“Trump Is Mishandling The Clinton Email Controversy”: Insisting Repeatedly That The Investigation Was Rigged
At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser helpfully explains why Hillary Clinton won’t be facing any criminal charges for her use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State. There are a lot of legal issues and precedents to discuss, but it can all be boiled down to one simple thing.
Setting aside the bare language of the law, there’s also a very important practical reason why officials in Clinton’s position are not typically indicted. The security applied to classified email systems is simply absurd. For this reason, a former CIA general counsel told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, “’it’s common’ that people end up using unclassified systems to transmit classified information.” “’It’s inevitable, because the classified systems are often cumbersome and lots of people have access to the classified e-mails or cables.’ People who need quick guidance about a sensitive matter often pick up the phone or send a message on an open system. They shouldn’t, but they do.”
Indicting Clinton would require the Justice Department to apply a legal standard that would endanger countless officials throughout the government, and that would make it impossible for many government offices to function effectively.
That’s the bottom line.
Of course, Clinton was not exonerated. FBI Director James Comey was scathing at times in his criticism, and would not even guarantee that the former Secretary of State’s emails hadn’t been read by foreign and hostile intelligence agencies.
With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.
There’s been a lot of hype about these damn emails, but Clinton deserves some criticism. She did not get a clean bill of health here, and the subject will be a legitimate issue during the campaign. That doesn’t mean that Donald Trump has handled the controversy with any deftness. By insisting repeatedly that the investigation was rigged, he undermined the case he should be making now, which is that the FBI is credible and should be taken seriously. But, instead, he’s still saying that the investigation was rigged.
That’s basically taking a weak, contentious and conspiratorial case in place of one that is backed up by the investigators. It’s particularly stupid because, now that we know that no charges will be filed, this is an entirely political controversy. And the object, for Trump, should be to get the maximum possible political mileage out of it. He could be making the case that Clinton shouldn’t be trusted to handle the nation’s national security because she did a poor job of safeguarding its secrets when she served in the Obama administration, but he’s instead saying that the FBI engaged in a coverup.
Consider that James Comey was confirmed by the Senate on July 29, 2013 as the director of the FBI for a term of ten years. If Donald Trump becomes president and serves for two full terms, his presidency will end on January 20th, 2025. In other words, Comey would be the FBI Director for all but the last 18 months of a Trump presidency. And, yet, Trump’s reaction to Comey’s statement today is to question his integrity and independence and to run down the organization that Comey heads.
It’s not hard to see that this isn’t the beginning of a good working relationship, and at least some voters will notice this and be concerned about it.
Trump will rile up some people who were already convinced that Clinton is a she-devil, but he won’t get much else out of this if he continues to shift the focus off of where it can help him make a case against his opponent.
The truth is, she should not have been indicted and most people will agree that the correct decision was made. So, focusing on the decision is actually doing her a giant favor.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 5, 2016
“The Hysteria Of The Hillary Haters”: An Exaggerated Animosity Lacking Any Rational Connection To Reality
Over the past few weeks, Republican politicians and party officials have begun the dreary and demoralizing work of reconciling themselves to the prospect of Donald Trump serving as the GOP’s presidential nominee.
Conservative writers and intellectuals, by contrast, have been more obstinate.
A few have come out in grudging and grumbling support of the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Most of the others, meanwhile, have expressed disgust at the prospect of having to choose between Trump and Clinton at all. This has inspired a small group of dissenters to fasten onto the fantasy of sparking a “true conservative” third-party challenge to Trump.
But many of the rest seem inclined to settle into a pox-on-both-your-houses position: Trump’s unfitness to serve as president is obvious, running the gamut from wholesale ignorance about policy to temperamental volatility and authoritarian instincts that alarm every informed and responsible observer. But Clinton is no better. She’s corrupt! She can’t be trusted! She isn’t qualified to be president! And oh boy, is she unlikeable!
This implies that the most responsible thing for a conservative to do is refrain from voting at all.
That would be foolish. Does Clinton have flaws? You bet she does. But the Hillary hatred that seems to motivate the right’s most adamant objections to her ascending to the presidency is rooted in unfair and exaggerated animosity lacking any rational connection to reality.
The national threat posed by a potential President Trump more than justifies that conservatives promptly get over it.
I can certainly understand ambivalence about Clinton. I feel some of it myself, even though she’s pretty close to my ideological (neoliberal) sweet spot on domestic policy. My hesitation comes mainly from the air of scandal that, as I’ve put it before, seems to follow her and her husband around like the cloud of filth that trails Pig-Pen from Peanuts. If I also opposed her economic agenda, as most conservatives do, I could imagine that concern curdling into something harsher.
On the other hand, I have strong objections to Clinton on foreign policy, where I think her hawkish instincts (on Iraq, Libya, and Syria) have led her badly astray on numerous occasions — and where conservatives probably find her outlook pretty congenial.
That’s a mixed bag. But under present circumstances, it should be good enough to win her conservative support, however reluctant.
Those on the other side usually begin with the signs of corruption that trouble me as well.
The contrast with Barack Obama is instructive. Contending with a rabidly hostile Congress for five of his seven years as president, Obama has nonetheless managed to avoid becoming embroiled in any significant scandals. There have been no subpoenas of White House staff, no special prosecutors.
Is it even conceivable that a Hillary Clinton administration would be so clean? Not a chance. From the string of scandals during Bill Clinton’s presidency (including an impeachment proceeding) to Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio to signs of questionable practices at the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clintons seem to be plagued by a mix of bad luck and congenitally poor judgment that we have every reason to assume would follow them back to the White House.
But here’s the thing: Every single accusation is trivial. Petty. Penny-ante. Yes, even the business about Clinton’s private email server. And especially the septic tank full of hyped-up, conspiracy-laden nonsense that goes by the name of “Benghazi.” (If well-meaning members of the conservative movement want to explore how the Republican electorate ended up hoodwinked by a transparent charlatan-demagogue like Donald Trump, they could do worse than reflecting on their own complicity in publicizing, or at least failing to defuse, this endless, cockamamie “scandal.”)
In an ideal political world, all administrations would be as clean as Obama’s. But as the events of this election cycle have demonstrated quite vividly, this is most emphatically not an ideal political world — and in the deeply troubling world we do inhabit, the prospect of a president dogged by minor scandals shouldn’t distract us from the far higher stakes involved in the upcoming election.
As for the other conservative objections to Clinton, they are even less compelling.
She’s unqualified? Compared to whom? Clinton’s been a successful lawyer. A first lady. A senator. A secretary of state. If that isn’t a stellar resume for a would-be president, I don’t know what would be. It’s certainly far more impressive than Barack Obama’s remarkably modest list of accomplishments when he ran for president — let alone Trump’s background of inheriting a few hundred million dollars and using that wealth to play a real-life game of Monopoly in the richest real estate market in the country (while still managing to file for bankruptcy four times).
Can Clinton be trusted? Probably no more or less than any other politician. Public servants go where the votes are, and in a primary season in which she’s had to fight a left-wing insurgency against the Democratic establishment and her husband’s centrist legacy as president, Clinton has undeniably moved modestly to the left. The question is whether it’s possible to imagine any presidential hopeful in the same situation not doing precisely the same thing. I think the answer is no.
Finally, there’s Clinton’s likeability. Follow conservatives on Twitter during a Clinton speech and you’ll hear the litany. She shouts. She hectors. She condescends. She’s shrill. She laughs in a really annoying way.
I’ll give Clinton’s conservative critics this: She isn’t the most charismatic politician in the world. But you know what? That’s her problem, not anyone else’s. If the voters find her sufficiently off-putting, they won’t elect her. The question is whether, when conservatives are presented with a candidate whose defects go far beyond style, they will be willing to put the good of the country ahead of what really is a merely aesthetic objection.
The path ahead for conservatives is clear. If they want to assure that Donald Trump loses, they need to assure that Hillary Clinton wins.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, May 19, 2016
“Is Bloomberg Betting Hillary Gets Indicted?”: Conservatives, Well, They At Least Hope It’s Going To Happen
The conventional wisdom says that Mike Bloomberg, whose presidential dreams were revealed Saturday by The New York Times, will in all likelihood not run against Hillary Clinton. The conventional wisdom is probably right in this case. It’s hard to imagine that against Clinton, Bloomberg would be anything but a Naderesque spoiler, which he would know and not want to be; against Bernie Sanders on one side and “Crump” (either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump) on the other, however, I think Bloomberg becomes a candidate—and a real player.
Unfortunately for Bloomberg, the chances of Sanders winning the Democratic nomination are quite slim, as he surely knows. So the rubber-hitting-road question is: Is there any chance he’d run against Clinton? I mean, if nothing else, this is presumably his last shot at glory, as he’s a few weeks shy of 74 (what’s with all these septuagenarians, anyway?).
There was a hint in that Times article that suggested he might consider doing that—that at a dinner party at the home of a prominent Clinton backer last fall, Bloomberg offered a “piquant assessment” (those Times euphemisms!) of Clinton’s weaknesses, built around “questions about her honesty” and the email mess.
I can back this up. On Saturday, I spoke with a longtime New Yorker I know who heard Bloomberg inveigh similarly last year at another such event, as Bloomberg delivered a blistering critique of the email controversy and even suggested—well, piquantly!—that Clinton deserved to be in very serious legal trouble. This person was “shocked by how little he seemed to think of her.”
A source in Bloomberg world says this is nonsense; this person claims to have heard the ex-mayor limn Clinton in adulatory tones numerous times, saying, in this person’s words, that she was practically alone among the candidates in being able “to take care of business”—simply to run the government and country responsibly and prudently. From the technocratic Bloomberg, praise doesn’t come higher.
Both these things can be true, of course. Let’s assume that Bloomberg was aghast at the email situation last year, but that it’s faded, and he’s now decided he’d be fine with a Clinton presidency even as he explores a bid of his own. Okay. But even this brings us to another thought—that maybe Bloomberg thinks there’s some chance Clinton might be indicted sometime soon.
If you were shocked to read that sentence, you’re clearly not reading enough conservative web sites. Let me say up front here that while I have no idea of the status of the ongoing FBI investigation into the email business, I would be really surprised to see this happen. Righties have been predicting her imminent indictment ever since Bill Safire’s ignominious 1996 column, but as far as is known publicly, Clinton is not under investigation. It was last summer when the FBI started looking into the matter, and officials announced then that Clinton wasn’t a target.
But that was months ago, so who knows, really? This Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general who keeps retroactively stamping “classified” on emails Clinton read or wrote when she was secretary, and who originally notified the executive branch last July that classified information might exist on Clinton’s server, sure seems to be an aggressive sort.
I think it’s a farfetched scenario myself. An ex-prosecutor friend tells me that a crime would require criminal intent. Then there’s the question of the timing. Somebody’s going to bring serious charges against one of the two major parties’ leading presidential hopeful in an election year? Conservatives whose carotid veins are popping after reading that sentence would do well to remember a time when they excoriated a prosecutor who brought suspiciously timed indictments of Republicans. Google Lawrence Walsh.
But mostly it seems farfetched to me because I just consider it pretty unlikely that any secretary of state, any American in that position, would knowingly compromise U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts.
If you talk to plugged-in liberals, they say forget it, ridiculous. If you talk to plugged-in conservatives, they, well, they at least hope it’s going to happen, think it clearly ought to happen, and maybe this week, i.e., before Democrats start casting votes. If nothing else, a non-indictment gives them all a chance to caterwaul for another few months (or years) about how the Clinton’s keep getting away with things and go raise money off that.
And what if these conservatives happen to be right? Well, when I’ve discussed this with liberals, most people think Joe Biden is the automatic Plan B. John Kerry gets a few mentions, on the grounds that he tried it once before, but that strikes me as a minus, not a plus. In any case, Democrats I’ve discussed this with all assume they rally behind a new establishment-type candidate rather than throwing in their eggs with Bernie. Or maybe they could rally to a Bloomberg bid, since many, many Democrats represent districts where a Sanders endorsement could hurt them. And don’t forget, the above scenario seems to assume that Clinton under such circumstances would just stop in her tracks. Not sure we can assume that.
I hope, and believe, all this will remain hypothetical. I just bet it’s rattling around in Bloomberg’s cage somewhere.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 25, 2016
“Stretching Facts To Fit His Preconceptions”: Only Softballs? Transcript Shows Trump Lied About Democratic Debate
By now you may have noticed that Donald Trump exists in his very own reality — a pleasing world where the Mexicans will pay us to build a border wall, where industrial nations will capitulate instantly to his trade demands, and where global climate change is merely a myth “created by and for the Chinese.” Lunatic as The Donald’s confident assertions often may be, not all of them are as easily debunked as certain remarks he made at today’s press conference in New York to introduce his new book.
Discussing the presidential debates, Trump complained more than once about the free ride that Hillary Clinton supposedly enjoyed at the last Democratic debate, which was televised by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper. According to the real estate mogul, the questioning by Cooper and his colleagues “was very unfair because Hillary Clinton was given all softballs. They didn’t ask her one tough question! They didn’t talk about the foundation, they didn’t talk about the emails….She only got softballs, that’s all she got…Hillary had only softballs, all night long. ‘Here, Hillary, hit this one over the park.’”
That struck me as a pandering and distorted account of the debate — so I checked.
It is true that Cooper didn’t inquire about the Clinton Foundation, but the questions he did ask (reproduced below without Clinton’s answers, which can be found in the full transcript here) indicate just how far Trump is willing to stretch facts to fit his preconceptions. Not only did Cooper pose several tough questions to her, from the very beginning of the debate, but he seized every chance to pillory Hillary in framing questions he put to the other candidates. (And he did ask her — and the others — about the damned emails.)
Unlike the Republicans, she spared us the post-debate whining.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, I want to start with you. Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the “gold standard”. Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it. Will you say anything to get elected?
COOPER [following up]: Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, “take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.” Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, “being kind of moderate and center.” Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Russia, they’re challenging the U.S. in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence, they’ve lied about who they’re bombing. You spearheaded the reset with Russia. Did you underestimate the Russians, and as president, what would your response to Vladimir Putin be right now in Syria?
COOPER [to Martin O’Malley]: Secretary Clinton voted to authorize military force in Iraq, supported more troops in Afghanistan. As Secretary of State, she wanted to arm Syrian rebels and push for the bombing of Libya. Is she too quick to use military force?
COOPER [following up insistently]: Does she — does she want to use military force too rapidly?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, on the campaign trail, Governor [sic] Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable. Should you have seen that attack coming?
COOPER [following up]: But American citizens did lose their lives in Benghazi.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, you are going to be testifying before Congress next week about your e-mails. For the last eight months, you haven’t been able to put this issue behind you. You dismissed it; you joked about it; you called it a mistake. What does that say about your ability to handle far more challenging crises as president?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, with all due respect, it’s a little hard — I mean, isn’t it a little bit hard to call this just a partisan issue? There’s an FBI investigation, and President Obama himself just two days ago said this is a legitimate issue.
COOPER [after Bernie Sanders dismissed the email controversy]: It’s obviously very popular in this crowd, and it’s — hold on.
(APPLAUSE) I know that plays well in this room. But I got to be honest, Governor Chafee, for the record, on the campaign trail, you’ve said a different thing [challenging Clinton’s ethics]. You said this is a huge issue. Standing here in front of Secretary Clinton, are you willing to say that to her face?
COOPER: Governor O’Malley, you expressed concern on the campaign trail that the Democratic Party is, and I quote, “being defined by Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”You heard her answer, do you still feel that way tonight?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, how would you address this [income inequality] issue? In all candor, you and your husband are part of the one percent. How can you credibly represent the views of the middle class?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Governor O’Malley says the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth between two royal families. This year has been the year of the outsider in politics, just ask Bernie Sanders. Why should Democrats embrace an insider like yourself?
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 3, 2015
Share This Blog
mykeystrokes.com- “The Unrelenting Hostility Of Washington’s Courtier Press”: The Media’s Crusade Of Scandals Against Hillary Clinton
- “Endorsing This Philistine”: The Christian Right Has Surrendered To Trump
- “Cop Killers Serve No Cause”: It’s Getting To The Point Where No Lives Matter
- “We’re Not Post-Racial Yet”: The Demons Of Our Racist Past Still Haunt Us
- “Ghosts Of History”: Why America Recoils From Donald Trump
mykeystrokes.com 