02/26/16

Fact-Checking The Washington Post Fact Checker on Mrs. Clinton’s Emails

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

The Washington Post Fact Checkers are once again coming to the aid of Hillary Clinton with a new column criticizing the popular comparison of former General David Petraeus’s mishandling of classified information to Mrs. Clinton’s abuse of classified information on her private email server. The Post politicizes the comparison from the beginning by using quotes from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz (TX), both controversial figures in their own right.

But many more people than these two politicians have compared the Petraeus case to Mrs. Clinton’s mismanagement of classified information. “His [Petraeus’s] offense involved conduct narrower in scope than Mrs. Clinton’s systematic transmission and storage of classified information on her private system,” arguesNational Review’s Andy McCarthy, former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York who successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Former federal prosecutor, Joe DiGenova, says that Clinton’s actions amount to “the negligent handling of classified information, which is prohibited by statute, and this is a gross example of it, and it dwarfs the information in the Petraeus case.” A similar case was made by Sidney Powell, also a former federal prosecutor, and yet again the case was made by former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

Every news article from a major newspaper should be assumed to have been fact-checked. But The Washington Post has a specific Fact Checker column, usually written by Glenn Kessler. Another contributor to the Fact Checker column is Michelle Ye Hee Lee, who wrote this particular column, which is anything but factually correct. Her blatant attempt to exonerate Mrs. Clinton transforms the fact-check article into little more than an opinion piece, while overlooking key facts.

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