The Clinton Scandals

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So, how many deplorables in the Trump electorate are there actually. The Economist tries to figure out:

How deplorable are Trump supporters?
Sep 13th 2016, 14:53 BY THE DATA TEAM

IN HER defence, Hillary Clinton did warn that she would be “grossly generalistic” before she began. “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States said at a fundraiser on September 9th, before classifying her opponent’s voters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it”. Conservative politicians and pundits pounced on the comment, comparing it with Mitt Romney’s ill-advised denigration in 2012 of 47% of American voters as “dependent” and “entitled”. Seeking to defuse the firestorm, Mrs Clinton apologised the next day—though only for having assigned a number, 50%, to the share of Mr Trump’s voters she believes are beyond salvage. She held firm on the assertion that such unsavoury characters lurk among Trumpistas in unspecified quantities.



Mrs Clinton’s guess about the magnitude of the “deplorable” fraction of Mr Trump’s enthusiasts can still be subjected to a rough fact-check. On July 30th and August 6th, YouGov included in its weekly poll four questions about “racial resentment”, which seek to measure attitudes regarding race relations. At first glance, Mrs Clinton’s 50% estimate looks impressively accurate: 58% of respondents who said they backed Mr Trump resided in the poll’s highest quartile for combined racial-resentment scores. And at a lower threshold of offensiveness—merely distasteful rather than outright deplorable, say—91% of Mr Trump’s voters scored above the national average.

Nonetheless, caution is required before declaring Mrs Clinton’s claim vindicated. First, our racial-resentment index, constructed from a standard battery of questions used in political-science studies for decades, is only an indirect proxy for racism itself. For all the pride in political incorrectness that Mr Trump has brought into vogue, people remain hesitant to admit their prejudices to pollsters. Instead, researchers measure racial resentment using questions on preferential treatment for blacks, such as strong disagreement with the statement that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class”.

Moreover, Mrs Clinton accused Trumpistas of far more prejudices than racism alone. Regarding her charge of homophobia, 51.8% of Mr Trump’s partisans—again, just above her suggested figure of half—do support a hypothetical constitutional amendment that would allow states to ban gay marriage. But it is of course possible to support this policy for reasons other than bias against homosexuals, just as it is possible to oppose affirmative action for reasons other than bias against racial minorities.

And regardless of how close her estimate was to the statistical truth, the backlash to Mr Romney’s 47% speech should have been enough for a cautious politician like Mrs Clinton to realise that insulting precise fractions of Americans is bad politics. There is no shortage of images of indisputably deplorable behaviour among Mr Trump’s backers. Even if the wonky, data-hungry Mrs Clinton is familiar with the polling figures that could conceivably support her position, sometimes it’s wiser to let a picture take the place of a thousand statistics.

[Admin]

So where are you know with these allergies..

Well, maybe simply this:

There have been questions over why Clinton didn't disclose her health condition earlier but her aides said the former Secretary of State didn't disclose her pneumonia because she thought she could power through and wasn't coughing Saturday. Now aides realize that was a mistake, NBC News reported.

Clinton's pneumonia: Just how bad is it?

[Admin]

A warmed up corpse, if anything..

Fox Host Megyn Kelly invited former Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya Greg Hicks on her program to attack Hillary Clinton's handling of the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi. Kelly’s attacks ignored the multiple bipartisan Congressional investigations that have routinely failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing.

The Benghazi hoax cooked up by Fox News was debunked by an investigation by the House Select Committee, a review by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and an independent report by the State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB). Although official reports discredited the network’s whirlwind of Benghazi misinformation, Fox News figures continue to cite Benghazi to attack Clinton on air. From the September 13 edition of Fox News’ The Kelly File:

After Four Years And Multiple Investigations, Fox News' Megyn Kelly Relitigates Benghazi

[Admin]

Well, well..

ABC News detailed a final State Department investigation which concluded that past secretaries of state, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice's immediate staff, "handled classified material on unclassified email systems." The findings come as the FBI investigates a private email server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state. 

For months, conservative media figures have attacked Clinton, baselessly accusing her of wrongdoing for receiving State Department emails on her private email account while secretary of state. On February 4, reports emerged that Colin Powell and aides to Condoleezza Rice also used private email accounts when they served under former President George W. Bush, and some of their emails similarly contained information that was retroactively classified. 

The March 4 ABC News article reported that "a final memorandum" issued by "[t]he State Department's internal investigation arm" found that former secretaries of state "handled classified material on unclassified email systems." The State Department found that emails handled on private email accounts associated with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice contain "information classified at the Secret or Confidential levels.'" 

Former Secretary Powell responded that those identified emails were not marked "'Confidential at the time and they were sent as unclassified,'" seemingly underscoring Secretary Clinton's defense that "the State Department is classifying documents too aggressively"

State Dept. Concludes Past Secretaries Of State "Definitively" Handled Classified Information On Private Email

[Admin]

Something to keep in mind, especially compared to the rather shady Trump Foundation

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her allies have so far offered a simple defense of the Clinton Foundation — which Donald Trump, Republicans, some left-wing critics, and much of the press have characterized as a giant pay-for-play scam that the wealthy and powerful used to gain access to the Clintons.

The Clintonites assert there’s simply no evidence of a quid pro quo, no evidence of favors being given by Clinton to foundation donors. On the contrary, according to reporting thus far, the evidence that exists is of such favors being requested and denied. When foundation staffer Doug Band tried to use his ties to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to get a diplomatic passport for himself,he was rebuffed. When he tried to get a visa for a British soccer player, Abedin said the request made her nervous, and Band backed off.

But some Clinton surrogates have tried a different approach: focusing on what the foundation does, rather than what it didn’t do. In August, Clinton loyalist James Carville told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that if the press succeeds in getting the foundation shut down, "There will be people that are going to die because of this."

The foundation negotiated drugs prices to reduce malaria drug prices by 89 percent," Carville said. "The Clinton Foundation was taking no money for the Clintons, raising money from rich people and giving it to poor people. … All of the people that helped shut it down will say, some people, a million people, had to die, but we had to prove a point."

The key question on the Clinton Foundation is whether it saved lives. The answer is clearly yes. - Vox

[Admin]

Comey was a Republican nomination, keep that in mind..

During the House Judiciary Committee’s annual Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation hearing, FBI Director James Comey dismantled an attempt to scandalize the immunity deals granted to long-time Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson in the now-closed FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Right-wing media has long tried to scandalize various grants of immunity in the email investigation, most recently by falsely claiming that the limited immunity provided to Mills and Samuelson for a specific laptop search was broad and suggesting it is proof of criminal wrongdoing. However, as Comey notes, the form of immunity that was granted is "a fairly normal tool in investigations." From the September 28 House Judiciary Committee's Annual Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Hearing, as aired on Fox News' America's Newsroom

FBI Director Comey Dismantles Right-Wing Media’s Attempt To Scandalize Limited Immunity For Aides In Clinton Email Case

[Admin]

What is their strategy, if you repeat it enough it becomes truth?

As he has several times recently, Mike Pence repeated a false claim that the Associated Press found that more than half of the individual meetings that she gave while Secretary of State were with major donors to the Clinton Foundation.

While the Associated Press initially tweeted the false claim that “More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation,” they have since admitted it was not true. 

Pence also falsely stated that the foundation spends only 10 percent on charitable purposes. Politifact has debunked this notion, as it includes only the foundation’s grants to other charities and completely omits the charity’s own programmatic work. The foundation in fact has spent the vast majority of its funds on promoting global health, empowerment of women, reducing childhood obesity, addressing climate change, and rebuilding Haiti.

Pence repeats debunked Associated Press tweet about Clinton Foundation

[Admin]

Sigh..

During the October 6 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly asked if “a major scandal” will “erupt in the Department of Justice,” claiming “[m]any Americans, including this one, now believe the fix was in regarding investigations into the IRS hammering some right-wing groups, and the Clinton email fiasco.” He then claimed “there is now enough evidence of corruption in the Justice Department that an independent prosecutor should be appointed,” though he didn’t specify what should be investigated.

To back up his claim of corruption, O’Reilly played clips from Congressional hearings about immunity deals that Clinton aides received in connection with the FBI investigation. But the immunity deals were limited and were necessary to resolve interagency disputes on what information contained in the Clinton email server should be retroactively classified, and Director Comey explained during the hearing that it “is a fairly normal tool in investigations.”

O’Reilly also alleged there was corruption regarding the investigation into the IRS allegedly targeting right-wing organizations, complaining that then-IRS head Lois Lerner "was never really held legally accountable." But a congressional investigation revealed that progressive groups were also subjected to the same kind of scrutiny as conservative groups, evidence which Fox News itself ignored when it first came to light.

And months before that, in June 2013, the congressional investigation found the culprit behind the increased scrutiny of organizations applying for tax-exempt status: not Lois Lerner, but a Cincinnati-based IRS manager who told investigators that he “instructed his team of screeners” to look for cases of political-sounding groups applying for tax-exempt status, and that “he took this action on his own.”

O’Reilly Uses Old, Repeatedly Debunked Right-Wing Myths To Call For “Independent Prosecutor” Of “Corrupt” DOJ

[Admin]

Those emails.. As so often, the 'devil' is in the details and Vox is doing much of the legwork..

We should get the most important point about this out of the way: From what we know from the FBI, Trump’s accusation that is flat-out incorrect. FBI Director James Comey has repeatedly said that there’s “no evidence” Clinton’s emails were deleted in an attempt to hide them, and all of the documents released by the FBI’s investigation since then have backed that up that conclusion. But like many wild accusations, Trump’s claim is built around a true fact: Somewhere around 33,000 emails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state really were deleted. Trump, however, omitted the most crucial fact about these emails — Clinton’s team ordered them to be deleted before any subpoenas had been issued.

For one, Clinton’s staff told the contractor managing the private sever to delete the second batch of emails in December 2014, according to the FBI. The House Republicans’ Benghazi committee didn’t order that all emails on the private server be preserved until March 2015. (There’s a complicated counter-narrative that these emails weren’t actually deleted until a conference call with Bill Clinton’s attorneys after the subpoena was issued, but that story doesn’t make much sense for reasons I explained here.)

It’s also not really possible to think that Clinton herself is responsible for hiding and deleting the “non-work related” emails that Trump is referencing. That’s because Clinton delegated those decisions to her attorneys — nobody has claimed that Clinton herself determined which emails were work-related and which ones were not. But, for the sake of argument, forget the timeline and forget the fact that Clinton herself wasn’t actually involved in the determination of which emails should be turned over.

Most tellingly of all, Clinton had the legal authority to classify as private and delete whichever emails she felt was appropriate. "There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," said attorneys from the Justice Department, according to CBS News.

Perhaps you can look at the sources I’ve quoted here — the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department — and assume they’re all in Clinton’s pocket and therefore can’t be trusted on this question. But if that’s your starting point, there’s not much the press or Clinton herself can say to convince you otherwise.

Is Donald Trump right when he says Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails? Yes and no. - Vox

FBI Director James Comey is a Republican, appointed by Bush.

We've seen these two decades of manufactured scandals. Eight independent inquiries in Benghazi have led to nothing, but much of the public doesn't care about the details.

[Admin]

The most credible of the sexual assault cases against Bill Clinton is the Juanita Broaddrick case, and that could actually be true, even if there is no evidence (and, needless to say, no conviction). The FBI looked into it (under the Starr investigation) and found it "inconclusive". For a long exposé about this, see Vox again. Mind you, that's Bill, not Hillary.