“A Little Noticed Brief”: Justice Department; Clinton’s Email Practices Were Permissible
In the spring, Republicans, a variety of reporters, and much of the Beltway establishment was convinced: there was a real “scandal” surrounding Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation’s international donors. In time, the allegations crumbled, the controversy evaporated, and the political world lost interest in the story that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. There just was no there there.
Over the summer, the same Republicans, many of the same reporters, and much of the Beltway establishment was once again convinced: there was a real “scandal” surrounding Hillary Clinton and her email server management. Given the latest revelations, it’s starting to look like deja vu all over again.
The Obama administration told a federal court Wednesday that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was within her legal rights to use of her own email account, to take the messages with her when she left office and to be the one deciding which of those messages are government records that should be returned.
In the most complete legal defense of Mrs. Clinton, Justice Department lawyers insisted they not only have no obligation, but no power, to go back and demand the former top diplomat turn over any documents she hasn’t already given – and neither, they said, can the court order that.
The Associated Press, BuzzFeed, and the New York Times had similar reports on this “little noticed brief.”
So, let me get this straight. Clinton used a private email server. The State Department said this was allowed. The Justice Department came to the same conclusion. The FBI isn’t investigating her.
I know we’re supposed to think this is a “scandal,” and the coverage has successfully convinced plenty of voters that this “controversy” is evidence of some unnamed nefarious misdeeds, but the rationale for taking this story seriously is looking pretty thin.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a lengthy, front-page piece over the weekend that reported Clinton’s personal, deleted emails may yet be recoverable by technicians. I’m not sure why these personal, deleted emails should be an area of interest in a presidential campaign; in fact I’m not sure why any candidate’s personal, deleted emails should be scrutinized.
And yet, over the weekend, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairmen of the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, respectively, said “they would push for the deleted e-mails to be reviewed if they can be recovered.”
Of course they would.
Why, exactly, should Hillary Clinton’s personal emails receive scrutiny that no candidate, in either party, has ever had to face? I have no idea, but congressional Republicans seem serious anyway.
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum added, sarcastically, “I’m sure the nation’s security hinges on this. And if Hillary’s personal emails are successfully recovered, I’m equally sure that a few of the most embarrassing ones will somehow get leaked to friendly reporters.”
Count on it.
In the meantime, if someone can explain why this is literally a front-page story for months, while Jeb Bush’s identical email issue is considered a non-story, I’m eager to hear the explanation.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 14, 2015
“Defiance Of The Right-Wing Opposition”: Iran Debate; Clinton Steps Up To Oppose The Demagogues
When Sarah Palin joins Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and a motley crew of crazies in Washington this week to rally against the Iran nuclear deal, the speeches are likely to reflect the incoherence of the opposition. None of these right-wing celebrities appears to comprehend its terms, how it was negotiated or – most important – why its failure would probably lead to yet another horrific war.
On that same day, as Cruz, Trump, and Palin blather on about their love of Israel, their hatred for Barack Obama, and their determination to “make America great again,” someone else will step up to support the agreement – someone whose diplomatic efforts laid the groundwork for successful negotiations with Tehran.
That would be Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former Secretary of State and leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Scheduling a major speech on the Iran deal for the same day as the Washington event, Clinton is plainly determined to display her mastery of its details as well as her defiance of the right-wing opposition.
But this speech — which could become one of the best moments in public life — will also prove just how far she has come since the last time she ran for president.
That’s because Iran was the subject of one of the most troubling moments in her 2008 campaign, when she promised to “totally obliterate” that country (and presumably its 70 million-plus population) if the mullahs ever attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon. Having uttered that genocidal threat in response to a provocative question, she reiterated the same bluster a few days later on ABC News’ This Week.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran [if they attack Israel with nuclear weapons]. And I want them to understand that. … I think we have to be very clear about what we would do,” she told host George Stephanopoulos.
At the time, in early May 2008, it wasn’t clear why the Iranians needed to “understand” any such ultimatum, since our own intelligence showed that they neither had nuclear weapons nor were likely to possess such weapons any time soon – and that the Israeli military was (and is) fully capable of nuclear retaliation. Clinton’s harsh rhetoric seemed to be aimed more directly at Obama, her primary opponent, whose aim of negotiating with traditional enemies like Tehran she had denounced as “naïve.”
Those who expected better from her pointed to her Mideast advisors, who advocated an opening to Iran, and to her own previous remarks about the imperative of talking with “bad people” as a sign of strength, not weakness. But at that moment, she seemed to echo John McCain and the “bomb Iran” chorus among the Republicans.
Much has changed since 2008, of course – including the leadership of the Iranian government. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the aggressive Holocaust denier who held the Iranian presidency back then, gave way in 2013 to Hassan Rouhani, a reformer who wants to end his country’s international isolation. Thanks in part to Clinton’s work as Secretary of State, a powerful and unprecedented international alliance enforced real sanctions that finally pushed Iran into serious negotiations. And since those negotiations began, Rouhani’s government has heeded the required limitations on its nuclear activities.
Perhaps Clinton hasn’t changed. After all, she has always believed that diplomacy, aid, and other aspects of American power are just as fundamental to our security as military force. But she has found a balance and a voice that are more vital than ever in a contest against irresponsible politicians, whose demagogy points us again toward war.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, September 8, 2015
“It’s Hogwash, But People Never Seem To Learn”: The Outsider Delusion And The Fallacy Of ‘Getting Things Done’
As you will read in a hundred news stories over the next few weeks, the outsider’s moment in the presidential campaign has arrived. This is going to be the prevailing narrative of the 2016 race, until a new one comes along. It’s perfectly accurate (for now, anyway), but we should ask just what voters are seeking when they gravitate to outsiders, and what they’re likely to get.
First, the latest numbers. A new Marist/NBC News poll of Iowa and New Hampshire shows Donald Trump holding a healthy lead in both states, with Ben Carson coming in a strong second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire; Carson’s rise is not quite as entertaining as the Trump campaign, but it’s nearly as significant. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has cut into Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and moved ahead of her in New Hampshire, where the race between the two has been closer for some time now. And a new Economist/YouGov poll shows Trump moving even farther ahead nationally, with his support at 36 percent, followed by Carson at 11 percent.
Most reporters have decided, based not just on poll numbers but also on their conversations with voters and the evidence they gather on the trail, that the state of the race can be explained by the American people’s dissatisfaction with “politics as usual.” Fed up with Washington’s gridlock and its inability to solve big problems, voters turn to outsiders who promise to do things like “shake up the system” and “change the way Washington does business.” These candidates supposedly possess fresh ideas and new perspectives that can turn everything around.
It’s hogwash. But people never seem to learn.
On the Democratic side, you can at least make a reasonable case for Bernie Sanders’ brand of outsiderism. Sanders is no political neophyte — he has held public office for most of the past 35 years, which gives him an insider’s understanding of how the system works. And his argument is a focused one, centered on the influence of big money and how it helps produce and sustain inequality. While tackling that problem is extremely difficult, one could at least imagine a President Sanders making some progress on it.
On the Republican side though, the two leading outsiders, Trump and Carson, have nothing so specific in mind. They argue that they’ll get things done, Trump through the force of his will, and Carson because he is untainted by politics. Ask either one of them about a specific policy issue, and it quickly becomes clear that when it comes to the issues a president deals with, they’re utter ignoramuses, which is perhaps understandable, if less than reassuring. I’m sure Marco Rubio doesn’t know much about brain surgery, which Carson knows a great deal about, but he’s not running for Brain Surgeon in Chief.
If you’re a voter attracted to these outsiders, you’d do well to ask yourself: What, precisely, will an outsider do as president that an insider wouldn’t? Would they pursue a fundamentally different set of policies? Not likely — the policies they’ll pursue will by and large be those of their party. Ben Carson may be a political newcomer, but the policy positions he takes are essentially the same as those of the other Republicans. And any Republican will appoint most of the same people to the thousands of executive branch positions. When it’s out of power, each party maintains what is essentially an executive branch in exile, spread among Washington think tanks and advocacy organizations, waiting to move back into government. It isn’t as though the outsider candidate can fill these positions from somewhere else.
And when it comes to things like government gridlock, you have to ask the question again: What is the outsider candidate going to do differently? Outsiders talk about things like “shaking up the system” and “changing the way Washington does business,” but they seldom get too specific about what those things might mean in practice. What would a shaken-up system look like? For instance, would it mean that Congress would swiftly and efficiently pass a bunch of bills instead of being consumed by bickering?
If that’s your idea of what the system ought to produce, then electing an outsider president isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is to give one party control of Congress and the White House, preferably with at least 60 votes in the Senate to overcome filibusters. Then you’ll see the system work.
President Obama had that for a time in his first term, and Congress was extremely productive, passing a large economic stimulus, financial reform, health-care reform and a bunch of other stuff you’ve probably forgotten about by now. If you don’t remember that period as one in which the system worked the way it’s supposed to, it’s probably because you didn’t like the particular things Washington accomplished. The real problem you had wasn’t with how smoothly the system operated, but with the substance of what it produced. In fact, Republicans often complain that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed down our throats” — in other words, they think the legislation wasn’t mired in gridlock for long enough (the fact that on Planet Earth it actually passed after more than a year of hearings, debates and negotiations isn’t really the point).
Plenty of voters say they want to get beyond partisanship and just find someone who’ll “get things done,” but that’s not what they really want. Everyone has an agenda. They want some things to get done, but not others. No conservative looked at Obama’s first two years and said, “I don’t like his policies, but I do admire the fact that he’s getting things done, so I’d like him to keep going in the same direction.” When George W. Bush tried and failed to privatize Social Security, no liberal said, “I’m disappointed that he wasn’t able to get things done.”
It’s perfectly understandable that Republicans are attracted to outsiders at this particular moment in history. As I’ve noted before, the real source of discontent among GOP voters with their party’s leaders is less about the rift between the establishment and the tea party than it is about the belief that the party’s leaders are ineffectual. They keep promising their constituents that they’ll destroy Barack Obama, repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut government down to size, but they never deliver. So when someone like Trump comes along and says he’ll sweep aside every problem and make all their dreams come true, it’s quite compelling, no matter how removed it is from reality.
But the truth is that voters of any persuasion don’t want to shake up the system when it isn’t getting things done; they want to shake it up when it isn’t doing the particular things they want. Washington may not be working, but what we really care about is whether it’s working for us.
By:Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 7, 2015
“Why Was He Even Called In The First Place?”: Hillary’s Aide Right To Plead The Fifth
The Benghazi Committee is a Sham.
So many questions about Bryan Pagliano, the Clinton campaign IT guy who’s invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to testify before the Benghazi committee, and all of them—yes—swirling! Who is this guy? What’s he hiding? What did he know, and when did he know it? Egad. Trouble with a capital T.
And here’s another question about Pagliano, one that I bet maybe hasn’t occurred to some of you: Why, exactly, is the committee that is investigating the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi subpoenaing an IT guy in the first place?
Now if Trey Gowdy were here, I’d imagine he could drum up some quasi-respectable seeming answers. Well, Pagliano might have wiped Benghazi-related emails from the infamous server. But in reality, I doubt the committee even cares very much what he does or does not know about Benghazi. As I wrote Wednesday, the committee now has nothing to do with Benghazi.
And Gowdy has even basically said as much. On Fox on August 16, Chris Wallace asked Gowdy what all this email business had to do with Benghazi, and Gowdy said, “Well, probably not much of anything.” He went on to try to regain his footing by asserting that “my focus is on the four murdered Americans in Benghazi, but before I can write the final definitive accounting of that, I have to make sure that the public record is complete.”
That sounds nice and innocent, but here’s what appears to be Gowdy’s idea of a complete public record. It includes making more than 40 witnesses testify—but in private, providing testimony that has not been and evidently will never be disclosed.
Some witnesses have wanted to testify in public, the better for all of us to judge, but Gowdy said no. Former Clinton aide Cheryl Mills saw her requests to testify in public this week rebuffed by the Republican majority, so she is testifying in private—complying, even though she knows very well that doing so means that her testimony will probably be leaked selectively and out of context. She will presumably demand that the full transcript be released, as Sid Blumenthal did, and the committee will say no, as it has with Blumenthal (technically, the majority has just ignored the minority’s request for a vote on the matter).
So, all these witnesses, and we’ll never know what any of them said. We’ll just be left depending on leaks from Gowdy’s investigators to the every-hungry Times. That’s some “public record.”
In the face of that, of course Pagliano is refusing to testify. I promise you, you would too. Pagliano thought bubble: “Hmmm, let’s see. I’m being offered the opportunity to go behind closed doors before a committee that already has a history of leaking stuff to make people look as bad as they can make them look in order to establish some piece of innuendo about Clinton. And I get to run up what, $50,000 or $70,000 in legal fees for the privilege? No thank you.” The Fifth Amendment applies to Pagliano every bit as much as it applies to that great American Ollie North, who invoked it back in 1986.
Ah, 1986. I pointed out the other day that this has now gone on longer than the Church Committee hearings on intelligence abuses, which in the mid-1970s dug into extremely serious systemic abuses of power by our government. Do you know also that the 1986 Iran-contra hearings, at which North pleaded the Fifth, lasted just 10 months and 13 days? The Benghazi committee, meanwhile, has now lasted for 15 months and counting. On September 24, it will pass the duration of the Watergate committee. The Watergate committee!
Oh, and by the way, the Watergate and Iran-contra committees both called upwards of 500 witnesses each. This committee has called, as noted above, around 40. Why? Well, it may be because Gowdy is an extremely judicious fellow. Or it could be because Watergate and Iran-contra investigators had actual serious work to do, probing as they were White House-based conspiracies to violate existing U.S. law, while Gowdy is obviously just fishing around on the off chance that he finds some evidence that Clinton or an aide made some classification error that can be hung around her neck.
Yes, yes, Clinton invited all this to some extent, yadda yadda. I’ve written that plenty of times. But people need to understand just how without precedent this committee is. I can’t think of a case when a Democratic congressional majority did anything like this. The investigation into the Bush administration firing of the U.S. Attorneys comes to mind, but that was handled completely differently. No special select committee was named. Those probes were just handled by the standing Judiciary committees, and it all went down fast—Congress held its first hearings in April, and by August, the hearings were done, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others had resigned.
Gowdy will say that he has to keep his committee alive as long as the State Department is dragging its heels on turning over a few emails. Lately they’re on a mad hunt for two emails from September 29, 2012, which were about prepping Clinton for a meeting with an unnamed senator in the aftermath of the attacks. Well, at least it’s about Benghazi, in a way, although what illuminating or incriminating information could be found in an email written two-plus weeks after the attack kind of eludes me (“Remember now, Madame Secretary, DON’T mention that you ordered that the military stand down because you didn’t care if Chris Stevens died!”).
But anyway it’s a weak argument. The Bush administration too withheld many emails from Congress during the U.S. Attorneys flap, and Congress still just got on with its work as best it could. That’s what a Congress usually does—it works, a little, with the minority party, and it tries not to do anything too embarrassing to the body, tries not to precipitate a blood sport crisis. But blood sport crisis is this committee’s raison d’être. I don’t blame Pagliano a bit for not feeding them his carcass to gnaw on.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 4, 2015
“Because Hillary Clinton Is Hillary Clinton, Running For President”: Why Nothing Can Quell The Media’s Addiction To Clinton Scandals
If there’s any constant in presidential campaigns, it’s that at the first sign of difficulty, everyone who wants one particular candidate to win has an iron-clad critique of the candidate’s decisions thus far, which goes something like, “If only they’d get their heads out of the sand and listen to what I have to tell them, they wouldn’t be having these problems.” You only have to get two or three partisans in a room (or an exchange on email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to quickly learn that the answers to what the candidate should have done before and ought to do now are as clear as a bright spring morning; it’s just that the candidate and his or her advisers can’t see the wisdom of the true path to victory.
The fact that this complaint is as predictable as the sunrise doesn’t mean it’s always wrong; candidates do screw up, and sometimes there was a better alternative to something they did, an alternative that really would have produced dramatically different results. And the ability to be an armchair strategist is part of what keeps campaigns interesting, just as the ability to second-guess coaches and players helps keep sports interesting.
Right now, Hillary Clinton is the target of lots of this advice, apparently because, 13 months before the actual voting will occur, she hasn’t yet put this election to bed. Anxiety is creeping among the legions of politicians, advisers, insiders, and in-the-knowers (anonymous and otherwise) who will happily share their opinions with journalists looking to populate their “What’s Wrong With the Clinton Campaign???” stories with the thoughts of worried Democrats, an amply populated species. And most of it revolves around the story of her State Department emails, a story that “won’t go away,” as everyone is saying.
“Clinton’s standing has been eroded both by her own shaky handling of the e-mail controversy and by the populist energy fueling the challenge of Sen. Bernie Sanders,” says The Washington Post. “Democratic leaders are increasingly frustrated by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to put to rest questions about her State Department email practices,” says The New York Times, in an article for which they spoke to “more than 75 Democratic governors, lawmakers, candidates and party members.” I’ve heard similar things from any number of liberals and Democrats myself.
But here’s a piece of advice: If you find yourself starting a sentence on this topic with “If only she had…”, stop and take a breath.
I say that not because Clinton didn’t do anything wrong. It was plainly a mistake to set up her private email account in the first place, and if she used emails for communication that should have been confined to official cables, then we can criticize her for that. The most informative recent piece I’ve seen on this topic comes from David Ignatius, who notes that the fact that her server was private isn’t actually relevant to the question of classified information passing through it, since employees aren’t allowed to send such information through state.gov emails either. More importantly, multiple officials tell him that classified information passes through non-classified channels all the time; it shouldn’t happen, but it does.
Nevertheless, the important thing to understand about the politics of what’s happening now is this: There is nothing—nothing—that Hillary Clinton could have said or done differently since this became a public issue that could have made this go away, or that she could do now to “put it to rest.”
That’s not because it’s such a dreadfully serious issue, or because the American people care so deeply about the question of State Department email security that they’d never elect anyone to the White House who exercised anything less than the greatest of care with their communications, adhering to not just the spirit but the letter of every regulation. If you asked most voters what this is all about, they’d probably say “Um … something about emails?” No, it’s because Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton, and because she’s running for president.
That means that Republicans will never be satisfied with any answer she gives on this topic, or any other for that matter. She could read Trey Gowdy every email she ever wrote while giving him a foot massage, and it wouldn’t change their conviction that there was still something nefarious hidden somewhere in something they hadn’t seen. She could have personally delivered her server to Roger Ailes’s office on the day the story broke, and it wouldn’t change their determination to figure out what she’s hiding.
Nor will the news media ever be satisfied. Bill and Hillary Clinton have always been treated by a different set of rules than other politicians, one that says that any allegation about them, no matter how little evidence there may be for it, must be presented as the leading edge of what will surely turn out to be a devastating scandal. The New York Times, which despite its reputation as a liberal newspaper has what can only be described as an unquenchable desire to find Clinton scandals whether they actually exist or not, can be counted on to run blaring front-page articles about alleged Clinton scandals without the barest hint of skepticism, no matter how many times their reporting turns out to be based on false tips or bogus interpretations of mundane facts (the phantom “criminal referral” of a month ago was only the latest).
Then once the Times puts out its story, the rest of the media are off to the races, and conservatives just about lose their minds with glee, because this time they’ve really got her. Then inevitably, the alleged wrongdoing turns out to be either nothing at all or too little to care much about. But we only figure that out after Republicans in Congress have launched investigation after investigation, each one the engine for story after story about the scandal that won’t go away.
If you think that how Hillary Clinton responds to all this (Did she say she just “regrets” what she did, or did she actually apologize? Did she seem dismissive? Could she have used different words? Could she have framed the whole thing with this clever argument I just thought of?) would make any difference at all, then you must not have been around in the 1990s.
To repeat, I’m not defending everything Clinton did with regard to her emails, but that’s just the point: This cycle will spin whether she did anything wrong or not, and no matter how she conducts herself once the story breaks.
Eventually, all the facts do come in, and it’s at that point that we can really judge. For instance, multiple investigations of what occurred in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, have shown that it was a terrible tragedy, but there was no “stand-down order,” there was no criminal negligence, and there was no impeachment-worthy malfeasance, no matter how fervently Republicans might wish it. Yet their investigations go on. In fact, at this point it’s impossible to see how anything other than Clinton losing the 2016 election will ever stop them. If she becomes president, they’ll go on investigating it for the length of her time in the Oval Office.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer The American Prospect, August 31, 2015
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