The Music Goes ‘Round and ‘Round


I’ve been avoiding remarking on the presidential campaigns as their Mighty Wurlitzers spin out. However, this comment by Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post on the latest revelation about Hillary Clinton’s emails caught my attention:

To be clear: Clinton has already been cleared of any official wrongdoing in the matter by Comey. And Comey and the FBI were aware of this latest batch of emails — hell, they found them! — when he rendered his judgment on Clinton.

Is that actually what happened? Maybe my opinions are clouding my judgments and my recollection. What I remember is that, after laying out a prima facie case that Sec. Clinton had actually broken the law he declined to request an indictment anyway, saying that the didn’t think he had a winnable case and presumably to take the pressure off his boss and her boss.

That didn’t clear Sec. Clinton of anything. A case could be brought later as new evidence emerges or old evidence that makes Director Comey’s and by extension the administration’s position untenable is revealed.

36 comments… add one
  • CStanley Link

    That’s the problem with Comey’s decision to not recommend prosecution/ it’s being used to claim complete exoneration and even blanket immunity. The current issues being raised aren’t even related to the set up of her email accounts- they go to the content of her emails which clearly describe graft.

  • TastyBits Link

    It depends upon what the definition of “is” is, and now, the home audience will be playing as well.

    Can somebody explain to me why I was doing such harm to the system by not voting for all these years. Are the newly minted “none of the above” voters admitting I was right?

    The only vote that counts is for the R or D candidate. Voting for any other candidate or not voting is by default voting for the winner. When you refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils, you are actually voting for the greater of two evils.

    If you want to do so, do it with the full knowledge that you are contributing to the collapse of the system, and by the way, welcome to the party. Here, have a few marshmallows and hot dogs.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Comey said he received a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General concerning possible transmittal of classified information on a private system. In response the FBI investigated whether classified information was stored in a way that violated two statutes, and whether classified information had been accessed by any hostile power.

    The framing of the investigation as a leak of classified information was the vehicle by which Comey emphasized that it was important that Clinton did not intentionally want to harm the U.S. or release government secrets to a foreign government. He wasn’t investigating violations of FOIA or the Records Act, though he obviously had evidence of those violations.

  • When the manifestly corrupt Edwin Edwards ran against David Duke for the Democratic nomination for governor of Louisiana, there was a famous bumper sticker: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”

    In my view supporting Hillary Clinton on those grounds and keeping that in mind is an honorable and decent position. Supporting her because she’s the greatest ever and has been unfairly persecuted borders on the unhinged. Attempting to delegitimize criticism of Sec. Clinton on the grounds that criticizing her is misogyny is vile. Indeed, the need in a republic to be able to criticize the chief executive is itself an honorable and decent reason to oppose her election.

  • The framing of the investigation as a leak of classified information was the vehicle by which Comey emphasized that it was important that Clinton did not intentionally want to harm the U.S. or release government secrets to a foreign government.

    That was sleight of hand. Intent is not necessary in the presence of reckless disregard. He used the words “extreme carelessness” in his testimony. That’s literally the dictionary definition of reckless disregard.

  • TastyBits Link

    Even Edwin Edwards political enemies admitted he was railroaded by the federal prosecutors. He had been in and out of office for 30+ years, and they could not get him on any legitimate crimes. Either he was the crook of the century, or he was not doing anything too spectacular.

    David Duke, on the other hand, has a long and public record of his achievements, and for those not familiar, they are not positive.

    The slogan should have been, “Vote for the politician who has been accused of being a crook but for whom there has never been a shred of evidence against him, and in the future a federal prosecutor will spend millions to convict him using questionable tactics and evidence. The other guy is a racist with a long and provable history.”

    The problem is the length of car bumpers and the voter’s attention span. For this election, some people are trying to take the candidate with the long and public history and send it down the memory hole. I would suggest that this post is about that very topic, but instead of acknowledging reality, reality is twisted to fit the narrative.

    If this much effort must be spent to rebuild the history of one candidate, I would suggest that there is a problem. If the other candidate were the monster he were portrayed as, people would be coming out of the woodwork with stories. Where are they?

    If anybody else believes that Hillary Clinton is better for the US than Donald Trump, they need to stop trashing her. All you are doing is ensuring that she will be “damaged goods” if she is elected, and the same goes for anybody who plans to vote for Trump for the same reasons.

  • Guarneri Link

    She can open a jar of pickles, so that’s good enough for me…………..and apparently enough others as well.

    Welcome to America. At least the Clinton’s know their audience.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @Tastybits, if you don’t vote, you don’t count. The losing party can or should look around after the election and see where they under-performed and the easiest place to find regrets are in third party votes. These represent people who cared enough to vote, but not for the two choices. A party is unlikely to change in response to non-voters because they may still not vote. This assumes third-party voting is significant, which often it isn’t.

    Also, in the Presidential election it usually matters for “bragging rights” purposes if the President gets 50% of the votes.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @Tastybits, the information that came out in Edwards’ first trial about the bags of cash and gambling debts was adequate to identify him as a crook, if not a convicted one. People don’t deal with cash in the amounts Edwards used without trying to conceal illegal transactions, just like Clinton set up a private server with the obvious intent to circumvent disclosure.

  • steve Link

    I thought what he said was that it was not a case which anyone would actually prosecute. When all was said and done they found only one email that was marked as classified (not in the header but in the body of the email) and no one has ever been prosecuted for just one email. So, yes she broke the law, but it is not the kind of thing for which people get prosecuted. (All of the other examples of people being prosecuted involved lots of communications and/or they took the info into hostile territory.)

    Steve

  • steve Link

    “In my view supporting Hillary Clinton on those grounds and keeping that in mind is an honorable and decent position. ”

    Seems a bit much. I would say justifiable and leave it at that. By the same token I can see someone supporting Trump because they think she is a crook. I can’t see supporting Trump because you think he is actually good.

    Steve

  • I can’t see supporting Trump because you think he is actually good.

    and I’d probably say that anyone who believed that is, as P. G. Wodehouse might have said, far from hinged.

  • I thought what he said was that it was not a case which anyone would actually prosecute.

    which is not the same as “clearing” Sec. Clinton which is my point.

    That people have actually been prosecuted for a single infraction weakens his case somewhat. I think it’s pretty darned clear he was making a political or policy judgment rather than a legal one. He may even have made the right political or policy judgment—prosecuting Sec. Clinton would have thrown the country into an uproar, possibly dangerously so.

  • steve Link

    “That people have actually been prosecuted for a single infraction weakens his case somewhat. ”

    When? All of the cases cited on right wing sites were cases where there were multiple communications.

    Steve

  • TastyBits Link

    @PD Shaw

    Dealing in cash is not illegal, but I realize that the government has done everything it can to make it as illegal as possible. I also realize that in today’s culture anything you do not want to be public is considered nefarious.

    I am not particularly fond of Hillary Clinton, but I can understand the reason for wanting to simplify her email setup. I have a work account. I have a domain with a primary account and a few specialized accounts. I also have a hotmail (or whatever), yahoo, and multiple gmail accounts, and the gmail accounts are specifically to put roadblocks or speed bumps between me and the world. (I am sure that makes me a suspect to many people.)

    After the Whitewater investigation, I am not sure that I blame her for destroying 30,000 emails. As to her handling of the classified material, she is probably as guilty as Gen. Petraeus, and she should have at least the same punishment.

    Here is the problem: She will never get a fair investigation and judgement anyway. One side will excuse her behavior, and the other side will throw the book at her. Neither will really care about the collateral damage it does, and they will both be convinced that they are acting justly and fairly with all that is good on their side.

    The Whitewater investigation turned into a fiasco that never should have happened, and the Plame investigation turned into a fiasco that never should have happened. In Whitewater, Kenneth Starr could not find anything to railroad (that word again) President Clinton, and he started snooping for anything. I think he was even sniffing his dirty underwear. In Plame, Patrick Fitzgerald learned it was Richard Armitage almost immediately, but he wanted something he could railroad (that word again) VP Cheney.

    Like it or not, any investigation into Hillary Clinton will be a f*cking fiasco of major proportion, and the 30,000 emails would just be more sh*t to pin crap on her. There is no telling what could be found in them to build a case to railroad (that effing word again) her. By found, it could be a plot to overthrow the government, pirating mp3’s, or a recipe for coon stew.

    The system is rigged top-to-bottom and side-to-side. People without a “pot to piss in” are elected to Congress, and years later, they are able to become multi-millionaires on a salary that would be impossible to do. All the “good government” types seem to not notice, but when they get it into their head that somebody is doing something different, it must be nefarious.

    Director Comey made the best choice. She will be tried on election day. If you think she is guilty, vote Trump. If you think she is not guilty, do not vote for Trump, and if you think she is innocent vote for her. The not guilty votes will be added to the innocent votes, and you will help to elect her. If it makes you feel better, she can be evil but technically innocent. After the election, it should be a dead issue. but in the rigged system, this will have been the warm up.

    As to protest votes, you have got to be joking. Who exactly is getting this “message”? I guess some people still have not gotten the memo: The voters do not matter. The voters are sheep. They will go where they are lead. The “informed voter” is one of the idiots trying to to convince the less sheeplike that the wolf has their best interests in mind.

    On the Republican side, we have the smartest sheep are made at the other animals because they will not act like sheep, and the smart sheep keep reminding everybody that these non-sheep are really dumb sheep. These really, really smart sheep have informed us that the person the non-sheep choose will upend the pasture, and their proof is that they are really, really smart sheep. (They cannot figure out which animals are not sheep, but they have special “sheep smarts” that only really, really smart sheep can understand.)

    The smartest Republican sheep are going to vote for the person the smartest Democrat sheep choose, and they are going to do this in order to send a signal to the Republican party which is controlled by them.

    If I understand correctly, the anti-Trump Republican are like a homeowner who burns down his house and gives the insurance check to the neighbor because he does not like the TV show his wife wants to watch. OK, I got it.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @Tastybits, “Dealing in cash is not illegal.”

    Edwards was paying for things with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, beyond what a government salary could account for. Prosecutors put on a lot of evidence of huge cash transactions as circumstantial evidence of pay-to-play and it wasn’t enough. They got him later. He was always a crook. Clinton is an unconvicted crook as well.

  • Andy Link

    “All of the cases cited on right wing sites were cases where there were multiple communications.”

    Which was the case with Clinton. I’m not sure where you’re getting that it wasn’t multiple communications. It was.

    Anyway, short of prosecution there are a variety of administrative punishments for people who mishandle classified information which people are punished for all the time. Clinton, being a cabinet official and potential President, is immune to all those administrative actions.

    What really surprised me is that no one was prosecuted. Classified information just doesn’t appear all by itself on a private server – someone had to put it there. Usually in cases where classified information is removed from a security facility or secure system, that makes intent a lot clearer and lowers the bar to prosecution. Supposedly the State Department reopened an investigation to look at DoS employees – we’ll see if anything comes from it, but it appears that Clinton’s staff is free and clear by riding on her coattails.

  • Guarneri Link

    “At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

    Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton’s help with a visa problem and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm’s corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.

    The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton.”

    Don’t know if it was illegal. And it’s not like there were bags of cash delivered by plane, er, in the dead of night. But really, what’s the real difference? This ain’t just client services.

    To paraphrase Dave. This isn’t the kind of Cabinet and Chief Executive running my country that I want.

  • Andy Link

    To a certain extent, that is just politics. Pay to play is pretty much the norm (just look at the juicy ambassadorships that campaign bundlers routinely get). I don’t like it, but that isn’t something unique to Clinton and any political system will have at least some of that.

    What bothers me is the foreign angle. If our politicians can be bought at the very least only Americans should be able to buy them.

  • ... Link

    Indeed, the need in a republic to be able to criticize the chief executive is itself an honorable and decent reason to oppose her election.

    That bridge was crossed and nuked with about a thousand 50 megaton nuclear devices when Obama was elected, Dave. The only reason anyone ever opposed anything Obama ever proposed was because they were racist.

    Now you’ve already been told by some of the same Only Righteous People That Ever Lived that you’re a regular Haven Monaghan for not kissing Hillary’s ass. That’s just the fucking way it is. Being opposed to her, now, for that reason, is worrying about tying up your horse so it doesn’t run away when horses have been extinct for millions of years.

    I think I’ll try nominating Paul Anka on the National Razor Party ticket in 2020. “Move, Slice, Hammer.” Sounds like the making of a good bumper sticker!

  • ... Link

    If our politicians can be bought at the very least only Americans should be able to buy them.

    Racist.

  • ... Link

    The losing party can or should look around after the election and see where they under-performed and the easiest place to find regrets are in third party votes. These represent people who cared enough to vote, but not for the two choices. A party is unlikely to change in response to non-voters because they may still not vote. This assumes third-party voting is significant, which often it isn’t.

    But PD, when the two parties largely agree on everything truly important AND DON’T WANT TO CHANGE, what are you going to do? Especially when the two main third party options also agree on the agenda of the two big parties? Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Libertarians all want open borders. They all want more international agreements. They all want more imperial government. The Dems and Reps both want more foreign interventionism, and at least I think the Libs and Greens disagree there.

    But who exactly was one supposed to vote for, if not Trump, that held out against these things? There hadn’t been someone of that type to get even notional support since Perot. Truly, there were no options.

    And look at what the Republican Party did after 2012. They decided that the only reason people hadn’t voted for them was because they hadn’t pushed massive Third World immigration enough. WTF?

    Not voting was the only reasonable option for a voter like me. Until Trump. Now I’m voting for a riot. Now I’m voting to see the system burn. It’s not like the system (and those that support it with enthusiasm) want me and mine to do anything but die, preferably horribly. So fuck them, and fuck them hard. If it takes voting for scum like Trump to do it, so be it.

    To that end I’m going to look into starting my own party. Look for the National Razor Party on your local ballots in two to four years. Or start your own branch. “Do it to them before they do it to you” will be the party mantra. I’ll look into important things like a catchy emblem later this week.

  • Andy Link

    Ice,

    I guess it depends on what you value. There are a lot of people (too many, IMO), who subscribe to the “lesser of two evils” calculus. Personally, I vote for whoever I think is the best candidate on the ballot in my particular state. IMO, that has a couple of benefits:

    – It’s an affirmative decision, one that I can live with.
    – It doesn’t give political capital to someone who doesn’t deserve it and thereby enable them and their allies.

    My third party vote may, statistically, help Clinton win (at least as the race stands now – things could obviously change), but that is better than voting for Trump. I don’t want either of these candidates to have much political capital should they win, and the best way to achieve that is to vote third party and deny them that political capital. The last thing we need is an unpopular, divisive President who believes he/she has a mandate to execute their vision because millions voted for them only because the other one was worse.

  • steve Link

    Andy- “Which was the case with Clinton. I’m not sure where you’re getting that it wasn’t multiple communications. It was.”

    No sure if I can find it again, but in an email by email analysis, there were three emails that were marked as confidential. Two of those were acknowledged as misclassified. That left one actual confidential email. But, assume the worst and say there were 3. In all of ht other cited cases there were dozens to hundreds, and they were higher level classifications IIRC. Would a prosecutor really bring a case for 3 emails, when 2 were openly acknowledged as misclassified?

    Steve

  • steve Link

    Drew- Yup. this pay to play. I am sure you will join us efforts to reduce the influence of wealthy campaign donors who donate money directly to the campaigns of politicians, just os they can have access. I remember when you opposed Citizens United so I am sure you will support this effort.

    Steve

  • TastyBits Link

    @Icepick

    I had a really long screed about this nonsense (actually, absolute bullsh*t, but why acknowledge reality?). I have changed my mind. Hillary Clinton is the burn down the f*cking place candidate.

    She will never be able to deliver a 1/10 of what she and the Democrats are promising to the far Left of their own party, and when the Bernie Sanders supporters, the Occupy Wall Street, the Safe Zoners, the Anarchists, and the BLMer’s realize that she sold them out to the sheiks in Saudi and the moneybags on Wall Street, they ain’t gonna be happy.

    These good folks are not quite like your typical Tea Party dufus. They do not wear funny hats with Lipton tea bags hanging off, and the Leftists know all the sexual connotations to avoid. These folks are a little more direct in their approach. When the Democrats have their Tea Party moment, stay the hell out of the way.

    If you thought these recent riots were bad, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Half of them would just as soon burn down the place for the fun of it, and I mean with matches and gasoline. (Come to think of it, …) After four years of Hillary Clinton, the country will be begging for you and your party to take over.

  • Andy Link

    Steve,

    This is from FBI director Comey:

    “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. 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 e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.”

    and

    “The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

    This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.

    With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”

    Finally:

    “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

    For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that 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. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).”

    Earlier press reporting indicates that those Top Secret/SAP emails were Clinton approving drone strikes as part of the approval process before the strike occurred.

  • The first paragraph in the last group of quotes from Director Comey’s statement is what I had in mind. Intent is not required in the presence of reckless disregard. The legal definition of “reckless disregard” is “extreme carelessness”. That’s how I conclude that Director Comey’s decision not to seek an indictment was a political/policy decision.

  • Andy Link

    Dave,

    I think his wording was intentionally careful: “…there is evidence that they were extremely careless…”

    “There is evidence” is a big caveat when it comes to a prosecution compared to other word choices he might have used. Extreme carelessness seems solidly supported by facts.

  • steve Link

    “In his testimony, Comey said three of Clinton’s emails had “portion markings” on them indicating they were classified, but since they weren’t properly marked in the email header, Clinton could have missed them. He also said he believes at least two were mistakenly marked as confidential, indicated by a ‘c’ lower in the body of the message.”

    So, we end up with one email (maybe) correctly marked as confidential that was sent to Clinton, and even then it was not marked as such in the header or subject.

    As to those not marked as confidential, they were all but one about drone strikes. According to the WSJ, the Murdoch owned mouthpiece for the GOP, it was actually not uncommon practice to resort to private email to make decisions about drones when a quick response was needed.

    So, unlike other cases, we are talking about only one validly marked (maybe) email. We then have a bunch of others, but they really were all about 7 drone strikes, and multiple diplomats were using private email as means to get around the slow but more secure system in order to give timely responses. If the WSJ is correct, should this actually be prosecuted?

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-emails-in-probe-dealt-with-planned-drone-strikes-1465509863

  • Andy Link

    Steve,

    Whether an email was marked or not is irrelevant. Deleting classification markings (or failing to add them as the case may be) does not magically make the information less classified, nor does it lessen the potential damage from leaks or hacking (almost certain in the latter case). This is particularly true of of the drone strike program – one can’t use the ignorance excuse here. Anyone who’s been remotely involved in such things would know that operational decisions about future operations for a sensitive program involving the deliberate killing of Presidentially declared enemies of the US is not something that should be discussed on on any unencrypted system, much less one that is completely private with minimal to nonexistent security.

    “According to the WSJ, the Murdoch owned mouthpiece for the GOP, it was actually not uncommon practice to resort to private email to make decisions about drones when a quick response was needed.”

    I don’t know if that’s true or not. If it is, there are ways to facilitate that through the use of pre-briefed code words. There’s no evidence Clinton’s State Department used such measures – if they had, the messages themselves wouldn’t be classified.

  • Veritas Link

    Last time I heard anyone make a comment like the one the creature at the Post did, I was listening to Nigerian television, home of virtue.

  • steve Link

    Andy- Per the State Department, those call sheets were considered classified only until the decision was made to make the call. Once that decision was made, the material was no longer classified and the markings were supposed to be removed. They did remove them out of the header and subject, but not out of the body of the material. Either Clinton did not see the marking, or she knew it was no longer classified as, again per State, in the earlier emails it was clear that the decision had been made to call.

    Steve

  • Andy Link

    Steve,

    You’re confusing two different things. The call sheets had nothing to do with emails about drone strikes.

  • Additionally, there is some information that is “classified at birth”, i.e. it doesn’t matter at all whether it’s marked or not: it’s classified.

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