The Clinton Scandals

[Admin]

Back to Hillary's emails, from Mother Jones:

I don't want to make a big point about this, but I want to write it down in order to get comments. Here is my understanding of the results of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's 33,000 emails:

• 3 were marked classified. Two of these were classified in error. The third was classified correctly but was marked improperly (and was pretty trivial anyway).
  
• 110 contained information that wasn't marked classified, but which Hillary and her aides "should have known" was sensitive. That's according to FBI Director James Comey. Based on previous reporting, virtually all of these probably related to the drone program in Pakistan, which was classified but had been extensively reported in the press.
  
• About 2,000 emails were retroactively classified as part of the FOIA process.
  

Is this correct? Or is there some part of this that I continue not to understand?

[Admin]

She disputed an Associated Press report this week that linked some Clinton Foundation donors to government meetings that took place when she was secretary of state. Many of those meetings occurred with “highly respected global leaders” because of their status, she said, not because of their generosity to the Clintons’ charitable foundation. “These were people I was proud to meet with,” she said, mentioning the late Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel and Nobel laureate and economist Muhammad Yunus. To suggest otherwise is “absurd,” she said.

Sounding exasperated, she defended the Clinton Foundation for its transparency, which she argued exceeds the industry standard. And at every turn in the telephone conversation, Clinton returned to critiques of her opponent. “You know more about the foundation than you know about anything concerning Donald Trump, his business, his tax returns. I think it’s remarkable,” she said, her voice rising. “I’m proud of the work my husband started and he did. We provided a massive amount of information,” she argued. “And Donald Trump doesn’t release his tax returns and is indebted to foreign banks and foreign lenders!”

Clinton Defends Foundation: Smoke, But 'No Fire' | RealClearPolitics

[Admin]

How this stuff is spun, even by mainstream media (that are supposedly on her side..)

The Associated Press has just shown us why it is important to be vigilant in how we consume the news as it is reported. They took some interesting information they gathered and spun it into something it wasn’t…scandalous. Here is their lead-in introduction:

More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money – either personally or through companies or groups – to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

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.

Chris Cillizza is an example of a pundit who ran with it. In reference to that intro, he writes this:

It is literally impossible to look at those two paragraphs and not raise your eyebrows. Half of all of the nongovernmental people Clinton either met with or spoke to on the phone during her four years at the State Department were donors to the Clinton Foundation! HALF.
And those 85 people donated $156 million, which, according to my calculator, breaks down to an average contribution just north of $1.8 million. (Yes, I know that not everyone gave the same amount.)
It just plain looks bad. Really bad.

Now…let me pull a couple of other quotes from what he said.

No one is alleging that the Clinton Foundation didn’t (and doesn’t) do enormous amounts of good around the world…
To be clear: I have no evidence — none — that Clinton broke any law or did anything intentionally shady…

In other words, what it comes down to is “it just plain looks bad.” That is basically what most every drummed up “scandal” against Hillary Clinton comes down to: from the perspective of the people judging her – it looks bad. Welcome to the world of optics as scandal.

One way to look at this is that the AP spun the story they wanted to tell about this information. That happens almost all the time and we often don’t notice. To clarify how that happened here, note first of all the AP headline: “Many Donors to Clinton Foundation Met With Her at State.” As Adam Khan points out – that’s actually not true.

Washington Monthly | How the AP Spun the Story About the Clinton Foundation

[Admin]

Smoke? Yes, but fire?

Most of the reaction was overreaction. The article contained no real allegations—let alone evidence—of any corruption or breach of ethics. Most of the meetings cited were the sort of one-on-ones a secretary of state could be expected to hold, whether or not the person in the room with Clinton was a donor to the foundation. The story dwelled on a meeting she had with Nobel Prize winner and foundation donor Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer in microlending with whom Clinton has known for 30 years. In one instance, the article cited a meeting Clinton held with the head of an AIDS foundation, which was developing projects in Africa with the State Department. And OMG—this foundation also gave to the Clinton Foundation, which has long been involved in the global fight against AIDS.

The Question No One's Asking About the Clinton Foundation | Mother Jones

[Admin]

How to manufacture a scandal.. 

ERIC BOEHLERT: So the [Associated Press] went in, they got access to Hillary Clinton’s scheduling from secretary of state, and they crossed matched it to see who she met with that were Clinton [Foundation] donors and they came up with the wildly misleading premise of the story and then this absolutely categorically false tweet. [...]

The obvious implication, she’s running a pay-for-play shop and if you donated to the Clinton Foundation, that’s how you met with her, if you didn’t meet with her, well good luck. She turned this into some kind of cash turnstile. So if you then go to read the story, where did they get "more than a half?" Well "more than a half" was 85 out of like 174 meetings were with donors.

And you read that and you think, “She was secretary of state for 1,400 days. How the hell did she only have 175 meetings with people?” And you think, “That doesn’t make any sense.” And then you read, oh, the Associated Press is taking the tiny subset of people. They’re leaving out every government worker she met with and every representative from a foreign government.

So when you factually look at her schedule, she had something like 1,700 meetings, met with thousands and thousands of people. But the AP wanted to turn this into a story, so they threw out 90 percent of those meetings and said, “We’re only going to focus on the private citizens, and that’s where we’re going to get more than half.”

Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert Explains How The AP Manufactured False Hillary Clinton “Pay-For-Play” Speculation

[Admin]

The whole article is required reading from the ethics chef under Bush:

These critics have yet to point to any provision of the federal statutes or ethics regulations that was violated by Secretary Clinton or her staff in their dealings with the foundation and its principals, agents and donors. Was there favoritism? Probably, yes. But laws were not broken. If favoritism by political appointees toward outside persons and organizations were illegal, the United States government would be quite different than it is today. White House political appointees and members of Congress show favoritism regularly, from how quickly they return campaign contributors’ telephone calls to which meeting requests they honor to who gets what they want in the policy arena.

This kind of access is the most corrupting brand of favoritism and pervades the entire government. Under both Republican and Democratic presidents, top ambassadorial posts routinely go to campaign contributors. Yet more campaign contributors hound these and other State Department employees for introductions abroad, preferred access and advancement of trade and other policy agendas. More often than not the State Department does their bidding.

The Real Clinton Foundation Revelation - The New York Times

[Admin]

Let's stick to the facts please, this article is required reading..

These facts raise legitimate questions. Did donors to the Foundation get special access to the secretary and the department as a result of their donations? If they did get special access, did they receive any favors? Did Hillary or her staff do anything illegal, unethical, or contrary to U.S. interests or administration policy?

The good news is that as a result of these investigations we can now answer those questions pretty definitively: no, no, and no. The bad news is that the press doesn’t seem to want to take “no” for an answer, even if the answer is based on the evidence of its own reporting.

Consider the story in today’s New York Times by Eric Lichtblau based on a new batch of emails released by the conservative group Judicial Watch as part of its lawsuit. The emails show that Doug Band, then with an arm of the Clinton Foundation, asked Huma Abedin, a top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to help him procure special diplomatic passports for himself and two other Clinton Foundation staffers. Band also asked for a private meeting between Secretary Clinton and Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, a Clinton Foundation donor. These emails, writes Lichtblau, raise “new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access at the department.”

The reporting in the piece itself, however, doesn’t so much raise new questions as answer old ones. As Lichtblau explains, Band wanted the diplomatic passports because he and his colleagues were about to accompany Bill Clinton on an emergency mission to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American journalists (as a former president, Clinton already had such a passport). In the end, State didn’t issue special passports to the Foundation staffers, despite the risks they were taking, because doing so would have been contrary to Department rules. Liveris did get a short meeting with Mrs. Clinton for a perfectly valid reason: he had offered to let Mr. Clinton use his private plane to fly to Pyongyang.

Other stories on the Clinton Foundation over the last two weeks fit the same basic pattern: the facts dug up by the investigation disprove the apparent thesis of the investigation.

Washington Monthly | How the Press is Making the Clinton Foundation into the New Benghazi

[Admin]

And then there are those that actually claim that the media have a liberal bias...

True, there aren’t many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he’s being graded on a curve. If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention.

Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.

Step back for a moment, and think about what that foundation is about. When Bill Clinton left office, he was a popular, globally respected figure. What should he have done with that reputation? Raising large sums for a charity that saves the lives of poor children sounds like a pretty reasonable, virtuous course of action. And the Clinton Foundation is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an “A” rating — better than the American Red Cross. 

Now, any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest. You could imagine the Clintons using the foundation as a slush fund to reward their friends, or, alternatively, Mrs. Clinton using her positions in public office to reward donors. So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation’s operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation “raises questions.” But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, “no.” 

Consider the big Associated Press report suggesting that Mrs. Clinton’s meetings with foundation donors while secretary of state indicate “her possible ethics challenges if elected president.” Given the tone of the report, you might have expected to read about meetings with, say, brutal foreign dictators or corporate fat cats facing indictment, followed by questionable actions on their behalf.

But the prime example The A.P. actually offered was of Mrs. Clinton meeting with Muhammad Yunus, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who also happens to be a longtime personal friend. If that was the best the investigation could come up with, there was nothing there.

So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

And here’s a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t. George W. Bush’s policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today. In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can’t afford another election tipped by innuendo.

Hillary Clinton Gets Gored - The New York Times

[Admin]

Depressingly familiar, this istuff. Something new is discovered. Right-wing media blow it up out of all proportions, but a closer look discovers there is nothing there, but you won't hear that from these media..

State Department lawyers announced that 30 emails the FBI recovered from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s private server regarding the September 2012 Benghazi attacks contained only one “all-new” email, which was a personal message to Clinton. The announcement contrasts right-wing media hype that scandalized the emails as a “Benghazi bombshell” and fodder for conspiracy theorists, and implied that they might reveal new information to negatively implicate Clinton in the Benghazi attacks.

HotAir’s Ed Morrissey: Announcement Could Fuel “Potential Perjury And Obstruction Charges” Against Clinton. HotAir editor Ed Morrissey wrote that the announcement was “another unpleasant surprise from the e-mail scandal” and that it could “add fuel to the fire over potential perjury and obstruction charges relating to Hillary’s Congressional testimony, assuming anything in them contradict her representations there.” Morrissey added that Clinton “managed to shoot herself in the foot politically by creating the opportunity for them to be found in this manner rather than turning them over from the beginning.” From the August 30 blog (emphasis original):

Fox News’ Fox & Friends Hosts: The Discovery Is A “Benghazi Bombshell.” Fox co-host Brian Kilmeade said the announcement was “unbelievable,” while co-host Ainsley Earhardt claimed the findings showed that Clinton’s claim "that she released all of her emails” was “false.” An on-screen graphic called it a “Benghazi Bombshell.” From the August 31 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends:

Politico: Only One Of The Emails Was New, And It Was A Personal Letter Praising Clinton. Politico reported on September 7 that government lawyers “said a closer review of the records the FBI located revealed only one of the messages was entirely absent from those produced by previous State Department searches,” which was a “flattering note sent by a veteran U.S. diplomat following [Clinton’s] testimony on Benghazi before a Senate panel in January 2013.” As Politico noted, the set of “30 Benghazi-related messages” turned out “to contain little fodder for critics.” From the September 7 article:

Right-Wing Media’s Supposed “Benghazi Bombshell” Of 30 New Clinton Emails Falls Flat

[fsilk]

"The only new email found was a personal letter praising Clinton"

This is incredible stuff, thanks admin.