Tag Archives: Emails

08/2/16

Trump, Hillary, the Emails and Russia

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

Emails

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said during his controversial July 27th press conference. “I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press.” He later tweeted that these emails should be turned over to the FBI.

The press insisted that what Trump proposed would involve foreign meddling in the American election. However, the press has said little about the Obama administration’s meddling in other countries’ elections. President Obama urged a “no” vote when Britain was considering “Brexit,” leaving the European Union. As for Israel’s election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, The Washington Post reports that “…the news broke that Obama’s 2012 national field director, Jeremy Bird, was headed to Tel Aviv to manage a grass-roots campaign to oust Netanyahu.”

Granted, while this might constitute American interference in foreign voting, neither of these actions encouraged foreign countries to spy on U.S. candidates, or hack into their emails. But is that really what Trump did?

CNN political analyst Christine Quinn said of Trump, “It’s honestly almost treasonous.”

John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and contributor to The New York Times, tweeted that “Trump, who fondly recalls when America was ‘great,’ could literally have been locked up in 1950s for saying what he said about Russia today.”

Michael Weiss, Senior Editor at The Daily Beast, tweeted that it was “A bold strategy, making your campaign platform treason.”

While the press was busy pillorying Trump, they repeatedly focused on that one line. The premise of the question swirling around Trump was that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails and their release just before the start of the Democrats’ convention was an effort by the Russians to hurt Hillary and the Democrats—and to help Trump.

Early on in the press conference, Trump said, “It’s just a total deflection, this whole thing with Russia. In fact, I saw her campaign manager I don’t know his title, Mook. I saw him on television and they asked him about Russia and the hacking. By the way, they hacked—they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there.”

The questions kept on coming. That is when Trump said the following:

“Why do I have to get involved with Putin? I have nothing to do with Putin. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn’t respect our President. And if it is Russia—which it’s probably not, nobody knows who it is—but if it is Russia, it’s really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would be interesting to see—I will tell you this—Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Where is the media outcry over Hillary Clinton’s trafficking in classified information? FBI Director Comey, while choosing not to recommend an indictment, called her “extremely careless” and said that 110 of her emails, either sent or received, contained classified information which was classified at the time.

“She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries,” said Comey. “Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”

When Chris Wallace interviewed Mrs. Clinton on Fox News Sunday on July 31, he cited Comey’s repudiation of her claims that she never emailed any classified material to anyone, nor that she ever sent or received any information that was classified at the time, nor received anything marked classified. She responded, “Chris, that’s not what I heard Director Comey say.” But that’s exactly what Comey said. You can see it here. Even The Washington Post Fact Checker has given Hillary Four Pinocchios for this latest series of lies.

Many in the press seemed to have forgotten that Mrs. Clinton’s server has already been turned over to the FBI. What, then, is left to hack? Any espionage would likely have been done while Mrs. Clinton’s server was hooked up to the Internet, and may have been done while she was secretary of state.

Bloomberg News reported back in June that “The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the November election…” The Clinton campaign may have been affected, as well. More damaging leaks can be expected in the future, and the news media will most certainly rally to protect Mrs. Clinton—whatever the revelations.

Mrs. Clinton and her family have much to hide. We have reported repeatedly about the quid pro quo corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons, as the family accepted donations and speaking fees from foreign nations and companies with business before Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

“The truth is that when the emails that are leaked in the age of the Internet are America’s wartime secrets, such as battlefield secrets in a time when our troops are engaged in combat with a savage foe, the left is all too eager to work with the leakers and characterize them as ‘whistleblowers,’” comments The New York Sun. “But when the messages being leaked include internal email traffic of the Democrats themselves, wires that show them maneuvering against Senator Sanders in a ghastly way, the Democrats are suddenly up in arms.”

Where was the media outrage when an alleged Russian hacker exposed the opposition research of the DNC against Trump back in June? Frankly, they were fine with that. The latest revelations on Wikileaks have been more damaging, and the press has had to step in to help their favored candidate.

If the Russians did hack Mrs. Clinton’s homebrew server, they likely have blackmail material on her. “This sort of gangsterism is perfectly in keeping with Putin’s [modus operandi], so the blackmail angle can hardly be dismissed,” noted Rick Moran for The American Thinker in June.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist had an excellent piece on this, arguing that the media played right into Trump’s hands. She wrote:

“Trump’s communication style is one that works well on many voters, and is not known in any way, shape, or form for its specificity. First he says he hopes Russia finds the emails. Then he says ‘they probably have them’ and ‘if they have them, they have them.’

“But the point is that his jokey highlighting of Hillary Clinton’s claim that she deleted 30,000 personal emails about yoga is not really the same thing as calling on Russia to currently hack information that they, in all likelihood, took years ago. Perhaps a tempering of the headlines and framing is in order.”

It’s a familiar pattern by now. The press plays gotcha with Trump. His adversarial and sarcastic posture towards the media sometimes gets him in trouble and requires several days to clean up and move on. We’re at 100 days and counting until the election. The polls show the race at close to dead even. It’s time to buckle up.

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

06/7/16

State Department Basically Claims Hillary’s Emails Will Never Be Released

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Hillary

The State Department, who has been known for telling whoppers, lobbed a doozy last week. State Department lawyers now say that it will take about 75 years to release all of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Let me translate that for you… those emails implicate a whole bunch of people in corruption along with Clinton and we won’t release them until (a) all of you are long dead and (b) until the Democrats are in the clear. This, my friends, is political two-step bull crap.

The court filing took place last Wednesday. In that filing, it was noted that the records requested in two lawsuits by the Republican National Committee (which are about 450,000 pages worth), included communications from Clinton’s aides Cheryl Mills and Jacob Sullivan. They also included emails from State Department official Patrick Kennedy.

“Given the Department’s current [Freedom of Information Act] (FOIA) workload and the complexity of these documents, it can process about 500 pages a month, meaning it would take approximately 16-and-2/3 years to complete the review of the Mills documents, 33-and-1/3 years to finish the review of the Sullivan documents, and 25 years to wrap up the review of the Kennedy documents – or 75 years in total,” the lawyers wrote.

Now, that’s a whole new level of blatant hubris that even shocks me. And I’m politically jaded. The State Department is whining that FOIA requests have tripled since 2008. Gee, I wonder why? “In fiscal year 2015 alone we received approximately 22,000 FOIA requests,” State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said.

“The requests are also frequently more complex and seek larger volumes of documents, requiring significantly more time, resources, and interagency coordination. While we have increased staffing for our FOIA office, our available resources are still nonetheless constrained.”

Oh, freaking boo hoo! That’s your job and it doesn’t take anywhere nearly that long to release those documents. This is the DC shuffle and everyone knows it. They have absolutely made transparency a joke and corruption mainstream. That’s Hillary Clinton for you.

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.

Continue reading →

02/23/16

Two Scandals on Hold as Presidential Primaries Unfold

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

It appears that, with only one week left until Super Tuesday, the mainstream media are content with the slow pace of the various investigations into Hillary Clinton’s malfeasance. Come March 15, over half of the states will have voted for their favorite primary candidates. Yet the FBI investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material, along with the House Select Committee’s Benghazi investigation, may be going nowhere.

“[Republican Congressman Trey] Gowdy [SC] has said he hopes to wrap up interviews with witnesses in February,” reported Sarah Westwood for The Washington Examiner on February 18. “His committee will then release a highly-anticipated report on its findings.”

But that report may not effectively tell the story of Benghazi if, as Gowdy says, he is going to allow his audience to draw their own conclusions. “It’s not my job to tell you what happened,” said Gowdy on the Don Smith radio show. “It’s my job to tell you what the witnesses say. I wasn’t there.”

Gowdy also said that he was “pleased and frankly proud” of the effort his committee had made that revealed to the public that Clinton was using a private server for all of her emails.

Continue reading →

02/7/16

Hillary Clinton’s Email Problems: Growing Crisis or Nothing to See?

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

The media’s double standard has been on full display with a number of softball interviews and a staged CNN town hall held for the Democratic presidential candidates. The left-wing mainstream media are waiting to crown Hillary Clinton, even before the votes are in. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, in particular, recently interviewed Hillary Clinton about her close victory in the recent Iowa caucuses.

At the very least you would have to say that the thrill up his leg that Matthews used to get for President Obama is now firmly in place for Mrs. Clinton. Matthews’ performance was no journalistic interview. Instead, it was a mutual love-in with Hillary, and the Democratic Party in general. It was as if Matthews was unaware of any of the developments in EmailGate or the Benghazi scandal, both of which have been very public. Yet Matthews uttered nary a word on his sycophantic network, MSNBC, about the substance of any of Hillary’s scandals.

Instead, he showered Mrs. Clinton with praise. “You know I think everybody should’ve been impressed, maybe I wasn’t impressed as I should have been—but everybody should have been about the way you handled New Hampshire last time around,” said Matthews to Mrs. Clinton.

Despite the fact that Matthews, and the rest of the mainstream media, would prefer to ignore the latest revelations in EmailGate, the drip, drip, drip of scandal continues. The day after Matthews’ interview with Mrs. Clinton, Fox News’ Martha MacCallum interviewed Republican Congressman Chris Stewart (R-UT) about Mrs. Clinton’s email controversy.

Stewart, a former Air Force B1 bomber pilot, is now a member of the House Intelligence Committee. He has seen the latest batch of Hillary’s emails marked Top Secret, and pointed out that there were more than just the 22 emails reported earlier. The total now comes to 29 emails that the State Department will not release.

Stewart was shocked at what he saw when he reviewed these emails.

“[These emails] do reveal classified methods, they do reveal classified sources, and they do reveal human assets,” said Congressman Stewart on Fox News. “I can’t imagine how anyone could be familiar with these emails, whether they’re sending them or receiving them, and not realize that these are highly classified.”

“Did Hillary Clinton demonstrate the judgment and the respect for protocol that would allow her to protect national security?” asked Rep. Stewart. “And when I read these emails and when I see how she has exposed some of the most sensitive information or potentially exposed that, I don’t know how we can say that she has demonstrated that judgment.”

Stuart condemned claims that the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s private email server is a “right-wing conspiracy.”

“For heaven’s sakes, this is where Obama administration officials who have told us that these emails were so classified they can’t be released,” he said. “This wasn’t something that’s coming from the right; it’s coming from this current administration,” Congressman Stewart added. “So her argument isn’t with me, it’s with the President and with his administration regarding that.”

It was the Obama-appointed Inspector General who stated that some of Mrs. Clinton’s emails were Top Secret, and an Obama administration State Department that has concurred. As we reported, some of these emails contained material so highly classified that even the Inspector General’s team wasn’t originally cleared to see them.

But apparently few reporters in the mainstream media saw Rep. Stewart’s interview, or had any interest in hearing his perspective. You see, it’s only Fox News that cares about such trivial nonsense.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler did note Stewart’s interview, but did so only in order to contradict his assertions. “Other sources who have viewed the emails do not describe the emails as strongly [as Congressman Stewart], though one official said Clinton’s aides might have put their security clearances at risk,” writes Kessler.

Kessler’s piece gave only two Pinocchios out of a possible four to Mrs. Clinton for her claims about how she handled classified materials on her private server. In the same Fact Checker column, Kessler cited a George Stephanopoulos interview with Mrs. Clinton. And while we’ve criticized Stephanopoulos in the past for his failure to note his conflicts of interest when it comes to the Clintons—including his obvious partisanship on her behalf by failing to ask her the tough questions—he does deserve some credit for a question he raised on his ABC show last Sunday. He talked about a non-disclosure agreement that Mrs. Clinton signed as secretary of state. This made it clear that whether or not the material is “marked classified” is “not that relevant,” since she has been “trained to treat all of that sensitively and should know the difference.”

Mrs. Clinton gave a nonsensical answer, stating at first that “Well of course and that’s exactly what I did. I take classified information very seriously.” And then in the same answer she reverted to her tired defense: “And when you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain thought that this was classified, and that was not the case.” She’s trying to have it both ways.

I have reported extensively on the Hillary Clinton email scandal. And, yes, Mrs. Clinton did apologize—sort of. She apologized for using one device for her emails instead of two while she served for four years as secretary of state.

“As I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” said Clinton in an ABC News interview last September. At a recent January town hallstaged by CNN, Mrs. Clinton insisted that she wasn’t “willing to say it was an error in judgment because what—nothing that I did was wrong. It was not—it was not in any way prohibited.”

In Thursday night’s debate on MSNBC, Chuck Todd asked about the emails, but not in any substantive way. He asked her, “So can you reassure these Democrats that somehow the email issue isn’t going to blow up your candidacy if you’re the nominee?” She said, “Absolutely I can. You know, before it was emails, it was Benghazi, and the Republicans were stirring up so much controversy about that.”

He then asked, “Are you 100 percent confident that nothing is going to come of this FBI investigation?” She replied, “I am 100 percent confident.” What does Mrs. Clinton know that the rest of us don’t? Has she been assured by the Obama administration that no indictment will be forthcoming? After all, President Obama emailed directly to her private email address on a number of occasions, and could get caught up in the scandal as well. Plus, indicting Hillary would create a civil war in the Democratic Party, perhaps opening the door to a Biden run, or a massive defeat in November.

Where is the apology for failing to turn over her emails in a timely fashion when she left office, or for doing business on an unsecured “home brew” server unprotected from Chinese, Iranian and Russian hackers? Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense under both President George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said that “the odds are pretty high” that Mrs. Clinton’s home brew server was compromised by China, Russia and Iran.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton has absurdly claimed that her server was secure becauseSecret Service agents were guarding the property.

Mrs. Clinton was also caught lying about whether she had turned over all her work-related emails when Sidney Blumenthal’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi revealed additional business-related emails that she had not sent to the State Department.

The drip, drip, drip of scandal has only gotten worse over time. We have now learned that there were more than 1,300 emails containing classified information that were either sent to or from her email server, classified as Top Secret, and some were classified as the even more secret Special Access Programs.

“You were out there on that arena, I remember you standing in I think it was a fieldhouse,” said Matthews during his softball interview with Clinton. “And you went on and on and on, it went on for five hours. It was incredible, it was a marathon, answering every single question of everyone in that room… Are you going to try to match that performance this time?”

No doubt Mrs. Clinton will be more than happy to answer further questions from the mainstream media. If Matthews’ interview and Chuck Todd’s debate questions are any indication, she knows that pertinent questions about her worst scandals won’t even be mentioned.

11/6/15

Clinton Scandals Threaten Her White House Run

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While Republicans are deciding among themselves whether to open a separate investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, evidence keeps piling up that shows serious problems ahead for Mrs. Clinton. Yet the media continue feasting on what they perceive as turmoil in the GOP presidential race. When looked at objectively, Mrs. Clinton’s problems should prove far more consequential than anything facing the Republicans. And current polls reflect that problem.

The media are still basking in Hillary’s great October turnaround. Not only did she have what they considered to be a strong debate performance, but Vice President Joe Biden announced he wasn’t running for the presidency, and Hillary, they assure us, scored a big victory in the Benghazi hearings. Game over. The march to the White House can proceed unimpeded.

But a closer look at what should be very troubling issues to the media, and to Democrats who want a candidate without so much baggage, reveals much that they should be concerned about.

The latest batch of emails was released on October 30, revealing an additional 266 messages that are now “deemed classified, bringing to 666 the total number of messages so far,” as reported by The Washington Times, but ignored by most of the media. “One of the messages, sent by a State Department staffer, even labeled itself ‘confidential’ in the subject line to Mrs. Clinton, despite her insistence that none of the information should have been secret at the time. The email contained what the staffer called ‘a good report’ from a top German official who’d met with then-Serbian President Boris Tadic. All information gleaned from foreign governments is deemed classified.”

Other revelations from this latest drop included correspondence showing that in response to security concerns in Benghazi, Mrs. Clinton “made an effort to help evacuate the acting Libyan prime minister from Benghazi amid a crumbling security situation.” This was released about a week after her testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi that she had not seen some 600 requests from Libya that had to do with the security of American personnel, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in the terrorist attack at the Special Mission Compound on September 11, 2012, in Benghazi. A case of misplaced priorities?

Remember, the FBI is investigating whether or not classified materials were mishandled on Mrs. Clinton’s private, unsecured email server. This occurred as a result of the Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCulloch III saying back in July that he had found four of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that were classified out of the first 40 he viewed, including one that was Top Secret.

It got worse. In August, “the scandal deepened, as Mr. McCullough sent a memo to the House and Senate intelligence committees that said two emails contained top secret information that was compartmentalized as Special Intelligence (SI) and Talent Keyhole (TK),” reported The Washington Times. “The two codes mean that the material came from communications intercepts of a foreign target and also from military spy satellites. Such data are considered the crown jewels of intelligence, for which access is greatly restricted.”

Rowan Scarborough, reporting for the Times, wrote that “Intelligence officials are aghast it sat in Mrs. Clinton’s at-home server, susceptible to hacking by adversaries such as China and Russia.

“‘SI information is not just top secret,’ said the former intelligence official,” adding that “it’s compartmented. It’s the highest level of classification you can get. It’s code word. It’s extremely sensitive.”

“‘You have a massive spill, a massive leak of classified information,’ the former official said. ‘The responsibility for that server is on Hillary Clinton directly.’”

Mrs. Clinton’s defense has changed from a complete denial: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material,” she said back in March of this year at her press conference at the United Nations.

Then, after two Obama-appointed IGs discovered classified material in her emails, she switched her story to saying that she didn’t knowingly send any classified material, and finally that she did not send or receive anything that was “marked as classified.”

But as former congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) wrote in a column for the New York Post, co-authored with Victoria Toensing, a former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee, “…that statement ignores how the process works. 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.”

Ron Fournier of the National Journal wrote a column entitled “Parsing Clinton: Deflection, Deception, and Untruths,” in which he said, “What Clinton doesn’t want you to know: Federal rules put the onus on government officials like the Secretary of State to protect classified material, even when it’s not marked as such. Government officials have been convicted of mishandling unmarked classified material. Any chain of events or excuses that led to the disclosure of these documents begins with Clinton’s decision to go rogue with government email.”

President Obama compounded matters when he told Steve Kroft on CBS’s 60 Minutes on October 11 that he didn’t know about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State, and that he didn’t think it posed a national security problem. But back in March, after first saying that he learned about her use of a private server for all of her government emails “the same time everybody else learned it—through news reports,” he backtracked through his spokesman, Josh Earnest, saying he knew she used a private server some of the time, but didn’t know the full extent, or how it was set up.

Of course he knew. He had exchanged emails with her, emails which he is nowrefusing to hand over to the committee investigating Benghazi, raising further suspicions.

And when he told Kroft that “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered,” he was prejudging the case under investigation. This “angered” members of the FBI who are investigating Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified material, and who spoke with The New York Times following President Obama’s comments. The Times also spoke with Ron Hosko, “a former senior F.B.I. official who retired in 2014 and is now the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund,” who “said it was inappropriate for the president to ‘suggest what side of the investigation he is on’ when the F.B.I. is still investigating.

“‘Injecting politics into what is supposed to be a fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the F.B.I.’s mouth and makes them fear that no matter what they find, the Justice Department will take the president’s signal and not bring a case,’ said Mr. Hosko, who maintains close contact with current agents.”

This, along with recent news about a spin-off of the Clinton Foundation having to refile tax returns because in the earlier filings they had failed to disclose millions of dollars in foreign donations; and the obvious lies, inconsistencies and omissions from Hillary’s Benghazi testimony before the committee last month, are taking their toll.

When asked in the latest Quinnipiac poll, “Would you say that [Candidate] is honest and trustworthy or not?” when compared to all of the leading Republican candidates, Clinton was the lowest with just 36 percent who said yes, and the highest at 60 percent who said no. The poll shows that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is currently ahead of her by 46 to 43 in a head to head match-up. Several others were beating her as well.

Even a slumping Bernie Sanders is reconsidering the “Get out of jail free” pass that he gave Mrs. Clinton during the one Democratic debate, when he said, “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.” He now says it’s a legitimate issue to pursue. “Let the investigation proceed unimpeded,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The Democratic front-runner is under investigation by the FBI for her mishandling of classified information. There’s no doubt that she did. The only questions are, did she know at the time that classified material passed through her computer that it was classified? Should she have known? Does it matter whether she knew or not? What about the gross negligence aspect of not knowing? If the FBI refers the case to the Justice Department for a criminal referral, would Attorney General Loretta Lynch indict her, or would she turn to President Obama to get his okay on whether or not to indict? Is Joe Biden still waiting in the wings?

09/30/15

Interviewing Mrs. Clinton, Avoiding the Tough Questions

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The carefully selected members of the media chosen to interview Hillary Clinton during her run for the Democratic nomination are sure to continue providing her with nothing but softball questions, giving her candidacy an opportunity to claim its honesty and transparency where little exists. Previously we cited Andrea Mitchell’s interview on MSNBC. Most recently it was Chuck Todd, whose interview on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday exposed how these reporters deliberately avoid discussing topics which run counter to their favored progressive narratives.

“And a reminder, and I know there’s always conspiracy theories out there, there are no limitations to this interview,” said Todd.

He asked several questions about Hillary’s private email server but few regarding the classified information found on that server, a much more serious issue.

While the Clintons like to blame the attacks on themselves as partisan politics, Hillary’s lies are becoming harder and harder for the liberal media to defend.

When Todd questioned Mrs. Clinton about her claim that she had turned over her emails as part of a general request from the State Department, he had to press her to provide answers about the discrepancy between the timing of when State asked for her records, and when the campaign claimed that this request was made.

“Well, we have explained that,” replied Clinton. “The campaign has explained it.”

This is far more than the mere discrepancy that Todd made it out to be.

The Washington Post Fact Checker gave Clinton three Pinocchios, because “there was a pressing need for the State Department to seek Clinton’s e-mails” due to the “Benghazi inquiry—and the State Department had made clear…its interest in the Clinton e-mails months before an official letter was sent.” The New York Times recently reported that experts in government classification laws said that Clinton aides may have “violated federal laws that govern how intelligence information is handled.”

The question remains how much of the State Department’s turning against Hillary Clinton is being orchestrated by the White House, which appears to be backing Vice President Joe Biden.

As we have reported, Mrs. Clinton’s receipt of classified email over a private server remains a national security concern: “Whether or not classified information was sent and received, not whether or not it was marked classified—which is the current iteration of her evolving explanation—is the real issue.”

On Monday’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, on CNN, he demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s inconsistent, evolving answers regarding the selection process for deciding which of her emails were personal and which were business, as Accuracy in Media’s Don Irvine cited. Yet on the transcript page of that show, CNN simply omitted that segment, as if it never occurred.

Mrs. Clinton has provided a wealth of excuses in the past that have been proven to be false. When questioning Mrs. Clinton about her dealings with the Clinton Foundation, for example, Todd focused on whether these emails would have been personal or work.

“You know, I did not communicate with the foundation,” replied Mrs. Clinton. “Other people in the State Department did. In accordance with the rules that had been adopted.”

This was another of her many transparent lies, as can be seen in an email already released to the public in June.

An October 28, 2009 email shows Mrs. Clinton copying Doug Band and Justin Cooper on a message to Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal. “Bill Clinton’s senior adviser Justin Cooper was the man responsible for running the email network, according to archived Internet records,” reported Breitbart on September 2. “Cooper also works as a top fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation. He also serves as a senior adviser to Teneo Holdings, a private corporate advisory and investment banking firm founded by former Bill Clinton adviser Doug Band.” Band was active with the Clinton Global Initiative and on the Clinton Foundation’s Board of Directors at the time.

“Sid—I’m copying Doug and Justin who are traveling with Bill [Clinton] since he will be in Europe and may have some ideas about what could be done, and asking that they share it w him and then get back to you,” wrote Mrs. Clinton.

Questions also remain about possible pay-for-play during Mrs. Clinton’s term as Secretary of State.

“Newly released financial disclosures reveal Bill Clinton received $16.46 million in payments from a George Soros-backed for-profit education company, as Hillary Clinton’s State Department funneled tens of millions of dollars to a group run by the company’s chairman,” reported Peter Schweizer for Breitbart in August. “From 2010 until just days before the 2015 release of Clinton Cash, Bill Clinton served as [Laureate Education’s] ‘honorary chancellor.’”

“When the Clinton campaign team obtained a copy of the book and its Clinton-Laureate connection revelation, Bill Clinton abruptly resigned.”

Todd could have also taken Hillary to account for her many falsehoods and role in the Benghazi cover-up, such as her decision to coordinate with the White House to blame the 2012 Benghazi attacks on a YouTube video.

As a counter to Todd’s biased reporting, and in our continuing effort to help keep the media on an aggressive yet unbiased path, we are offering up some suggested questions on various topics that the press should start demanding that Hillary Clinton answer:

  1. You’ve apologized for not using two separate email accounts. But you haven’t apologized for using a private, unencrypted server, which could have easily—and probably was—hacked by Chinese, Russian and North Korean operatives. Will you now apologize for endangering national security?
  2. If in your position as Secretary of State you would have received training on how to handle classified information then why did you and your aides exchange information now marked “Confidential” with Tony Blair regarding his role as Middle East Envoy over your unsecure server?
  3. Why did your department send out a memo encouraging department staffto “Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts” yet you yourself used a private server for your work as Secretary?
  4. Why did the State Department and the White House coordinate the Benghazi YouTube video narrative when your staff became aware that this was a terror attack approximately a half hour into the attack?
  5. Why did the State Department provide inadequate security leading up to the attacks, despite multiple requests for assistance from Tripoli?
  6. If you neither sent nor received classified emails using your private server, then why has the Inspector General marked two of them as classified, and Reuters identified another 87 exchanges as born classified?
  7. If you assumed that the State Department would capture your emails when they were sent, then why were your aides also using private email accountsfrom your server?
  8. You told Chuck Todd, “I’m not by any means a technical expert. I relied on people who were.” Bryan Pagliano, who maintained your private server while simultaneously working at the State Department, has pled the Fifth and won’t talk to the FBI. How does this reflect on your statements that you have been transparent with the public?
  9. While you chose to erase and destroy more than 30,000 emails from your time as Secretary of State, why didn’t you allow an independent figure to determine which emails were personal, and which were somehow business related?
  10. If you provided all of your work-related emails, why has the Defense Department now found approximately 10 exchanges which were not turned over in the first place?
  11. Why has the State Department now turned over 925 additional emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi some of which, according to The Daily Beast, were “previously assessed to be of a ‘personal nature and unrelated to the former Secretary’s official capacity?’”
  12. If you say that you’ve deleted all your personal emails, then why have emails from an “old friend,” Sidney Blumenthal, been released by the State Department? Does that mean Blumenthal, who was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation, was conducting official business for you as Secretary of State?
  13. You have said you’re very proud of the “life-saving and life-changing work” that the Clinton Foundation is currently performing. Why, then, does it only spend approximately 10 percent of its funds on direct charitable grants?