Tag Archives: Emails

09/5/15

Hillary’s Email and National Security Scandal Continues to Grow

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails establishes beyond a doubt that she regularly received classified information. This has become both an email scandal and a national security scandal, as Mrs. Clinton risked the safety and well-being of all Americans with her lax security practices.

Some might blame this gross negligence on incompetence, or falsely argue, as she does, that other secretaries of state have done the same thing, but her deliberate use of a private email server is, in fact, the mark of Hillary’s supreme arrogance.

To arrogance one must also add corruption, as it has also become undeniable that Mrs. Clinton worked on behalf of the interests of the Clinton Foundation, her family, and associates while in office.

“In another exchange, Mrs. Clinton praised an idea to set up schools in Haiti, developed by…longtime domestic partner to top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who was her chief of staff at the department,” reports The Washington Times. “Great ideas (no surprise). Let’s work toward solid proposal maybe to Red Cross and Clinton Foundation since they have unencumbered $,” Mrs. Clinton, then Secretary of State, responded to Mills.

“Records show the [Clinton] foundation would become a major player in the [Haiti] relief and reconstruction efforts, raising more than $30 million.” In other words, Mrs. Clinton was using her position as Secretary of State to steer contracts to the Clinton Foundation.

President Obama cannot have failed to have noticed Mrs. Clinton’s behavior as Secretary, and needs to be held equally accountable for this scandal. It is just one more scandal that has occurred on his watch that the media choose to treat as if he has no responsibility. Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is asking, “What did President Obama know and when did he know it?” Surely he knew he was emailing with her on her unsecured server. Did he use a private email account too? IBD reminds us that the White House won’t say if he has. We, too, have been asking some of these same questions for many months.

Mrs. Clinton’s email practices are currently being investigated by the FBI, particularly in relation to potential violations of the Espionage Act, according to Fox News. However, despite the confidence some have in FBI Director James Comey’s independence, this investigation has become inherently political, and will have a political outcome. President Obama has two choices: indict Mrs. Clinton, and risk a civil war within the Democratic Party, or allow her to continue to stonewall as she runs for the presidency. The second option could be accompanied by selective leaks to undermine Hillary’s narrative that she has done nothing wrong. In the meantime, Obama has already given Vice President Joe Biden his blessing to run against her, and announced through his spokesman that appointing Biden was “the smartest decision he has ever made in politics.”

Mrs. Clinton’s released correspondence contains nearly 200 emails with classified information, according to The Washington Post. The Post is one of the few mainstream media organizations acknowledging that Mrs. Clinton “wrote and sent at least six e-mails” with classified information.

Yet The New York Times’ report made sure to include a quote from Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, stating that if these emails contained intelligence information, “it would certainly be classified at a higher level than confidential.”

“Confidential” is the lowest level of classification. This lower-level information seems to be all members of the mainstream media really want to talk about, as if it excuses Mrs. Clinton’s actions.

“But classifying government information is more of an art than a science, often relying on judgment calls by examiners,” reports the Times.

The Intelligence Community’s Inspector General has identified two emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server as “top secret.”

An email from Clinton’s server conveys spy satellite information regarding North Korea’s nuclear program, frequently classified as top secret, according to The Washington Times. It reported on September 1 that the intelligence community believes a State Department employee summarized this extremely sensitive information and sent it on to Mrs. Clinton. Thus, her defense is that while she may have passed classified information on her unsecured private email server, she didn’t recognize it as such because, she says, it wasn’t marked classified.

As we pointed out in prior columns, Mrs. Clinton has demonstrably and repeatedly lied about her private email arrangement. She falsely claimed that the public record she submitted to the State Department was complete despite having deleted half of her emails that she claimed were personal, having her email server wiped clean, and even having altered some of the ones she turned over. And there is a high probability that Russia and China have hacked her server and seen all of her emails. She also falsely maintained that her relationship with Clinton confidant and hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal was “unsolicited” despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Now the Clinton acolytes are proceeding forth from the woodwork in defense of her inexcusable behavior. Andy McCarthy, a former U.S. Attorney writing for National Review, describes how Anne M. Tompkins, a Hillary Clinton donor, hastaken to USA Today in defense of Mrs. Clinton’s case because the latter, somehow, didn’t “knowingly” do what she did. Thompson is the Obama-appointed prosecutor who gave former CIA Director David Petraeus a “sweetheart plea deal” after he grossly mishandled classified information and provided it to his girlfriend, according to McCarthy.

“To exonerate Clinton, [Thompson] relies on nothing other than her status as the government lawyer who oversaw the prosecution of David Petraeus,” writes McCarthy. He continues:

Tompkins seems to believe that unless the prosecution has the kind of slam-dunk proof she had (but shied away from using) in the Petraeus case—namely, proof that Petraeus admitted to someone that the information he hoarded was highly classified—it is impossible to prove knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, there are innumerable cases in which investigators and prosecutors establish knowledge, intent, willfulness, gross negligence, and other mental elements without a confession by the suspect.

The media aren’t interested in making reasonable inferences about Mrs. Clinton’s behavior. Instead, reporters tie themselves in knots to avoid making common sense conclusions which might implicate her.

Former Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano’s decision to plead the Fifth before the Select Committee on Benghazi has taken the Committee’s investigation to a whole new level. Pagliano “was the information technology director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign,” helped set up Mrs. Clinton’s private server, “and then worked at the State Department as an adviser and special projects manager for its chief technology officer…” reports The New York Times. How much did he know about the vulnerability and usage of that server? Michael Isikoff is reporting that Pagliano also refused to talk with the FBI or the State Department Inspector General.

The media’s fact-checkers, especially, are supposed to hold leaders accountable and expose candidates’ false statements for what they are. After Mrs. Clinton said on August 26 that she was “confident that this process will prove that I never sent nor received any e-mail that was marked classified,” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, in his Fact Checker column, gave her only two Pinocchios for “excessively technical wordsmithing.” Maybe, as the Democratic primary nears, Mrs. Clinton’s false statements will be downgraded to only one Pinocchio—or maybe she’ll start winning the “prized” Geppetto checkmark.

“In all the 87 email threads examined by Reuters, the State Department has blanked out the confidential information in the public copies, adding the classification code ‘1.4(B),’ denoting foreign government information,” reportsJonathan Allen.

“This is the only kind of information that presidential executive orders say is ‘presumed’ to likely harm national security if wrongly disclosed.” In other words, it is born—and presumed—classified.

Mrs. Clinton’s continued claims about her receipt of classified information are egregious lies, second only to her misconduct in the Benghazi scandal. Yet the liberal media continue to ignore, downplay, or trivialize this scandal.

The Benghazi scandal, in particular, will continue to haunt Mrs. Clinton just as much as the continued drip-drip-drip of emails. Just as no further information is necessary to demonstrate that Mrs. Clinton lied about classified information on her server, no further revelations are necessary either to implicate Hillary Clinton, or President Obama, in perpetrating a cover-up after the planned terrorist attacks in Benghazi that claimed the lives of four brave Americans. The media refused to be honest in the 2012 election; it seems that they are set to continue with this dishonesty into 2016.

09/2/15

Media Nervous Over Hillary Sting Videos

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

You know an event is potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton or other top Democrats when Dana Milbank of The Washington Post shows up. Hence, Milbank’s attendance at Tuesday’s James O’Keefe news conference on Clinton campaign violations of federal election law was an indication that the Democrats are concerned. This time, despite video evidence of top staffers for Hillary accepting cash from a known foreign national, most of the media reaction was vintage Milbank. “Is this a joke?” the media wanted to know.

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In fairness, Milbank’s questions seemed mild, when compared to some of the other media reactions.

The joke question came from Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast, with other liberals joining in and wondering what the press conference was all about. The law says that foreigners are strictly prohibited from contributing to U.S. political campaigns, and O’Keefe had dramatic evidence of the campaign law violation. Thevideo was played on a television screen for all to see.

Looking for some reason not to pay attention to the facts, some in the media seized upon the small amount of money that was used to pay for the Hillary campaign merchandise in question.

This was not the only media reaction, but it seemed to be one of the most popular. “James O’Keefe Targets Clinton Campaign For Legally Selling A T-Shirt,” was the dishonest headline over an article attacking O’Keefe published by Media Matters, the pro-Hillary and George Soros-funded group. This article set the tone for the pro-Hillary contingent in the press.

However, the great number of journalists who showed up was an indication that, when it comes to Hillary, nobody really knows how serious the law-breaking will get. O’Keefe suggested that more evidence against the campaign is yet to come.

Milbank may be in a quandary about what to do with Hillary, who is dropping in the polls against the socialist career politician Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and leaving the Democratic presidential field open to other candidates, most notably Vice President Joe Biden, a notorious plagiarist. (In Biden’s case, Media Matters had also defended him, insisting the plagiarism wasn’t as serious as some knew to be the case).

Milbank’s modus operandi in the past has been to ridicule conservatives who provide evidence of corruption by top Democrats such as Hillary and Barack Obama. For example, he attacked those who investigated Obama’s relationship with communist Frank Marshall Davis. He showed up at an AIM conference to write an article distorting the findings of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, which investigated Hillary’s role in covering up the terrorist attack that killed four Americans.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist has written that Milbank “serially exaggerates or distorts what he writes about. It’s just what he does.”

But those distortions won’t suffice when the video evidence itself can be seen by millions, telling the real story that some in the media try to conceal. As Project Veritas emphasized, the video shows Molly Barker, the Director of Marketing for Hillary Clinton’s national campaign, knowingly breaking campaign finance law by accepting a straw donation from a foreign national.

O’Keefe, who almost single-handedly took down the Alinskyite ACORN organization, has also investigated Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio. He wrote the book, Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy, and has targeted Republican politicians in the past as well.

His reputation meant that O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action news conference at the National Press Club was packed, with at least seven television cameras there to record the proceedings.

Washington Post reporter David Weigel conveyed the message from the Clinton campaign that the event was much ado about nothing. But at least he did an advance story about the video and got the Clinton campaign response.

Los Angeles Times reporter Evan Halper played the story to the advantage of the Hillary campaign, insisting that the video somehow missed its target. It was “Hardly the stuff of a Pulitzer Prize,” he insisted. He found it newsworthy, and somehow relevant to the issue of federal law violations, that the journalist from The Daily Beast had treated the video as a joke.

The “joke” response said more about the lack of seriousness from The Daily Beast than it did about O’Keefe’s video. Making matters worse, Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast seemed proud of the fact that she didn’t grasp the seriousness of the election law violations, highlighting her “Is this a joke?” responses on her Twitter account.

O’Keefe may have the last laugh, as he repeatedly emphasized that more videos are coming, and that other Hillary officials may be in them and forced to resign. Reporters in attendance, anxious to dismiss these charges, seemed nervous about this prospect. They repeatedly pressed O’Keefe to spill more details about other undercover operatives he may have in the Clinton and other campaigns. He told the media they would just have to wait.

It was nervous laughter from the press, as they couldn’t figure out what other damaging evidence O’Keefe’s crew may have against the Democratic presidential candidate.

In a message to his supporters, O’Keefe noted, “Since at least 1996, Hillary and her husband Bill have been accused of accepting foreign contributions to further their political ambition. Back then, it was China accused of funneling massive amounts of money into the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. The State Department investigated the matter. Three Americans were convicted of crimes, one of whom, Johnny Chung, admitted that $35,000 of his contributions came from the Chinese military. But Bill and Hillary got off clean.”

Not all media were prepared to laugh this all away. In his story about the O’Keefe news conference, Alan Rappeport of The New York Times seemed to admit that O’Keefe had struck gold, noting, “Foreign donations are a sensitive subject for the Clintons, as their family foundation has been under scrutiny for accepting money from overseas while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, and recent State Department emails showed that former President Bill Clinton tried to get permission to give paid speeches in North Korea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

One question is whether the illegal transactions captured in the Project Veritas video are part of a pattern of illegal conduct. The media will just have to wait. Maybe their laughter will die down in the wake of more videos being released.

Asked why the major media don’t do these kinds of undercover investigations and the job falls on him and his staff, O’Keefe dismissed the significance of liberal media bias and said that he thinks journalists are more motivated by a desire to protect their access to candidates like Hillary. In other words, reporters have to flatter the candidates with fawning coverage.

But it’s increasingly difficult to portray Hillary in a favorable light. At the campaign event where the video of the illegal contribution was recorded, Hillary had told the crowd that she would “stop the endless flow of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political process, and drowning out the voices of our people.”

A reporter seeking to maintain access to a candidate like this, caught in scandal after scandal, is something that is destined to truly become a joke.

08/17/15

CLINTON CRIME FAMILY COMICS: Hillary’s 5 Funniest Email Lies

Doug Ross @ Journal

Another instant classic by our long-suffering summer intern @BiffSpackle, based upon an editorial by The New York Post:

On Fox News the other day, blogger and counterterror analyst John Schindler explained the ramifications of Clinton’s actions.

And if Vegas had a line on it, my guess is that longtime aides Huma Abedin and/or Cheryl Mills illegally removed the classification markings from the emails destined for Hillary, so she could always claim she didn’t know they contained TOP SECRET information. And each such action is a felony, too.

Hat tip: BadBlue News.

08/17/15

Clinton Email Scandal Threatens to End Her Presidential Bid

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The number of confirmed classified documents found among Hillary Clinton’s emails in a State Department review has climbed to 60, and yet she was joking about it this past weekend in Iowa. “You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account,” said Mrs. Clinton. “I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves.” But it may not be such a laughing matter for her. There are new reportsof Democrats worried about the viability of her candidacy, new polls showing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ahead of Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire and Iowa, and reports of Vice President Joe Biden appearing more likely than ever to enter the race as a way to try to save the Democratic Party from a potential disastrous election next year.

Hillary’s story has been evolving, from her statements that she had never sent or received classified material on her private email server, which was her only server throughout her four years as secretary of state, to later asserting that nothing in her emails was classified at the time it passed through her server, although some may have become classified later on. But when faced with the charge by Obama appointed inspectors general that four of the first 40 emails that they sampled were in fact classified at the time they were on her server, she claimed that though that may be true, they weren’t marked classified. So how was she to know?

In a Wall Street Journal article this weekend by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, he took Mrs. Clinton to task: “It is no answer to say, as Mrs. Clinton did at one time, that emails were not marked classified when sent or received. Of course they were not; there is no little creature sitting on the shoulders of public officials classifying words as they are uttered and sent. But the laws are concerned with the sensitivity of information, not the sensitivity of the markings on whatever may contain the information.” Her decision to erase her emails, argues Mukasey, may put her in further legal jeopardy for obstruction of justice.

Earlier reporting indicated that Inspectors General for the Intelligence Community found four classified emails, and it urned out that two of those four were Top Secret, one of the highest levels of classification. This would appear to contradict Mrs. Clinton’s claim that at the time this information was on her email server it wasn’t marked as classified, and therefore she wasn’t aware that it belonged in that category; or else that it wasn’t classified at that time.

“Clinton’s argument ignores her actual misconduct,” wrote Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi member and former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Pete Hoekstra and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Victoria Toensing on August 13. “The reason the documents were not marked is because she never submitted them for clearance.”

“The reason government officials with security clearances are required to keep their correspondence on the appropriate government server is so the material can be vetted and classified prior to hitting ‘send’ to an uncleared recipient,” Hoekstra and Toensing wrote for The New York Post on August 11.

“Let’s cut the spin and identify her email transgressions for what they are: gross mismanagement of classified material that happens to violate the law,” they argue at Fox News.

On Wednesday of last week, the FBI took possession of Mrs. Clinton’s email server. She claims that she handed it over, implying voluntarily. According to The Washington Post, it was stored at Platte River Network (PRN), the company hired by the Clintons to manage their server for security since mid-2013, in New Jersey. PRN said it “was blank” and contained no usable data because everything on it was transferred during a 2013 upgrade. PRN said they don’t think they have anything from that old server.

But that story changed over the weekend, with ABC News now reporting that PRN is saying that “it is ‘highly likely’ a full backup of the device was made and that the thousands of emails Clinton deleted may still exist.”

Mrs. Clinton had refused to hand the server over to a neutral party at the request of the House Select Committee on Benghazi since it was first requested in March of this year.

According to an article in The Daily Beast, “Hillary Clinton [had] little choice but to hand over her server to authorities since it now appears increasingly likely that someone on her staff violated federal laws regarding the handling of classified materials. On August 11, after extensive investigation, the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General reported to Congress that it had found several violations of security policy in Clinton’s personal emails.”

The article, by John R. Schindler, said that “Most seriously, the Inspector General assessed that Clinton’s emails included information that was highly classified—yet mislabeled as unclassified. Worse, the information in question should have been classified up to the level of ‘TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN,’ according to the Inspector General’s report.”

Furthermore, adds Schindler, “Claims that they ‘didn’t know’ such information was highly classified do not hold water and are irrelevant. It strains belief that anybody with clearances didn’t recognize that NSA information, which is loaded with classification markings, was signals intelligence, or SIGINT. It’s possible that the classified information found in Clinton’s email trove wasn’t marked as such. But if that classification notice was omitted, it wasn’t the U.S. intelligence community that took such markings away.”

The network news coverage of the story played down the significance, and largely treated it as a “distraction” for Mrs. Clinton, and a partisan issue for Republicans running for the GOP nomination, but it is, nonetheless, starting to get traction. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, for example, host Chuck Todd talked of how surprised he was to find so many Democrats at the Iowa State Fair who are expressing great concern about Hillary being their nominee, in light of these recent revelations.

Mrs. Clinton has systematically concealed her actions and routinely lied about them afterwards, creating what Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post labeled on August 12 a significant “trust deficit with the public.”

The deceit over Mrs. Clinton’s private email extends much further than Mrs. Clinton herself, implicating President Barack Obama, his advisors, and State Department staff.

“A federal judge has intervened to block Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, from deleting any emails in her possession after her attorney informed the State Department last week that she had instructed her client to do so,” reported The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross on August 10. Attorney Beth Wilkinson “did not provide a reason for her instructions to Mills to scrub her email account,” reports Ross.

David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s attorney, likewise, wrote in March that “no emails … reside on the server or on any backup systems associated with the server,”according to CBS News. However, Kendall was given a thumb drive with 30,000 emails from Ms. Clinton’s server. Kendall, ironically, was also the attorney for David Petraeus in the case for which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor offense of mishandling classified information. Petraeus received a sentence of two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine. According to reports, Petraeus “admitted that he improperly removed and retained highly sensitive information in eight personal notebooks that he gave the biographer, Paula Broadwell, to read.” Many have noted how Petraeus’s mishandling of classified material pales in comparison to Mrs. Clinton’s. She is arguing that in four years of holding the office of Secretary of State, she never sent or received emails that contained classified information. That is utterly absurd.

It is also unclear how Mrs. Clinton’s decision to turn over her server will impact her upcoming October scheduled hearing before the Select Committee on Benghazi. Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of that Committee, was on a couple of the Sunday shows taking some well deserved credit for his Committee having started the process of prying loose her emails and email server.

What is clear is that no further information is necessary to expose the Benghazi cover-up and Mrs. Clinton’s role in it.

Few knowledgeable about the security situation in Libya, or Mrs. Clinton’s role encouraging the initial intervention in Libya, can argue that there is no reason to investigate her misconduct. Mrs. Clinton didn’t just fail to provide the State Department with some of her messages, she altered some of the ones that she handed over.

“It has already been shown that in [Sidney] Blumenthal’s production of emails to the Benghazi Committee, they included at least 15 Clinton emails related to Benghazi that are nowhere to be found in Clinton’s production to the State Department,” write Hoekstra and Toensing. “Is this obstruction of justice?”

As the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi revealed in its 2014 Interim Report, the Obama administration switched sides in the War on Terror. Its political leadership chose to not continue truce talks with Muammar Qaddafi, instead facilitating arms to the al-Qaeda-linked rebels. The result has been a conflict-ridden terror safe haven.

Some in the media have finally woken up to the reality of Mrs. Clinton’s lies, even if they continue to dismiss the Benghazi scandal as “phony” and try, at every turn, to undermine the Select Committee’s investigation.

“There’s simply no way to see these latest development in the long-running e-mail story as anything but bad news for Clinton,” comments Cillizza for the Post. “The turning-over of her private server not only takes control of its contents out of her hands but also likely ensures this story will be in the news for far longer than she’d like.”

It is possible that the media have begun preparing the way for another, less scandal-prone Democratic candidate in the form of Joe Biden, yet some in the media are arguing that it may already be too late for a Biden to come save the day. Clearly Biden would be President Obama’s preference over Mrs. Clinton, and there is speculation that what’s going on here is no less than an effort by the Obama administration to throw Hillary under the bus. It’s hard to imagine this Justice Department investigating the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination without having gotten the green light from the President.

Mrs. Clinton’s lies and deception have become undeniable, even for those in the mainstream media. But President Obama and Mrs. Clinton’s attempts to blame four deaths in Benghazi, Libya on a YouTube video were equally blatant deception. When will the media recognize that attempts to cover up a more important scandal—the Benghazi scandal—have already failed?

Updated 9:38 a.m.

08/8/15

The Real Drama is in the Democratic Primary

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While the attention of the world was on the first Republican presidential debates in Cleveland on Thursday night, the drama in the Democratic Party may soon overshadow anything the GOP has to offer. Look at what’s happening on the way to Hillary Clinton’s coronation in 2016. All of a sudden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-identified “democratic socialist,” is within striking distance in some of the key early primary states. But the real action is with Vice President Joe Biden. Will he or won’t he challenge Mrs. Clinton? That is the question.

If we take our cues from The New York Times, Hillary should be worried. First came the story about two inspectors general seeking a criminal referral involving Mrs. Clinton’s use of her email server while she was secretary of state, and the potential mishandling of classified material. Then, after pushback from the Clinton camp, the Times pulled back, to some extent. No, it wasn’t a criminal referral, they determined on second thought. Yet now the FBI has opened an investigation, and they only get involved when crimes are alleged, or there is the possibility that national secrets may have been compromised.

Are we witnessing a situation like 1968, when Eugene McCarthy entered the Democratic primary race against then-President Lyndon Johnson, and when McCarthy did well in New Hampshire, then-New York Senator Bobby Kennedy decided to jump into the race. Will Biden be Bobby Kennedy to Sanders’ Gene McCarthy, in terms of challenging the presumed Democratic Party standard bearer, once it has become clear that the standard bearer is vulnerable? Have the media and their allies in the Democratic Party decided that Hillary is too badly damaged, and ethically challenged to win the election?

The news media are star-struck by The New York Times, which, allegedly, provides “all the news that’s fit to print.” As Accuracy in Media has repeatedly demonstrated, the news that the Times editors actually see fit to print is often full of bias, inaccuracies, and complete spin. And, sometimes, the Times transparently involves itself in promoting or destroying candidates.

Maureen Dowd’s recent Times column, “Joe Biden in 2016: What Would Beau Do?,” begins by comparing scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton with Tom Brady, and then proceeds to promote Vice President Biden’s chances by recounting the emotional words that sons Beau and Hunter apparently used to encourage their father to run for president while Beau laid on his death bed, dying from brain cancer.

“When Beau realized he was not going to make it, he asked his father if he had a minute to sit down and talk,” writes Dowd. “Of course, honey,” said his father, she recounts.

Dowd continues:

At the table, Beau told his dad he was worried about him.

My kid’s dying, an anguished Joe Biden thought to himself, and he’s making sure I’m O.K.

‘Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,’ Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in.

Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.

Hunter also pushed his father, telling him, ‘Dad, it’s who you are.’”

Where, exactly, could Dowd have received that heart-wrenching anecdote? Only from the friends, family, or supporters of the very person who some speculate may jump into the 2016 presidential race.

“And so I completely have faith in that Beau Biden anecdote,” exclaimed Helene Cooper on Meet the Press the next day. “I think it’s really telling.” Cooper believes Dowd’s story because, “Before she was a columnist, she was a fantastic political reporter. She has really good sources.”

“But, you know, when I think about what the Bidens have been through, and I think about that if Maureen’s sources are correct, then that son’s request is very powerful, I would think,” Kathleen Parker sympathetically added on Meet the Press.

No mention was made that The Wall Street Journal reported that both sons were “urging” the vice president to run for president—back in June. “Before his death last month, elder son Beau Biden encouraged his father to get into the race, people familiar with the matter said,” reported the Journal on June 28. “And Hunter Biden told a friend in recent weeks he, too, would like to see the vice president wage one more campaign for the White House.”

“It’s no secret that he’s thinking about this….I’m glad he’s thinking about this. But he hasn’t made up his mind,” said Beau Biden, the Times reported this April.

Beau’s consistent support for his father to become president is clearly nothing new. What’s new was the Times’ coming to the same conclusion as The Wall Street Journal. When the Times reports the story, even through a columnist as opposed to a reporter, it becomes a legitimate story for the rest of the media. We pointed out the likelihood of Biden’s entry into the race a month ago, based on the Journal and other stories out at the time.

Knowing the bitter history between the Clintons and Obama, one has to wonder about the timing of recent events. Did the FBI start their investigation, which isn’t being called a criminal investigation at this time, at the urging of President Obama, who would obviously prefer that Biden carry on his legacy, rather than Hillary? Obama could never trust Hillary to be loyal to his disastrous policies and controversial legacy. But Biden? Yes, he most likely would stay loyal to Obama. This has the potential to make the Republican race seem dull.

07/16/15

Hillary Clinton’s Lies Are Starting to Catch Up with Her

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The mainstream media appear eager to distract from the substantive issues raised by the email scandals continuing to plague Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. One example is the media’s focus on the timeline surrounding a Select Committee on Benghazi subpoena for her emails, and when those emails were deleted. As I recently argued, the media wish that these stories about Mrs. Clinton were not true. Most reporters cannot fathom, or will not acknowledge, that she routinely lies to the public about her activities—and those of the Clinton Foundation—while stonewalling both the press and the public.

The repeated revelations that Mrs. Clinton has been lying are apparently affecting her standing in the polls. Politico is now reporting that in the past couple of months she has dropped from having the support of 60% of Democrats, to now having just 51%. And that is before Vice President Joe Biden enters the race, which many signs indicate may happen in the not-too-distant future.

Ron Fournier of The National Journal captured the sentiment of many journalists in his recent letter to Mrs. Clinton, which, he writes, is based on interviews with those who are close to her. “Which brings us to the matter of trust,” he writes in their voice. “Hillary, this makes us want to cry. We can’t figure out why you would compromise the most important commodity of leadership over such banalities.” Fournier continues on to discuss the Clinton Foundation’s inexcusable conflicts of interest and the email scandal.

But while, according to Fournier, some of Clinton’s supporters may have decided that Mrs. Clinton is her own main obstacle to gaining the presidency, the media continue to attempt to salvage her campaign by whatever means possible. Andy McCarthy, writing for National Review, said that “when Benghazi came up in a one-on-one media interview setting, CNN couldn’t bring itself to call Mrs. Clinton on an obvious lie.”

“Plus, it was [Brianna] Keilar who brought up the subject of the subpoena, so one has to assume she did a modicum of research—which is all it would have taken to be ready to challenge Clinton’s false assertion,” writes McCarthy. “Yet, in the context of being asked about her destruction of emails from her private server, Clinton was permitted to tell the public she had not been subpoenaed. …she was able to frame suspicions that she has willfully obstructed probes of the Benghazi Massacre as outlandish.”

The Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded Mrs. Clinton three Pinocchios for stating on CNN that “Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation.” However, like so many in the media, Kessler focused on minutiae, the technical details of whether government regulations permitted Mrs. Clinton to use private email exclusively.

The real implications of Clinton’s email scandal are not whether government regulations allowed her to use her own private email account, exclusively or otherwise. Rather, Mrs. Clinton’s actions demonstrate that she unilaterally flouted a transparency process designed to provide the public with the ability to hold her accountable for her work as Secretary of State. In the process, she jeopardized national security and may have hidden pay-for-play schemes involving the Clinton Foundation. Plus, in light of the recent revelations about the cyber-hacking of the government’s Office of Personnel Management, it is very likely that the Chinese or the Russians, or both, have possession of every one of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

The UK Guardian writes that Cherie Blair’s emails to Mrs. Clinton show that Mrs. Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “appears to be acting directly as a fixer for the Qatari ruling dynasty.”

“Three years after the successful lobbying effort a Qatari-government backed telecommunications [firm] donated an undisclosed amount to Mrs. Blair’s own charity for women,” reports Raf Sanchez for The UK Telegraph.

“Meanwhile, the Qatari government was also giving millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton’s global charity,” writes Sanchez. “Charity records show that Qatar gave between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation while the controversial committee behind Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid donated up to $500,000 further.”

Jennifer Rubin, writing for the Post, says that her emails expose Mrs. Clinton as “immersed in a web of cronies and hacks.”

“She solicits Sid Blumenthal for advice, and not just on Libya,” continued Rubin. An August 9, 2009 email from Blumenthal appears to pass along a suggestion for a Clinton Global Initiative forum by Shaun Woodward, UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Blumenthal writes that he has already gotten Bill Clinton’s approval, and asks Hillary to “let me know how to move this forward.”

Blumenthal received $10,000 a month from the Clinton Foundation starting that year.

A couple of months earlier Blumenthal writes regarding Woodward that “he told me things you would in my judgment want and need to hear because they will likely involve your personal role.”

“I think you should step in and ask him to tell you directly,” Blumenthal continues.

“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” Mrs. Clinton told the press this spring.

To the contrary, at least 25 of the emails that Mrs. Clinton did not delete have been upgraded to classified status by the State Department.

While technically that may not constitute having sent or received classified information through the personal email server located at her home in Chappaqua, New York, it does reveal that she certainly trafficked in sensitive information. We also learned recently that she had edited some of the emails that were handed over to the State Department, long past due. And she hadn’t handed over other emails that were clearly State Department-related business, though she had claimed that she had. That was discovered through the additional emails Blumenthal provided to the Select Committee on Benghazi when he testified before the Committee last month.

In addition, Mrs. Clinton has publicly acknowledged having self-selected and deleted approximately 30,000 emails that she deemed personal, and had the server wiped clean so that it could not be independently verified that they all were, in fact, personal. Who wouldn’t trust Hillary?

It’s impossible to know what information has been withheld by the State Department. However, here are just a couple of topics discussed in those emails containing now-classified information:

  • Background for a call to America’s international allies discussing the May 24, 2009 North Korean nuclear test;
  • Discussions with family members of journalists detained in North Korea; and
  • A readout from a call with Tony Blair while he was still representing the Quartet, which mediates the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Mrs. Clinton’s ongoing efforts at deception have become so commonplace that perhaps reporters don’t believe that her lies and conflicts of interest deserve regular front-page treatment. Instead they write articles about how the GOP is trying to “vilify” her using her own falsehoods. The drive-by media may be disappointed in their attempts to save Hillary because the slow drip, drip release of her emails will repeatedly force them to confront these real issues, like it or not.