“Clinton; Not A Scandal, Yet. But…”: The Right Is Going To Be Gunning For Her From Day One
So by now we’ve read every possible interpretation of why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct her State Department business. There’s a lot that isn’t clear, and a lot we still don’t know. The main thing we know that is the original Times story that broke the news was really slipshod, staggeringly so for such a major story in America’s best newspaper. After I and others noted this, you could tell the Times acknowledged as much, because the paper’s Day Two follow-up didn’t really have any new news, just facts and dates that should have been in the original article to begin with. It took reporters the better part of the day Tuesday to figure out exactly which regulation the Times piece was accusing Clinton of potentially violating.
Even Mark Halperin, nobody’s idea of a Clintonista, slammed the original article. “There are things in the Times story that if they’re not flat out wrong are really misleading and unfair to the Clintons,” he said on Bloomberg TV.
The Times’ overheated sloppiness does not mean, however, that Clinton is totally in the clear here. I didn’t say that (“Clinton still has some questions to answer,” I wrote Tuesday). The citizens on whose behalf she was conducting business obviously have the right to hear her explain why she opted to use a private account. And we have the right to know whether the private server was more secure than State’s or less, and whether any classified information was electronically transported across this server. (You may think it implausible that a private server could have been more secure than State’s, but remember, Wikileaks didn’t seem to find the State systems too impenetrable, and it is after all the federal government we’re talking about.)
If the answers to any of these questions turns out to be alarming, this could become a legitimate scandal. And of course, depending on the content of the emails, we may well be in for another, related Clinton “scandal.” She doesn’t have to have said anything self-incriminating in these emails. The way the other side is out to get her, one ill-considered verb could end up being hung around her neck for days or weeks.
But even if this story were to end right here, or right after she does a press conference about it, there are a couple of lessons Clinton ought to take away from this.
First, she desperately needs someone on her staff to serve as a kind of average person-common sense barometer, and this person has to have the stature to be able to give it to her straight, and she has to listen to this person. In this case, back in early 2009, this person might have said something like, “I don’t know, Hillary. When an average person gets a job at First Federal Bank, he gets a First Federal email address, and that’s the account through which he conducts his banking business. Anything other than that is just gonna look weird to people.”
Or, last year, on the topic of her paid public appearances: “No, Hillary, not Goldman Sachs. Avocado growers, I see no harm. American Association of Sheetrock Manufacturers? Fine, if you insist. But not Goldman!”
Or: “You know, maybe it’s not the world’s best idea for you to put your name on that foundation. Cuz then whenever a question arises about its funding sources you can say ‘Hey, it’s his foundation, not mine!’”
Or, more proactively: “I was thinking, Hillary, with all these millions you’ve now made, and coming out of State, why not start your own foundation? Help women around the world with microcredit and all that. Can’t lose.”
Yes, she ought to be able to make these calls herself, but it seems clear that she can’t. They’re obviously not Bill’s strong suit either. So since neither of them seems able to do it, they need to hire some help. Or maybe assemble a panel of actual average Americans, and when one of these decisions looms, her staff can video-tape the panel reacting, and she can watch.
The second thing she needs to get is this: If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath. This kind of secrecy and defensiveness will only add fuel to the fire—and it will put the media on the right’s side. It will make it look—not just to Hillary-haters, but to average people—like she’s hiding something even when she doesn’t have anything she needs to hide. We’ve seen that movie many times.
If she’s president, she has to break that habit. The White House operates under far more onerous disclosure and accountability rules than the cabinet departments do, and if she doesn’t follow those rules and then some, she’s just going be handing those out to get her the proverbial match.
Old habits die hard as they say. We seemed to have reason to think that the Hillary Clinton who urged the stonewalling of The Washington Post on Whitewater documents back in 1994 had gone away. We never heard any such stories in her Senate or State years until now. But that Hillary is still around, apparently. The Tweet she sent out late Wednesday night doesn’t quite equate to transparency.
The other old habits that won’t die easily are 1) right-wing loathing of her and desire to discredit and even destroy her, and 2) the mainstream media’s reflexive, uncritical, and panting promotion of every charge the right levels against her (remember, though this story came through the Times, it obviously originated in Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee’s investigative staff). Clinton’s old habit just feeds these others, and it’s not a dynamic she or the country will need if she’s in the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 6, 2015
“Pretty Much How Things Go”: Every Clinton Scandal Is Exactly The Same
We don’t yet know whether there will actually turn out to be something nefarious in the emails that Hillary Clinton somewhat belatedly passed on to the State Department, but I feel confident in predicting that this Clinton scandal will likely play out just like every other Clinton scandal. For those of you who don’t remember the 1990s, here’s how it works:
- Bill and/or Hillary Clinton does something that on first glance looks a little sketchy.
- The news media explode with the story, usually including insinuations that something illegal or corrupt took place.
- Republicans quiver with joy, believing that this scandal will finally be the one to reveal the true depths of the Clintons’ villainy.
- Clintonworld adopts a bunker mentality, insisting that they did nothing wrong yet trying to limit the amount of information that gets out, thereby antagonizing reporters.
- As the eight zillion journalists assigned to the story learn more information, the story grows increasingly complex, yet no actual illegality or corruption is found.
- The story drags on for months or even years, with Republicans never wavering in their certainty that the only reason we haven’t learned the awful truth is the Clintons’ stonewalling.
- The more committed conservatives begin to lose their minds, eventually coming to believe spectacularly outlandish theories about what actually happened.
- The whole thing peters out, and reasonable people conclude that while Bill and/or Hillary might have shown better judgment, they didn’t actually break the law, violate their oaths, betray their country, or anything else their opponents imagined.
There are variations, of course, but that’s pretty much how things go. And even though it’s possible there’s an email somewhere in which Clinton instructs her paramour Ayman al-Zawahiri to launch the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, it’s probably how things are going to go with this one, too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 6, 2015
“Titillating The Republican Base”: Under Pressure From The Right, Gowdy Renews Benghazi Shenanigans
The Benghazi Select Committee shed the bipartisan cloak it had worn in public, as Republican members used Tuesday’s hearing to bully Joel Rubin, deputy undersecretary of state for legislative affairs. For more than two hours they badgered their witness, apparently haven taken cues from Eric Cartman (a petulant child portrayed in the cartoon South Park) demanding the State Department respect their “authoritah.”
The Central Intelligence Agency’s Neil Higgins, director of the agency’s Office of Legislative Affairs, for the most part sat silently at the witness table, happy to allow his State Department counterpart take the brunt of the public flogging as successive Republican lawmakers berated Rubin.
The exchanges between Rubin and the Republican members of the committee were a sideshow to the real fight in the room. For months tensions have been brewing between the majority and minority staff.
Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, made this clear in a series of letters he wrote to Gowdy, two of which were made public on Tuesday morning. At the heart of the dispute are interviews the majority staff conducted without the knowledge or presence of Democratic staff.
Investigating the accusations reported by Sharyl Attkisson at The Daily Signal, a website owned and published by the Heritage Foundation, that Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell witnessed members of the department’s staff removing documents “that might put [State Department officials at the Bureau of Near East Affairs] in a bad light,” the committee interviewed a second witness whom Maxwell claimed would confirm these allegations.
Instead that witness contradicted the story, saying that they had never been a part of such an effort, according to the letter penned by Cummings to Gowdy on November 24. This came as a surprise to the committee’s minority staff, who, according to Cummings, had been told by the Republicans via e-mail that they “learned nothing else of note in our discussion, so we don’t plan to conduct any additional follow-up.” Far from nothing of note, debunking a major conservative allegation is a seemingly important detail.
From the perspective of Representative Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the select committee, the source of tension was the State Department’s inability to fully respond to the committee’s request for documents and the availability of witnesses, despite the 40,000 documents that State had already forked over. The wide-ranging request delivered on November 18 was for “two full years worth of emails from 11 State Department principals.”
Democrats were quick to point out that this first request for documents came a full six months after House Speaker John Boehner created the committee. They repeatedly noted at the hearing that the committee created to investigate the federal government’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina had started and completed its work in this time span.
In the eight months since the committee’s formation was first announced, Gowdy has yet to present a single question about the attacks that has not already been answered. For six months, the committee had not requested a single document. Now it was suddenly claiming that State’s failure to comply with the entire document request in two months was unacceptable. Republicans tried to smooth over this uncomfortable fact by citing subpoenas from other committees.
Yet as recently as mid-December, Gowdy seemed to indicate he was pleased with the performance of the State Department, in response to his committees request telling Fox News Host Greta Van Susteren:
“They are making an effort to be cooperative. The timing issue we may work on a little bit. But you know as lawyers look at documents it may lead them to make another request for production. So if the State Department were here they’d tell you: ‘Look quit asking us for more documents. We’ve given you what you wanted so far.’ But for us to be able to do the kind of job you expect and the people who watch your show expect we’re going to have to have access to the witnesses and the documents. But sometimes that means lawyers decide late in the game that I need this batch. So the State Department hasn’t been difficult to work with and I don’t expect that will change.”
Clearly Gowdy’s comments on Tuesday signaled a change in tune.
Conservatives have begun to turn on the chairman, calling him “ineffective.” Retired U.S. Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons spoke to the right-wing website WorldNetDaily, claiming that “the idea that government-agency stonewalling—continuing now for over two years—is the reason Gowdy’s committee can’t make progress is pure nonsense.”
Gowdy now seems intent on pleasing the right by taking his investigation down the same path that led Representative Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, and other Republicans astray. (Issa’s Benghazi investigations became something of a national joke.) To show his toughness in front of the conservative media, Gowdy took to abusing a deputy undersecretary of state. Then, at the end of the hearing, he acknowledged that Rubin was not responsible for his purported anger.
Just the kind of BDSM display that seems to titillate the Republican base.
By: Ari Rabin-Havt, The American Prospect, January 27, 2015
“No Dramatic Headlines Here”: Benghazi Select Committee Hearings Begin; Craziness Inevitably To Follow
There’s a lot going on in the world: we have a new war ramping up, Ebola is spreading, and various NFL players are discovered beating the crap out of women and children (and I for one am shocked that a group of men who have spent their lives being rewarded for cultivating their most violent instincts and abilities would turn out to be prone to violence). So it may have missed your notice that today marks the beginning of public hearings in the select committee on Benghazi, or as Ed Kilgore has termed it, Benghazi! In advance, Democrats on the committee have set up a website showing how all the questions the committee is asking have already been answered, while a Republican PAC is already airing Benghazi-themed ads against Hillary Clinton. But if you were hoping to tune in this afternoon for thundering denunciations and dark warnings of conspiracy, you may be disappointed, as David Corn reports:
In a surprising move that might disappoint right-wingers yearning for proof that Benghazi is Obama’s Watergate (or worse!), the session will not focus on whether the White House purposefully misled the public about the attacks on the US diplomatic compound in that Libyan city that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Nor will it probe the favorite right-wing talking point that President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, for God-knows-what reasons, ordered US forces to stand down and not respond to the murderous assault. Instead, the committee will examine the State Department’s implementation of the recommendations made by the Accountability Review Board, an independent outfit that investigated the attack and in late 2012 issued proposals for improving security for American diplomats and US diplomatic facilities overseas.
That’s actually a worthy topic of discussion! I suppose committee chair Trey Gowdy deserves some credit for starting things off by trying to show everyone that this is going to be a serious undertaking. That isn’t to say there won’t be plenty of time given over to bashing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because there surely will be. But on its first day, the committee looks unlikely to generate dramatic headlines.
So how is this all going to play out? As I see it, there are three general possibilities:
1. For the most part, the committee goes about its work in a responsible way. While there are some angry confrontations with witnesses, on the whole things are pretty boring. Without much in the way of fireworks, press coverage of the hearings is rather perfunctory. Base Republicans wind up feeling disappointed and even betrayed, assuring themselves that the Republicans on the committee wimped out, perhaps because they knew that if they got too close to the truth, State Department assassination squads would take out their families. The true scope of the conspiracy remains buried under a mountain of lies and cowardice. Odds: 37%
2. Full-on circus. Republicans on the committee do a great deal of shouting; photos of the aftermath of the attacks are repeatedly projected on the wall of the hearing room. News coverage is somewhat greater, as nothing draws a crowd of reporters more than politicians yelling at each other. Despite the fact that the “truth” is never fully revealed, the GOP base is pleased. Yet the net effect of the whole thing is to make Republicans look like crazy people. In a cruel irony, this result greatly aids the presidential campaign of one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is able to say that she’s being attacked by a bunch of crazy people, and say it with a smile that drives Republicans around the bend. Odds: 62.99%
3. The committee actually discovers that there was a sinister conspiracy that led to the Americans’ deaths, with high-ranking administration officials at its center. All their accusations, not to mention the creation of this committee, are vindicated, and the moral rot at the heart of the Obama regime is finally revealed for all to see. Odds: .01%
Those are my predictions, anyway. But who knows — maybe they’ll surprise us.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 17, 2014
“Derailing The GOP Jihad”: Deeper Message, Republicans Wasted A Year Arguing What Turned Out To Be Phony Issues
The Senate Intelligence Committee made headlines last week by reporting that the 2012 attack in Benghazi was preventable. But frankly, we knew that. The deeper message of the bipartisan report was that Republicans in Congress wasted a year arguing about what turned out to be mostly phony issues.
The GOP’s Benghazi obsession was the weird backdrop for foreign-policy debate through much of last year.
Sen. Lindsey Graham used it as a pretext for blocking administration nominations. Rep. Darrell Issa used the issue to impugn the integrity and independence of a review conducted by retired Adm. Mike Mullen and former Ambassador Tom Pickering.
Driving the Republican jihad was a claim, first reported in October 2012 by Fox News, that CIA personnel had wanted to respond more quickly to the Benghazi attack but were ordered to “stand down,” perhaps by political higher-ups. Although this claim was promptly rebutted by CIA officials, it was repeated by Fox at least 85 times, according to a review by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. This barrage fueled Republican charges that the Democrats were engaging in a cover-up.
The Senate Intelligence report addressed this inflammatory charge head-on. “The committee explored claims that there was a ‘stand down’ order given to the security team at the annex. Although some members of the security team expressed frustration that they were unable to respond more quickly to the mission compound, the committee found no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction by the chief of [the CIA] base or any other party.”
The Senate panel also rejected the insinuation, made repeatedly by Republicans, that the Obama administration failed to scramble available military assets that could have defended the Benghazi annex and saved the lives of the four American victims. “There were no U.S. military resources in position to intervene in short order in Benghazi,” the report says flatly. “The committee has reviewed the allegations that U.S. personnel … prevented the mounting of any military relief effort during the attacks, but the committee has not found any of these allegations to be substantiated.”
These are bipartisan findings, mind you, endorsed by the panel’s Republican members as well as Democrats. GOP members offered some zingers in their additional minority views, but the Democrats rightly credited their colleagues for standing up to the right-wing spin machine: “We worked together on a bipartisan basis to dispel the many factual inaccuracies and conspiracy theories related to the Benghazi attacks.”
The Obama administration’s supposed cover-up on Benghazi became a crusade for leading Republicans. A low point came when Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Reform issued a report last September questioning “the independence and integrity of the review” by the Mullen-Pickering group. These were extraordinary charges to make against a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former ambassador to six countries — especially since Issa didn’t present any conclusive evidence to back up his allegations.
The Republican tirades about Benghazi were unfortunate not just because they were based on erroneous speculation but because they distracted policymakers from the real challenge of framing coherent policy in the Middle East. Sometimes, it seemed as if Benghazi finger-pointing was the only issue that leading Republicans cared about.
In fact, the Senate Intelligence report echoes many of the themes of the earlier report by the Accountability Review Board, which noted “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies.” Warnings about deteriorating conditions in Benghazi were ignored; proposals to add additional security there were rejected; even as evidence mounted of al-Qaeda’s growing power in Benghazi, the State Department failed to respond adequately. The Senate report makes clear that some important security mistakes were made by Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the courageous but sometimes incautious diplomat who was among those who died in the attack.
Perhaps the silliest aspect of the Benghazi affair was the focus on the errant “talking points” prepared for Congress, which cited incorrect intelligence about “spontaneous demonstrations” in Benghazi that wasn’t corrected by the CIA until a week after the points were delivered on Sunday talk shows by Susan Rice, then U.N. ambassador. Rice is still under a cloud because she repeated the CIA’s “points” prepared at Congress’ insistence.
Next time, the Senate report notes, the intelligence community should just tell Congress what facts are unclassified — and let the legislators do the talking.
By: David Ignatius, Real Clear Politics, January 19, 2014
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