s been under non-stop attack — ref-playing — from congressional Republicans for over three months. I’ve heard unconfirmed reports that Rep. Chaffetz (R‑UT) may have gotten wind of this new email cache and pressured Comey write the letter. Whether or not that is true, the broader point remains. Comey felt he would face Republican criticism either now or in the future if he didn’t send this letter.”
Score one more for the vast right-wing conspiracy, whether or not the unconfirmed report about Chaffetz specifically influencing Comey to go against DOJ policy gets confirmed. Still, it’s going to be very interesting to see if it does get confirmed. Talk about trying to rig the election.
One of the questions raised by James Comey’s bombshell letter to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election is just how long it would have taken for the FBI to determine whether or not these were actually new emails or copies of emails they already reviewed. And here’s an answer: Probably a few days at most using modern legal data-mining technology:
“Put simply, if the FBI starts work on this on Monday, they should be able to have a confident sense of what they have in hand by COB Friday. And, especially if they were to put a few extra people on the project, probably several days sooner.”
Well, while the decision to write this letter to Congress might have been a disaster, at least it sounds like we might get a clarifying answer from the FBI in a few days as to whether they actually found any new emails. Except, according to Michael Isikoff’s sources, the FBI hasn’t even received a warrant yet;
“That Comey and other senior FBI officials were not aware of what was in the emails — and whether they contained any material the FBI had not already obtained — is important because Donald Trump’s campaign and Republicans in Congress have suggested that the FBI director would not have written his letter unless he had been made aware of significant new emails that might justify reopening the investigation into the Clinton server.”
Yeah, the fact that the FBI apparently hasn’t reviewed the emails at all or even getting a warrant yet seems like maybe something that could have been included in that letter to Congress. Somehow that detail got left out.
So we’ll see as this unfolds. But note the one concern that Comey may have had that really could have been outside his control and potentially panicked him into prematurely writing this email: concern that someone, presumably someone in the FBI, was going to leak it to Congress anyway and create an even bigger scandal:
Who knows if that’s really what motivated Comey or it was just a convenient excuse, although it’s not implausible that it was factor. It’s a reminder that the vast right-wing conspiracy is, you know, pretty vast.
A number of news outlets including CNN and NBC are reporting that John Podesta’s Gmail account
may have been hacked as the result of a phishing expedition from an IP address in Dnepropetrovsk
Ukraine. How interesting! Could it be that the Maidan coup which thrust Nazi parties Svoboda and
Right Sector into power in Kiev has come to roost in the US presidential election, the latest incarnation
of the Conga- line Ops? From the standpoint of dark humour the hue of Donald Trump’s spray-on tan
makes him a good figurehead for a domestic Orange Revolution in the US, but seriously has the Arab Spring
morphed into an American Fall?
It’s looking more and more like a combination of right-wing FBI agents threatening to leak the played a significant role in effectively forcing FBI Director James Comey’s hand in releasing information about the emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Whether or not Comey himself is one of those right-wing FBI agents or merely caved to those pressures is unclear, but as Josh Marshall points out, at this point it’s beside the point:
“I may not be convinced of malice on Comey’s part. But it seems extremely likely — indeed, we all but know it based on information surfaced over the last forty-eight hours — that he is being played by people who are acting with malice. Or, perhaps more damning, he is unwilling to do the right thing because it could led to criticism from Republicans. I’ve said it several times: that self-protection seems to be governing his actions.”
Republican threats and bullying may have caused the head of the FBI to potentially break the law. Wow. And some of that bullying may have come for people work under Comey. Double wow:
So rogue agents who refuse to take “you have no case” as an answer may have just effectively forced the FBI director to preemptively leak to the GOP by making it obvious that they would leak it themselves to the GOP even close to the election, creating a potentially bigger scandal. Disturbing, yes. But also keep in mind that it’s only one explanation and one of the more charitable possible explanations at that. And it’s a explanation that still leaves open the question of whether or not it was fears of future Republican bullying that may have been motivating Comey or bullying that started before Comey informed Congress after Congressman Chaffetz was informed of the newly discovered emails by those same rogue agents:
“Anyhow, back to Friday. So now there is speculation that maybe, possibly, probably, Chaffetz got wind of these emails and put pressure on Comey to release some late October bombshell. Hence his non-endorsement support. Oh, and there is the whole, tweeting this out before the Dems even saw the letter”
That’s right, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, who suddenly reversed is prior disavowals of Trump on Wednesday night, then suddenly tweets that the FBI was going to ‘reopen’ the email investigation a half hour before the Democrats even saw Comey’s letter. It’s quite a mystery. Perhaps even the kind of mystery the FBI should be investiga...oh wait, never mind.
Uhhhh...so either one of the FBI’s twitter accounts got hacked and they don’t want to admit it, or someone at the FBI just reopened a dormant “FBI Records Vault” twitter account over the last two days to issue a bunch of tweets clearly intended to be embarrassing for the Clinton campaign:
“...The only item tweeted by the F.B.I. Records account related to the Republican’s campaign is a reference to Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump’s father, whom the tweet refers to as “a real estate developer and philanthropist.””
Yes, right around the same time people started wondering if the reason James Comey threw Hillary’s email server investigation right into the middle of the campaign, someone at the FBI decides to throw a whole bunch of other old Clinton investigations into the campaign. Plus a tweet that describes Fred Trump as a philanthropist. Just to be extra subtle.
Also note regarding the tweet about Marc Rich that James Comey oversaw Rich’s prosecution from 1987–1993 and took over the investigation of Bill Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon in 2002. So it sounds like a faction of the FBI agents has decided to join the Team Trump Troll Squad a week before the election. It raises the question of whether or not these agents are driven more by a case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome or are just really intense Trump fans. It’s probably a bit of both.
We’re learning more about the timeline and apparent motives for James Comey’s disclosure of the newly found emails to Congress 11 days before the election. First, it sounds like Comey first learned about the existence of the emails two weeks earlier when he asked the agents to analyze what they could without a warrant (metadata, etc) in order to see if there was cause for obtaining a warrant. So this issue wasn’t something that suddenly fell in Comey’s lap the day before he informed Congress. We also are getting further confirmation that Comey and the other senior FBI officials were convinced that it would be impossible to secretly carry on with the investigation without it leaking given the political nature of the whole situation:
““It could not be done in secret,” an official with knowledge of the investigation said. “It’s a volatile subject and a major topic in the presidential campaign.””
So the senior FBI officials are confident that the agency is incapable of keeping secrets about investigations that could swing an election? Why exactly isn’t this wildly scandalous?
And note that when you read:
keep in mind that one of biggest criticisms of Comey’s letter to Congress wasn’t that it said more than what his investigators knew but that it didn’t make it clear how little investigators knew, like where or not there were any new emails discovered at all.
Also note that when you read:
keep in mind that that concern over keeping Congress informed wouldn’t really be concern if it wasn’t for the concerns over rogue FBI agent leaks about the investigation. Because one of the reasons legal observers are shocked at what Comey did is because it’s generally recognized that the FBI shouldn’t have done what it did so close to election even if the FBI was really was reopening the investigation. Being terrified of how Congress would react after the election isn’t a valid excuse.
Ironically, however, if the motive for Comey to make this disclosure so close to an election really was because he was simply terrified of the GOP’s response once they found out after the election, that could actually save him from having violated the Hatch Act:
“Then again, there is that little word in Painter’s argument that troubles me: “…no other good reason.” Comey’s best defense to a Hatch violation might be that his underlying reasoning was anything other than tipping the election scales; the reason would just have to exist, but it wouldn’t necessarily have to be good. Pandora opened her box not for a good reason – but for a really, really lousy one – and she’s the poster child for bringing about unintended results. Comey’s grasping for self-preservation could actually work to his advantage in the long run. He’d just need to making a convincing case for some non-Trump reason behind his letter to Congress.”
Yes, as long as James Comey can make the case that he was basically scared of the Republicans and not working for them, he can argue that he technically didn’t violate the Hatch Act. The law is fun like that sometimes. So the more the GOP scares Comey between now and the election, or behaves in a way that could be reasonably perceived as likely to have scared Comey, the easier it will be for Comey to make another horribly-timed disclosure. And look at that, House Speaker Paul Ryan is urging Comey to release any “smoking guns” ASAP while empathizing with Comey’s fear of how the GOP would have responded after the election if he hadn’t made the initial disclosure:
“Yeah, look, I understand why he did what he did because imagine if he didn’t and we found out after the fact that he was sitting on this before the election. So I clearly understand why he did what he did”.
Yes, imagine what would have happened if the GOP found out Comey hadn’t improperly disclosed the newly discovered emails. And if you’re James Comey, keep imagining what the GOP would have done and then get really scared and filled with a sense of self-preservation. And then just do whatever your fear tells you to do! It’s totally legal-ish at that point.
Oh what a shocker: It turns out the FBI field agents who have been aggressively pushing the FBI to investigate the Clinton Foundation we’re basing their suspicions on “Clinton Cash”, the discredited book written by Breitbart’s editor-at-large:
“It is not new, of course, for right-wing demagogues to use the FBI to chase down false and inflammatory garbage. But even with its history, one of the ways the bureau maintains legitimacy as an institution is by giving the appearance of a nonpartisan actor. If its agents are so determined to base investigations on right-wing con jobs that their bosses do have to rein them in, then it will lose whatever moral authority it wants to claim.”
LOL! An investigation relying primary on “Clinton Cash”. That’s just sad. Maybe the FBI really was trying to protect Hillary initially by assigning implausibly incompetent agents to investigate her. Although, in the agents’ defense, maybe Hillary is so corrupt that her corruption corrupted the minds of the law enforcement agents investigating her and now they can’t even identify blatant investigative trash like “Clinton Cash”. That’s how cunningly corrupt she is: If you investigate her you go so insane that you lose credibility. Move over C’Thulhu!
Either way, it’s very possible that the FBI’s meddling in this campaign has already damaged its credibility for any future FBI investigations that these agents will no doubt be clamoring to do if she wins. And that makes for a rather explosive dynamic if Hillary wins, because it appears that her investigator-mind-corrupting powers have clearly been infecting the FBI for years and now it’s an epidemic:
“The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.””
While the right-wing leanings of the FBI aren’t anything new, if it’s really true that a large swath of the FBI personnel views Hillary as “the antichrist personified”, it raises a very serious question: If the nation’s highest law enforcement agency is heavily staffed with people gullible enough to fall for the right-wing’s anti-Clinton noise machine — a noise machine that’s designed to trick people who are vulnerable to cheap emotional manipulation and junk logic — doesn’t that mean the FBI is being dangerously understaffed by reasonable people who can’t be easily tricked by joke propaganda? It’s one thing to lean conservative politically and a very different thing to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for something like “Clinton Cash”. You shouldn’t have to be a Hillary voter to recognize that books like that are garbage, especially if you work for the FBI. The FBI has serious work that needs to be done. The kind of serious work that isn’t compatible with profound gullibility. So what are the implications of this?
Here’s a reminder that the GOP isn’t even bothering to pretend anymore that it will allow the government to function if a Democrat wins the White House:
“What is interesting to me is that if you look at the discussions in the 1860s, no one was saying what we are trying to do is snub the other party’s president…What is new to me is that they are being pretty open.”
That’s right, a growing number of GOPers, including the supposed ‘adults’ still left in the party like John McCain, have already declared that they’re not going to even consider allowing Hillary Clinton to appoint a Supreme Court nominee. And this is before she even appoints a nominee for the currently open spot. The party is just unilaterally deciding that maybe we can just let the Supreme shrink indefinitely…unless a GOPer wins, of course. At that point it will only be prudent to appoint all of the president’s nominees because...something. There’s presumably going to be something resembling an argument for why this is ok that they’ll roll out eventually.
And if this seems like it’s just election year bluster, if so, it’s bluster that John McCain just doubled-down on:
“If refusing to confirm nominees of different ideological beliefs became normal, there would be long stretches of open seats almost any time one party controlled the White House and the other controlled the Senate. This would potentially allow the court to shrink and create many more tie votes – which, as The Huffington Post’s Cristian Farias has noted, could leave legal disputes between lower federal courts unresolved.”
Well, at least Justice Ginsberg shows no signs of planning on retiring any time soon, which is pretty much the only positive aspect of this whole situation. And let’s not forget that Trumps ‘Second Amendment people’ assassination threat against Hillary Clinton was framed as a way of preventing her from nominee Supreme Court justices not beholden to the NRA. And it’s hard to see how the GOP’s stance isn’t going to transfer Trump’s ‘Second Amendment people’ death threats to the justices themselves (it’ll just be more seats for President Alex Jones to fill some time in the next decade). It’s the kind of context that raises a particularly dark question: is this situation more an act of GOP sedition or GOP insurrection? It’s the kind of question where the specific answer isn’t nearly as important as the fact we have to ask it at all. But here we are!
As we approach the end of a presidential campaign season that’s been fixated on synthesizing decades of right-wing Clinton smears into a general thesis that Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt and crooked politician ever, it is perhaps fitting that in the final days of this race the big questions are now about whether or not corrupt FBI agents are illegally colluding with the Trump campaign to slander Hillary at the last minute:
“Does leaking unflattering information about Hillary Clinton to one of Donald Trump’s top advisers count as working in concert with a campaign and/or advancing a partisan activity? It would seem that Rudy Giuliani understands that that might be the case, because when he went on Fox on Friday he denied that he’s in touch with current agents. “I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents,” he claimed, despite having attested at least twice in recent months to having done so.”
Oh look at that. After twice attesting that he’s been in contact with FBI agent now Giuliani is denying that he’s in touch with any current FBI agents. Perhaps it dawned on him that that have tne Trump team in direct contact with FBI agents involved with Clinton investigations has the appearance of this campaign seasons’s magic word: corruption! Specifically, corruption designed to manipulate voters. It’s not a great look.
And this is after Giuliani demonstrates some sort of FBI clairvoyance, bragging two days before James Comey’s shocking letter to Congress that “some pretty big surprises” are coming...
What a fun mystery. And what a ironically thematically appropriate mystery. But the mystery doesn’t end there. Because not only did Giuliani claim that he was getting his information from former, not current, FBI agents during that Fox News interview on Friday morning. Later in the day, during an interview on on CNN, Giuliani simultaneously claimed that these former FBI agents he’s spoken to were not the source of his knowledge about this internal FBI turmoil but also that he’s spoken with these former FBI agents about the turmoil in the FBI.
So either Giuliani is operating in two parallel universes at once, or he’s not going a very good job of covering the tracks that lead the Trump campaign straight back to the FBI:
“No, I’ve spoken to no current FBI agents, gosh, in the last eight months, nine months, ten months, certainly not about this,” he said. A few seconds later, he continued, “So, I’ve had lots of conversations with them and they have told me a lot about the — I guess the disagreement between the Justice Department on the one hand and the FBI on the other. But it all comes from former FBI agents and it’s all hearsay.”
So it sounds like the story Giuliani is shambling towards is that he is indeed in contact with former FBI agents who are happy to tell him about all the disgruntlement among right-wing FBI agents over the lack of an indictment of Hillary Clinton, but these same former FBI agents who have knowledge of this turmoil were not at all telling him about the specific turmoil involving these same disgruntled agents who were trying to get James Comey to investigate the Clinton-related emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. And as far as how Giuliani mysteriously knew about something “pretty big” coming just two days before Comey’s announcement and why it was that Giuliani claimed on Fox News earlier Friday that ‘Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it.’, Giuliani now claims he knew nothing about Comey’s announcement and instead what he knew about was a “revolution” brewing in the FBI. Also, his main source for learning about this FBI internal turmoil were “public sources” and “individuals” and not former FBI agents. That’s apparently his current claim:
Aha, so Giuliani has an inside track to the FBI, but only regarding the general “revolution” that’s been brewing by agents intent on taking down Hillary. But he had no specific knowledge about the actual anti-Hillary plots. Also, when he predicted two days before Comey’s announcement that some pretty big surprises were coming he was apparently basing that solely on his general knowledge of the FBI turmoil. And was also genuinely surprised when Comey sent his now notorious letter to Congress that put Trump back into the presidential race. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it! For the moment, at least.
So, given all that, it’s worth noting that the Daily Beast has a recent story up detailing the deep, ongoing ties between the FBI’s New York office and Rudy Giuliani via Giuliani’s former law firm, Bracewell Giuliani, which has long been the general counsel of the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), a group started out of the New York office. The article also covers James Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI’s New York office, the active pro-Trump role he’s playing in the campaign and the interview Kallstrom did on Fox where he talked about his discussions with the FBI agents in that office investigating Hillary which he also denied after the Comey letter came out). Oh, and the article also notes that Giuliani claimed that he’s spoken to “a few active agents” about the “revolution” brewing in the FBI
“Hours after Comey’s letter about the renewed probe was leaked on Friday, Giuliani went on a radio show and attributed the director’s surprise action to “the pressure of a group of FBI agents who don’t look at it politically.” “The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity,” said Giuliani. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents.” Along with Giuliani’s other connections to New York FBI agents, his former law firm, then called Bracewell Giuliani, has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group, born in the New York office in the early ’80s, was headed until Monday by Rey Tariche, an agent still working in that office. Tariche’s resignation letter from the bureau mentioned the Clinton probe, noting that “we find our work—our integrity questioned” because of it, adding “we will not be used for political gains.””
Huh. So Giuliani’s former law firm is the general counsel for the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), a group founded in the New York office and heading by an agent still working in that office (and who resigned days after Comey’s letter to Congress). Nothing fishy about that!
And, of course, let’s not forget that the FBI agents in this office who are waging this “revolution” in an attempt to force an investigation of Hillary, or at a politically embarrassing pseudo-scandal, we basing their suspicions on a book written by Peter Schweizer, a Brietbart editor-at-large:
“It had previously been reported that New York FBI agents brought this anti-Hillary Clinton Breitbart stuff to a meeting — excuse me, they had brought this anti-Hillary Clinton stuff to a meeting with career Justice Department prosecutors back in February, and one of the participants in that meeting described it as, quote, “one of the weirdest meetings I have ever been to.”...”
Uh, yeah, that was probably a pretty weird meeting. At least the agents didn’t cite Infowars. Maybe that will be our 2020 FBI October Surprise.
So that’s all part of what created a crisis of credibility in the FBI and helped tighten the polls just days away from the election. And election that’s been successfully framed as a mandate on whether or not Hillary Clinton is corrupt. Or rather, Hillary Clinton’s alleged corruption.
Josh Marshall has a piece that highlights a rather notable piece of information in the recent New York Times report about how the damage done by whoever hacked the Democratic National Committee was compounded by the fact that the DNC’s IT staff didn’t take seriously the FBI’s warnings that it might have been hacked: Back in September of 2015, when the FBI informed the DNC about the bureau’s suspicion that the DNC might be the target of a hack, the FBI didn’t actually have someone come by and talk with them. No, they called the DNC, and the calls were forwarded to the IT “help desk”. That was it. And, not surprisingly, the tech support contractor who talked with the agent interpreted it as a prank and ignored it, which is not unreasonable because, seriously, how absurd is it that the FBI would choose that method of informing an organization like the DNC in the middle of the campaign season about its detection of a major foreign cyber-intrusion. And this situation was allowed to go on for seven months:
“It goes without saying that FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC has a very clear understanding of who runs the Democratic National Committee, starting — at the time — with the sitting Member of Congress who ran the organization. Then there’s the executive director. The finance chair. Myriad executive, national committeepersons. If this was a serious business, which obviously it was, and the FBI thought it was important to get the attention of a decision-maker in the organization, it would have been very easy to do. But the way it was handled was something like the equivalent of seeing a problem at a major corporation and leaving messages with the receptionist.”
Yeah, it’s hard to see how exactly a hack of this nature wasn’t seen as a serious potential threat to the integrity of the upcoming election, so it’s rather odd that it didn’t warrant a kind of ‘hair on fire’ response by the FBI, especially if the agency wasn’t also detecting an immediate ‘hair on fire’ response by the DNC after the very first warning. And is it really that unusual for FBI agents conducting cold calls to have the person on the other line suspect it might not be a real call? It seems like ignoring FBI cold calls would be a know phenomena. Especially given things like, for example, prior warnings from 2013 by the FBI about people pretending to be FBI agents to scam people. Or the warnings from 2012. So let’s hope one of the lessons taken from this whole mess if that if there’s an urgent issue impacting a critical organization like the DNC that the FBI has determined needs addressing, they don’t just pick up the phone.
And in related news, the FBI has been issuing warnings since October of 2015 about a wave of people impersonating FBI agents and other government agents in order to scam people.
A federal court unsealed the search warrant for the now notorious laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner that was seized by the FBI and used as a pretext for James Comey’s now infamous letter to Congress about the reopening of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server 11 days before the election. So now we have a much better idea of what information the FBI investigators were working with and what argument they made to Comey before he made the call: the investigators concluded that the laptop was likely to contain evidence of illegal possession of classified information. And they based this hunch on information from the email metadata content that showed emails between Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton and the fact that investigators had seen emails with classified information between Huma and Hillary in the previous investigations of Clinton’s private server. Despite the fact that the FBI had already concluded back in July that the evidence they saw from the earlier investigation of the mishandling of classified information didn’t actually justify an indictment.
So the evidence found in October hinting that Weiner’s laptop might contain classified information was based solely on the knowledge that Human and Hillary had previously exchanged emails with classified information which the FBI had already reviewed coupled with the hope that there might be something new on Weiner’s laptop that would change that decision not to prosecute. And that hunch/hope was the basis for Comey’s letter to Congress 11 days before the election:
“The records suggest Fox may have granted the warrant based exclusively on the FBI’s contention that in the earlier phase of the Clinton email investigation, “many emails” between Clinton and Abedin contained classified information, therefore emails between the pair from that same time period and suddenly discovered on Weiner’s laptop were likely to also contain classified information and be evidence of a crime.”
Since it’s looking like the sole basis for the search warrant that James Comey’s letter to the FBI 11 days before the election was based on was a hunch that Weiner’s laptop contained new emails, and not emails they already reviewed months earlier, this is probably a good time to recall that the primary controversy associated with this warrant isn’t the fact that the warrant was issued. The controversy is over the the fact that, before the warrant was even written, the director of the FBI informed Congress about these new emails and the reopening of the investigation just 11 days before the election despite the fact that, as the warrant indicates, it was all based on a vague hunch that there might be some new classified emails. And on top of that, as we now know, reviewing all those emails after getting the warrant to determine whether or not they contained anything new was a rapid process that was just going to take a few day...which is what happened. The problem is it happened a few days after Comey informed Congress about the reopening of the investigation, completely changing the final stage of the election. It’s not the relatively weak case behind warrant that’s the big problem. It’s the relatively weak case coupled with the incredibly sensitive timing of the warrant and Justice Department guidelines against meddling with elections that’s the big problem with the FBI’s behavior. Or at least a big problem. There was unfortunately no shortage of big problems with the FBI’s unwarranted behavior.
This could get interesting: The Justice Department inspector general has decided to investigate James Comey’s actions during the election, although it’s not limited to Comey. It also includes the issue of possible leaks, like the fact that Rudolph Giuliani seemed to know what the FBI was going to do while claiming he was only speaking to ex-FBI agent. But it’s not limited to improprieties that may have helped the Republicans. It will also look into Republican charges that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should have been recused from the case after it was reported that a Clinton ally donated to his wife’s political campaign. Plus claims that DOJ congressional liaison Peter Kadzik improperly provided information to the Clinton campaign. So, yeah, this could get interesting:
“The investigation will be wide-ranging, encompassing Comey’s various letters and public statements on the matter and whether FBI or other Justice Department employees leaked nonpublic information, according to Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.”
Yeah, it definitely sounds pretty wide-ranging. And that’s part of what going to make it so interesting: There’s no way this is going to be completed before Trump is in office and there’s nothing stopping him from replacing the Inspector General. Well, nothing other than a sense of shame and a fear of looking corrupt. So, since this is Trump we’re talking about, there’s basically nothing stopping him from replacing Inspector General Horowitz.
Although, as the article below notes, the career Justice Department employees can’t be replace, so it’s assumed that even if the Inspector General is replaced with someone else there’s nothing that would stop that investigation from continuing. But as the article also notes, if Trump acts outrageously enough, there’s also nothing preventing a kind of “Saturday Night Massacre” scenario involving mass resignations from the department which would look really bad. At least for a normal politician it would look bad. For Mr. “the President can’t have a conflict of interest” Trump, who knows? Maybe he would love to see mass resignations. We’ll unfortunately find out!
“Trump could remove Horowitz, but lawmakers from both sides of the aisle say it’s unlikely that he would be able to halt the investigation.”
LOL, it would be “unlikely” that he would be able to halt the investigation. That sure sounds like it’s technically possible for him to do so. Uh oh.
Although there is one big incentive for Trump to keep the investigation going: as an excuse to replace Comey who still has sever years left on his 10-year tenure assuming the findings come in negatively for Comey. And that raises the question of who Trump would replace him with. It’s an interesting question.
Here’s something rather notable regarding the reports that the FBI, along with five other agencies, are investigating Trump’s ties to the Kremlin: First, according to the BBC,i these agencies began investigating possible Kremlin ties after a Baltic state passed along taped conversations indicating that money was going to be flowing from the Kremlin to influence the US campaign. And this was before former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sent his dossier to the FBI. So it will be interesting to learn if that conversation was specifically about hiring hackers or simply donating to politicians. Keep in mind that in the post-Citizens United world we shouldn’t expect all sorts of foreign governments to plan on influencing US elections so the specificity of the planned nature of how those funds were to be used in that alleged taped conversation seems particularly relevant now that the US opened the door to foreign financial meddling in US elections.
But also according to a BBC report, which was reportedly confirmed by one of McClatchy’s sources in the article below, the FBI had obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on October 15 to grant access to bank records and other documents so the FBI could investigate these alleged payments and money transfers involving Russia. So whether or not there really was a Kremlin plot to swing the election for Trump, it’s pretty significant that a FISA court actually granted that warrant. Especially when you consider the very public FBI discussion about joke re-opening Hillary Clinton’s email server case on October 27 and the complete silence from the FBI during that same period about that FISA warrant:
“The BBC reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia. One of McClatchy’s sources confirmed the report.”
So the FBI, which was already involved in these investigations of a possible Kremlin operation to finance operations in the US election, gets a FISA court warrant on October 15. And then 12 days later we get the infamous “we’re re-opening Hillary’s email investigation” news. Unless the FBI was utterly convinced by October 27 that there was nothing to the Trump/Kremlin theory that seems like a pretty outrageously disproportionate FBI response to these parallel investigations. It’s one more oddity to add to the inspector general’s investigation of the FBI. One of many:
“Information presently public and available confirms that Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump conspired to intimidate FBI Director James Comey into interfering in, and thus directly affecting, the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy was made possible with the assistance of officers in the New York Police Department and agents within the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All of the major actors in the conspiracy have already confessed to its particulars either in word or in deed; moreover, all of the major actors have publicly exhibited consciousness of guilt after the fact. This assessment has already been the subject of articles in news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum, but has not yet received substantial investigation by major media.”
Yes, while the public isn’t in a position to verify the various assertions in the published Christophe Steele dossier or the signals intelligence from Baltic states that purport to demonstrate a covert relationship between Trump and the Kremlin, we’re all in a position to assess the Erik Prince/Rudy Giuliani/Trump conspiracy to influence the FBI because it’s based on their public statements and behavior. It’s something to keep in mind as these investigations unfold. Or collapse. Or get subverted. Whatever happens, the fact that we have a Trump/Giuliani/Prince conspiracy directly related to the FBI’s inexplicable behavior that is supported by their own public statements and actions probably shouldn’t just fall down the memory hole.
Trump just fired FBI director James Comey. Yep. For the stated reason of how unfair he was to Hillary Clinton in the email investigation. That actually happened and doesn’t appear to an elaborate joke:
“Officials said Comey was fired because senior Justice Department officials concluded that he had violated Justice Department principles and procedures last year by publicly discussing the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Democrats have long argued that Comey’s decisions in the months and days before the election hurt Clinton’s standing with voters and affected the outcome, but the president and his closest advisers had argued that Comey went too easy on Clinton and her aides.”
Comey gets fired for abusing Hillary during her private email server investigations. It’s one helluva twist in our Trumpian hurricane of madness. A rather bizarre twist given how completely implausible it is that the Trump administration would fire Comey over that. Sure, there’s a compelling case that could be made that Comey really did mishandle Hillary’s email investigation to such a degree that he should go, but there’s a far more compelling case that there is no way in hell the Trump administration would use that as its reason for the firing which is part of what made the decision to fire Comey over Hillary’s email investigation so puzzling: Even if Rosenstein fired Comey for the right reasons there no reason to believe that those were the real reasons the Trump administration actually had to do this. It’s just too implausible. And yet one day after former acting Attorney General Sally Yates gives a testimony where she states that the justify department warned Trump that Michael Flynn could be a potential blackmail risk, the Trump team goes ahead with an implausibly goofy firing that just makes Trump look incredibly desperate. It’s just blindingly horrible optics.
Still, it’s worth noting that there’s one aspect of this firing that did at least have non-horrible optics: the Deputy Attorney General who wrote the letter giving a justification for Comey’s firing and detailing his mishandling of Hillary’s email investigation is generally seen a non-partisan straight-arrow and was appointed to his current post just a couple weeks ago on a 94–6 vote in the Senate:
“Yet Comey’s dismissal was prompted by a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a career Justice Department attorney with a straight-and-narrow reputation.”
And that’s part of what’s so bizarre about this whole thing: the most credible aspect of this firing is the argument laid out by Rosenstein on how unfair Comey was to Hillary in the email investigation. That’s it. Pretty much everything else just makes Trump look like a guy with something to hide.
And then note this other angle: there are already reports that Trump instructed senior White House and DOJ officials to come up with a reason to terminate Comey last week:
“This was a very closely kept credit at the White House. I’m told only a handful of top advisories knew this was coming. I am told just moments ago that the President himself has been considering this, been thinking about this for at least a week. Did not necessarily have the rationale when they first started talking about this but then asked the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General to look for that rationale and that explanation. And that is what we got this afternoon. The timing of this, of course, so interesting, Erin because the Russian investigation front and center, it is one of the things that aggravates this president more than anything at all.”
So Trump decides Comey has to go and a week later they come up with the most laughable reason to fire Comey they possibly could have. A reason that immediately raises the question, “ok, what’s the real reason they’re going this?” Which, in turn, raises the question of why they would do something so politically charged in such a tragically bizarre manner that immediately raises the question of why they did it? Desperation isn’t a great look.
And that’s just the big question raised by all this. There’s also all the other questions raised by this like who on Earth they’re going to find to replace Comey. It’s not remotely obvious. Jared’s plate seem a little full at the moment. Ivanka, perhaps?
Here’s a rather interesting twist to Donna Brazile’s bombshell revelation from an excerpt in her upcoming book about the 2016 election that was just published in Politico claiming that the DNC was basically owned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2015 after the Clinton campaign bailed out the DNC for $26 million in 2015: Brazile — who took over the DNC in July of 2016 after Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down — bases her claims on a particular document she says she found while investigating the question of whether or not the primary was “rigged”. The document is described as follows:
It sounds pretty damning, but there’s a catch. Josh Marshall points us to a document that appears to be that document in the Wikileaks cache of John Podesta’s emails and there’s absolutely no reference to such an agreement. It’s quite a twist:
“There is what at least appears to be a draft of the agreement in the Wikileaks Podesta cache of all places and from what I can tell it doesn’t include any of this. It’s just a barebones document going over funding allocations, legal matters, reporting and so forth. Again, that version is just a draft. The final copy could definitely have included other codicils or side agreements. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting the document. I’d ask campaign types to take a look.”
Note that while this Podesta leaks document is described as a draft of the document, the filename is “Joint Fundraising Agreement (HVF) FINAL.docx”. So if it’s a draft with “FINAL” in the name but without any of the text Brazile allegedly found that would imply a pretty substantial set of revisions to this ‘FINAL’ document, although it’s not at all inconceivable that there were a number of ‘final’ versions of this document. That happens. Still, it appears the incriminating document really is in the Podesta leaks and it doesn’t contain what Brazile claims it contained.
While it wouldn’t be totally stunning if an informal handshake agreement of this nature was made between the Clinton campaign and DNC after team Clinton handed over $26 million it was be rather amazing if they were crazy enough to put something like that in writing. But this is what Brazile claimed so it’s going to be pretty interesting to see if the final ‘final’ document is eventually revealed.
And in other news, President Trump is demanding that the FBI investigate Brazile’s allegations. Because of course he is.
Well, it looks like the mystery memo Donna Brazile wrote about has been obtained by NBC News. And, surprise surprise, it doesn’t appear to be remotely like what Brazile described.
Yes, the agreement stipulated that the DNC would select a communications director from “one of two candidates previously identified as acceptable to HFA,” by September 11, 2015 (months before the primaries began), for the purpose of preparing for the general election. The memo also said the DNC maintained “the authority to make the final decision” on senior staff in the communications, technology and research departments, although the party organization said it would choose “between candidates acceptable to HFA.” But it also explicitly stated that the DNC was free to engage in similar contracts with other candidates. In other words, it was an agreement that to give the Clinton campaign and other campaigns a kind of veto power over some of the staffing decisions. Which is not remotely ‘rigging’ the primaries:
“In exchange for Hillary for America’s (HFA) helping the cash-strapped DNC raise money, the party committee agreed “that HFA personnel will be consulted and have joint authority over strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures, and general election related communications, data, technology, analytics, and research.””
Joint authority. That’s what the memo lays out. And who gets to share this joint authority? Other campaigns:
So this was the ‘establishment’ candidate asking for some degree of influence over the DNC staff that would be likely be supporting Hillary’s campaign in the general election. But not exclusive influence. It’s basically saying the DNC should factor in the wishes of the Democratic candidates in making its staffing decisions which, again, ain’t exactly ‘rigging’ the primaries.
The Justice Department’s inspector general report on the actions of the FBI leadership regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server during the 2016 election was just released last week. And, of course, Donald Trump is claiming that the report totally vindicates him. And, of course, his assertions are the opposite of reality. The report found that the FBI did unjustly damage a candidate in its handling of the email server investigation, and that candidate was Hillary Clinton. Surprise!
It turns out the report did indeed find an FBI bias against Trump. Specifically, in the +500 page report there was one instance of an FBI agent, Peter Strzok, who was involved with both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump/Russia investigation, expressing anti-Trump sentiments in a series of texts. Strzok received a text from fellow FBI agent (and Strzok’s lover) Lisa Page asking if Trump is “not ever going to be president, right?” Strzok replied, “[n]o. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” And that “We’ll stop it” line is being latched onto as an example of the FBI actually being out to hurt Trump and give Hillary a pass. Note that there was no identifiable instance of Strzok somehow taking action to harm Trump and, in fact, it turns out that Strzok supported reopening the investigation into Hillary’s email server and helped helped draft the now infamous memo James Comey wrote to congress just days before the election about reopening the Clinton email investigation, the one move that probably did more damage to Hillary’s chances than anything else.
And that’s pretty much it in terms of anti-Trump sentiments uncovered in this inspector general report. The FBI agent who helped draft the letter that doomed Hillary once sent an anti-Trump text. The rest of the report covers how the FBI totally screwed over Hillary:
““The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI,” President Trump tweeted on Friday. Trump’s reaction is not so much wrong as misleading. The report is incredibly damning of the investigation into Clinton’s email server, but not because it was wrong not to charge her, but because former FBI Director James Comey kept violating department norms to intervene in a presidential election.”
Yep, Trump is bragging about a report that lays out extensive bias against Hillary Clinton without a hint of irony. Because that’s where we are.
But there was at least one instance of an FBI agent expressing anti-Trump sentiments: Peter Strzok, who worked on both the Hillary email server and Trump/Russia investigations before being removed from the latter investigation last year. This is largely the finding Trump has focused on from the report. And the fact that Strzok supported reopening the investigation into Hillary’s email server and helped helped draft and helped draft the Comey memo the doomed Hillary in late October 2016 is largely ignored by almost everyone:
And what Trump and the GOP are completely ignoring is the core finding of the report: that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was unjustifiably harmed at two critical points in the election: first, when James Comey editorialized on Clinton’s “extremely careless” behavior in July of 2016 when he formally announced he wouldn’t recommend criminal charges against Hillary over the server. And second, when the email investigation was reopened just days before the election (which, again, Peter Strzok supported reopening):
And perhaps the biggest embarrassment for Trump in the report is how it highlight how differently the investigations were handled between Clinton and Trump: Comey himself argued that “the window has closed” for informing the public about the investigation into Russian interference in the election, because a statement would damage the intelligence community’s “reputation for independence” and would expose the FBI and CIA to “serious accusations of launching our own ‘October Surprise.’ ” And then he went ahead and reopened Hillary’s email investigation:
So when Trump and the GOP brag about how the FBI inspector general report vindicates them they’re pretty much bragging about a fantasy interpretation of what’s contained in it.
But as the following piece by Kevin Drum notes, perhaps the most damning part of the new inspector general’s report is that it appears to confirm one of the reasons for Comey’s reopening of the Hillary email investigation that’s been suspected all along: that Comey reopened the investigation and informed congress about it over fears that the New York FBI office, which was notoriously pro-Trump and anti-Hillary, was going to leak about it if Comey didn’t go to congress first. And that’s just one piece of evidence pointing towards a major pro-Trump/anti-Hillary operation going on in the New York FBI:
“A few days ago, Rep. Devin Nunes admitted something he had never acknowledged before: In late September of 2016, New York FBI agents told him about the existence of Anthony Weiner’s laptop, which eventually led to the Comey letter of October 28.”
That’s right, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes admitted just a few days ago on Fox News that New York FBI agents told him about the existence of Anthony Weiner’s laptop in late September 2016. And if they were leaking to Nunes they were probably leaking to all sorts of other people. So by the time Comey wrote the memo to congress in late October there was presumably at least a month of those agents leaking information about that laptop a variety of sources. And one of those other sources was probably Rudolf Giuliani since he was literally boasting about a “pretty big surprise” coming in late October
Note that Giuliani is today asserting that he did not get this insight about “a big surprise” from any active FBI agents and that he and the former FBI agents he was talking with at the time “knew just by instinct” that something big was coming. It was just Rudy’s keen legal instincts. LOL.
And then there’s the content in the inspector general’s report, where they explicitly say that fear that information about the reopening of the Hillary email investigation would be leaked by somebody in the New York office if Comey didn’t disclose the reopening to congress (which was guaranteed to leak to the public almost immediately). Even Attorney General Loretta Lynch appeared to be resigned to the fact that the reopening of the investigation was going to leak if it wasn’t disclosed:
Heck, even a random guy on a plane was apparently made aware of this deep and visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton at the New York FBI by a chatty FBI agent who was familiar with how the New York office operates:
So that’s just a sampling of the evidence that makes it pretty obvious that the threat of leaks out of the New York FBI office was, at least in part, driving the blatant anti-Hillary systematic bias at the FBI throughout the 2016. And much of that evidence has been staring us in the face for years. But at least it’s somewhat encapsulated by the new inspector general report. Too bad Trump clearly didn’t read it.
The New York Times had a potential bombshell report yesterday regarding deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and allegations that Rosenstein proposed the secret recording of president Trump and the possible invocation of the 25th Amendment against Trump. But perhaps the loudest part of this bombshell is the fact that individuals and motive behind behind the leaking of this information remains a mystery. In fact, as we’re going to see, some of those on the right who have been calling most loudly for Rosenstein’s firing for months are coming out and explicitly advising that Trump not fire him. Sean Hannity called it an outright trap intended to lure Trump into prematurely firing Rosenstein.
So do we know at this point? Well, the following article asserts the following key facts:
1. The suggestions of wearing a wire and/or invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump came during meetings that took place between senior FBI officials in the days following the firing of former FBI director James Comey in the spring of 2017.
2. The report is based on several anonymous sources who have been talking with the New York Times over the past several months and who are insisting on anonymity. The sources are said to be either briefed on the events themselves or on memos written by FBI officials. The memos include those written by former acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
3. Before allegedly floating these ideas Rosenstein had been sitting in on Trump’s interviews of potential replacements for Comey. Rosenstein was apparently very disturbed by how Trump was not taking these interviews seriously and the chaos in general enveloping the White House at the time.
4. Rosenstein allegedly told McCabe that he thought he might be able to convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John Kelly, then the director of Homeland Security, to go along with a 25th Amendment move.
5. When Trump initially brought up the idea of firing James Comey to Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein, White House aides were surprised to learn that Rosenstein apparently embraced the idea and even offered to write the memo about the Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation as a justification. But when Trump publicly used Rosenstein’s letter as the primary justification for Comey’s firing Rosenstein grew angry at Trump and allegedly told colleagues that he would be vindicated.
6. When Rosenstein raised the idea of wearing a recording device, one of the meeting participants asked if he was serious and Rosenstein animatedly said he was. Rosenstein also suggested that maybe McCabe or other FBI officials interviewing with Trump for Comey’s job could wear the wire instead. So it appears that it was specifically these interviews to become the new FBI director that Rosenstein wanted recorded.
7. Rosenstein reportedly suggested that because White House officials never checked his phone when he arrived for meetings there it would be easy to secretly record Mr. Trump. It’s worth recalling that Omarosa Manigault-Newman thoroughly established that, yes, secret recordings with your phone were very easy to pull off in the White House.
8. Rosenstein mentioned the possibility of wearing a wire on at least one other occasion.
9. The sources for this story note that, while Rosenstein’s suggestion went nowhere, the comments were an example of how erratically Rosenstein was behaving during this period. That characterization of erratic behavior is a potential hint about the intent of these anonymous sources for leaking this story.
10. Rosenstein suggested invoking the 25th Amendment during a meeting that took play on May 16th, 2017. There were two meetings that day involving Rosenstein, McCabe, and other Justice Department officials. Rosenstein brought up the idea during the first meeting, but memos about the second meeting written by Lisa Page make no mention of the topic.
11. McCabe told other FBI officials of his conversations with Rosenstein.
12. Rosenstein denies any such suggestions of a wire or invoking the 25th Amendment ever happened.
13. The Justice Department provided a statement from someone who was present when Rosenstein made the suggestion of wearing a wire and they said the remark was made sarcastically, contradicting the other source who claim Rosenstein animatedly said he was serious.
Another thing to keep in mind with all this is that, as the article reminds us, the initial interviews Trump conducted with James Comey apparently involved requests for loyalty pledges and an end to the investigation into Michael Flynn. And that seems like an entirely believable, highly Trumpian thing to do. So what are the odds that Trump was talking about loyalty pledges and ending investigations during his interviews with Comey’s potential replacements. And might he have brought up loyalty pledges and ending investigations when Rosenstein was in the room during these interviews? Where there parts of these interviews where Rosenstein wasn’t in the room, when Trump could raise the loyalty pledge topic without witnesses? Those seem like pretty important questions that aren’t really addressed at all in the recounting of events by these anonymous sources.
So several anonymous sources have apparently been talking to the New York Times for months about this. And the story is now out there. Is this someone trying to get Rosenstein fired? Or they goading Trump into firing him as part of a larger plan? Who knows, but whoever was behind this sure knows how to troll Trump:
“Mr. Rosenstein made these suggestions in the spring of 2017 when Mr. Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director plunged the White House into turmoil. Over the ensuing days, the president divulged classified intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office, and revelations emerged that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey to pledge loyalty and end an investigation into a senior aide.”
That’s one of the key elements of all this that isn’t mentioned in the recounting of events by the anonymous sources: did Trump ever bring up loyalty pledges and ending investigations during these interviews to replace James Comey? Because Rosenstein, who surprised White House staff by endorsing the firing of Comey and agreeing to write a letter in support of it, was apparently highly disturbed by how unseriously Trump was treating these interviews. He was also angered at the fact that his letter became the primary justifcation for the firing:
And if anyone would be familiar with how Trump was conducting these interviews to replace Comey, it would be Rosenstein since he was sitting on the interviews:
When Rosenstein raised the idea of wearing a wire, he apparently animatedly said he was serious when asked by one of the meeting participants. And he apparently brought up the wire idea on at least one other occasion:
A Justice Department spokesperson does acknowledge that Rosenstein did raise the idea of someone wearing a wire, but say it was made sarcastically. Others, however, insist that Rosenstein was so serious that he followed up with a suggestion that the interviewees also secretly record Trump:
And that recommendation that both Rosenstein and the interviewees record Trump again raises the question: where these interviewees ever alone with Trump and was he making loyalty pledge requests or requests to end investigations? Why would both Rosenstein and the interviewees need to secretly record Trump otherwise?
At the same times, it’s important to keep in mind that the anonymous sources for this story weren’t actually at the meeting. They were people either briefed on the events or briefed on the contents of these memos:
It’s also important to keep in mind that these sources appear to be characterizing Rosenstein’s comments as a sign of how erratically he was behaving during this period. That sure sounds like these people want to see Rosenstein gone:
Finally, it was during a May 16th meeting involving Rosenstein and McCabe where the 25th Amendment idea was brought up:
And Rosenstein apparently told McCabe that he thought he might be able to persuade Jeff Sessions and John Kelly to go ahead with the 25th Amendment idea:
So it’s worth noting that this report doesn’t just make the firing of Rosenstein potentially easier for Trump. It also is likely to increase Trump’s tensions with Jeff Sessions and John Kelly. Again, this was some remarkable Trump trolling if he really was the target audience for this. It’s seemingly designed to push his buttons and prompt a response, which is why the right-wing effort to convince Trump not to fire Rosenstein is so fascinating:
“I have a message for the president tonight...Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody. ... The president needs to know it is all a setup.”
That was the message to Trump from Sean Hannity! And for anyone remotely familiar with Hannity this was highly out of character. And he’s just one of the main ‘usual suspects’ acting very unusually:
When Rep. Matt Gaetz is acting as a voice of caution something is awry. But what? Why the sudden right-wing concern about the veracity of sources? It’s so atypical it’s suspicious:
Even Laura Ingraham appears to be backing away from using this as a call to fire Rosenstein. It’s just bizarre:
So is this really an elaborate trap designed to infuriate Trump and prompt a rapid firing of Rosenstein? And is that why so many right-wing voices are going out of their way to convince Trump to not do something they’ve been advocating he do for months?
We’ll see, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the underlining story here is that Rosenstein apparently witnessed behavior from Trump so egregious that he felt it might be worth of invoking the 25th Amendment. So whether or not one thinks that this story ends up reflecting poorly on Rosenstein, it’s pretty unambiguous that it ends up making Trump look either incredibly corrupt, or mentally incompetent, or both, if the story is taken seriously which makes it a potentially masterful piece of calculated trolling if that really is what this is. So perhaps that might all have something to do with the right-wing’s sudden fretting about the veracity of anonymous sources. Still, that masterful trolling aside, you have to wonder what’s up with this.