08/8/15

The Real Drama is in the Democratic Primary

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.

04/17/15

Judith Miller Opens Old Iraq War Wounds, and Sheds Some New Light

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, has sparked a fierce reaction from a mainstream media intent on continuing to blame George W. Bush’s “lies” for the Iraq War with her new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. The book has produced a general disgust from a media intent on ignoring important revelations she’s made in this book. Instead the mainstream media have chosen to focus on her alleged agenda-driven reporting leading up to the invasion of Iraq, while for the most part ignoring additional details about how weak the prosecution was against Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Miller now says that not only was she wrong when she testified that Libby had outed CIA operations officer Valerie Plame to her, but that the federal prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was on a vendetta designed to implicate former Vice President Dick Cheney himself in the conspiracy to expose Plame, with Libby as a convenient victim sacrificed in pursuit of Fitzgerald’s agenda.

Ms. Miller’s testimony was vital to the trial. She was “the only reporter who asserted that Mr. Libby volunteered information about Mr. Wilson’s wife,” writes Peter Berkowitz of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, in a long piece for The Wall Street Journal, entitled “The False Evidence Against Scooter Libby.” Now she says her memory is unclear, and that Libby probably hadn’t “talked about Plame with me that day.”

Her testimony at the trial interpreted notes from a conversation years past. Not knowing that Plame had worked for the State Department, Miller interpreted those notes to support the premise that Libby had told her about Plame’s position at the CIA.

“If Libby, a seasoned bureaucrat, had been trying to plant her employer with me at our first meeting in June, he would not have used the word Bureau to describe where Plame worked,” writes Miller in The Story. That’s because, she writes, “The CIA is organized by offices within divisions” whereas the “State Department is divided into functional offices and regional and other ‘bureaus’…”

“Reading Plame’s book had put my reference to that word—in parentheses and with a question mark—in a new light,” she writes. “Libby probably hadn’t used it, or talked about Plame with me that day.”

“Had Fitzgerald’s questions about whether my use of the word Bureau meant the FBI steered me in the wrong direction?” she wonders in her book. “Had I helped convict an innocent man?”

Such an error would prove troubling for any reporter, and probably for anyone who might have accidentally testified falsely. It was courageous of Miller to acknowledge that she had been misled given her already controversial reputation.

Her after-the-fact explanation actually fits with contemporaneous accounts “She was confused about that at first, she said,” the Associated Press reported back in 2007. “‘Through the context of the discussion, I quickly determined it to be the CIA,’ she testified.”

Fitzgerald had a transparent agenda, according to her 2014 interview with Joe Tate, Libby’s lawyer until the criminal trial, writes Miller. Tate told her that Fitzgerald told him, “Unless you can deliver someone higher up—the vice president—I’m going forth with the indictment,” a bargain Fitzgerald offered him twice, according to Miller’s book.

Accuracy in Media (AIM) has reported extensively on the flaws in the way Libby’s prosecution was conducted. Yet years later ABC News was still including this “scandal” in its top ten political scandals of the 21st century, and reporting the facts from Plame’s and her husband, Joe Wilson’s biased perspectives. “It’s unfortunate that this story has to be re-litigated time and again,” I wrote in 2013.

The story of Libby’s trial will not be re-litigated again here, but my numerous accounts of the myths surrounding this story outline essential details on how this trial has become one of the most misreported stories in recent history.

Miller’s account validates AIM’s consistent reporting on the subject: “I wrote or co-wrote with Cliff Kincaid a series of articles during and after the Libby trial that showed he was wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, and that Bush did a disservice to Libby and his own legacy by not having the courage of his conviction to pardon Libby rather than just commute his sentence.”

“Indeed, the prosecution presented no hard evidence that Libby had lied,” I wrote. “Instead, the prosecution asked the jury to infer that Libby had (with no motive) lied, based simply on the jury’s experience of the accuracy of memory.”

And now Miller says her memory was likely not accurate at all.

Miller apparently discovered her error upon reading Plame’s book, Fair Game; Libby himself had suggested to her she might find “something of interest” in it.

According to her account in The Story, Miller has been treated very harshly by the Times, and considers herself a scapegoat for the Times’ and news media’s overall discontent with the war coverage. “Other news outlets had followed my lead,” she writes. “That made me Azazel, the biblical goat upon which the community heaped its many sins.”

“‘Judy’s stories about WMD,’ wrote the Times’ Maureen Dowd, ‘fit too closely with the White House’s case for war,’” I noted back in 2005. “That was the bottom line of the anger and venom, some of it very personal, aimed at Miller by the likes of Dowd and Frank Rich.” I also pointed out how Miller was far from being the only reporter, or editorial writer, at the Times to have written about Saddam’s possession and pursuit of WMD, some of which turned out to be wrong, but by no means all of it.

Recall that it was then-President Bill Clinton, who in 1998 signed the Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change official U.S. policy, and he ordered the sustained bombing of Baghdad in December of that year. As the bombs began to fall, Clinton told the nation, “Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.”

The animosity between Miller and the Times remains palpable. “To Ms. Miller’s credit, this is not a score-settling book, although Bill Keller, the executive editor who she says forced her out of The Times, gets walked around the block naked a couple of times and competing reporters receive just-for-old-times’-sake elbows to their rib cages,” writes Terry McDermott for the Times.

“Cast out of the journalistic temple, she says she felt ‘stateless,’ and from the evidence here she remains a bit lost,” he writes in the book review—ending it with a pointed, unnecessary jab. “This sad and flawed book won’t help her be found.”

Similarly, Erik Wemple of The Washington Post calls the book “depressing,” “desperate,” and written with a “tedious grand design.” And while Wemple cites Libby early in his review for his criminal conviction, he never touches on the points made by Miller that pointed to his persecution by Fitzgerald and exoneration as it related to Miller.

“A two-year study by Charles Duelfer, the former deputy chief of the U.N. inspectors who led America’s hunt for WMD in Iraq, concluded that Saddam Hussein was playing a double game, trying…to get sanctions lifted and inspectors out of Iraq and…to persuade Iran and other foes that he had retained WMD,” wrote Miller for The Wall Street Journal in an op-ed published on April 3. “Often forgotten is Mr. Duelfer’s well-documented warning that Saddam intended to restore his WMD programs once sanctions were lifted.”

Miller’s account is the more accurate, if less politically correct, one, despite the media’s ongoing animosity toward any evidence or argument that may absolve Bush from the accusation that he lied—and misled us into the Iraq War.

“Neighboring Kuwait and Iran also thought Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,” notes Berkowitz for Real Clear Politics. “So did some of Saddam’s field commanders.” So did the British government, the French, and many of the other countries in the coalition that went to war with us in Iraq. Last year, The New York Times, of all places, revealed in a major series of articles titled “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons,” that “American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs” during the Iraq War, but the Bush administration chose to keep it quiet. Clearly, the stockpiles of WMD that they expected to find once Iraq was liberated from Saddam Hussein were not found. The debate over that issue, and the significance of the Times’ findings, continues. But it is wrong to argue that no WMD were found in Iraq.

Berkowitz, in his Wall Street Journal analysis, took a deeper look at the actions of Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby, and it wasn’t pretty: “Mr. Fitzgerald’s conduct warrants revisiting not only to set the record straight about Mr. Libby, but also to illustrate the damage that can be done to national security by a special counsel who, discovering no crime, generates through his investigations the alleged offenses he seeks to prosecute.”

And this, which detailed how Fitzgerald withheld exculpatory evidence from Libby’s lawyers that could have absolutely made a difference in the final outcome of the trial: “Mr. Fitzgerald, who had the classified file of Ms. Plame’s service, withheld her State Department cover from Ms. Miller—and from Mr. Libby’s lawyers, who had requested Ms. Plame’s employment history,” wrote Berkowitz. “Despite his constitutional and ethical obligation to provide exculpatory evidence, Mr. Fitzgerald encouraged Ms. Miller to misinterpret her ambiguous notes as showing that Mr. Libby brought up Ms. Plame.”

Berkowitz also made the most salient point regarding this whole prosecution. The idea, when the investigation began in late summer of 2003, was to find out who leaked Valerie Plame’s name and identity to reporters, specifically to Robert Novak, who first reported it in a July 2003 column. By October, the FBI knew where the leak came from. It was Richard Armitage, from the State Department, who unlike some at the White House was opposed to going to war against Saddam. But that was kept quiet, and when Fitzgerald was appointed special prosecutor in December of that year, the case should have been closed. But Fitzgerald chose to seek a conviction against Libby by arguing that he was lying, rather than that his memory was confused when he spoke months later following his July 2003 conversation with Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Libby’s team wanted to have memory experts testify, but Fitzgerald refused to allow it, allowing him to stack the deck by manipulating witnesses.

Miller now makes clear that Libby did not tell her about Valerie Plame.

I sat through parts of the trial, including the day that Evan Thomas of Newsweek, David Sanger of The New York Times, Bob Woodward, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, and Robert Novak testified—all of whom spoke with Libby during the period in which he was supposedly outing Plame—and each one said that didn’t happen in their conversation.

The idea that neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post, nor others in the media, regularly and deliberately push an agenda when the facts are limited, only available from the administration’s perspective, or conveniently fit preconceived narratives about reality is laughable. Accuracy in Media exists to document many such cases, including: the coverage of the Ferguson, Missouri shooting; the Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus;” Obamacare, and illegal immigration. Meanwhile, stories about Benghazi, Fast & Furious, and the IRS scandal, among others, are largely ignored by the mainstream media because they don’t fit the established progressive agenda and might damage the current administration.

In the end, this is one of those books that each party takes from it that which conveniently suits their own narrative. And by doing so, many in the media are ignoring the important revelations to be found in Miller’s new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.

03/10/15

Obama and Hillary: What Did They Know, and When Did They Know It?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The latest revelations about Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails while Secretary of State for the Obama administration have proven “politically problematic,” and invited discomfort by some of her fellow Democrats, possibly encouraging other ambitious Democratic hopefuls to contend for the presidential primary, according to some in the media.

By defining the problem as just “political,” these reporters can cast the issue as one dividing political parties to distract from the pressing issues of the day. This media frenzy works in the Obama administration’s favor. “…why did Hillary Clinton become the Obama administration’s bête noire this very week…? questions Lee Smith writing for Tablet Magazine. Perhaps because Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech before Congress reflected badly on the administration’s plan for an Iran deal. “This week’s tarring of Hillary Clinton is part of the White House’s political campaign to shut off debate about its hoped-for deal,” he asserts.

Smith’s suspicions are raised by the fact that Gawker’s John Cook emailed then-deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, now White House press secretary, about the issue of Clinton’s private email account back in 2013—two years ago!

Yet on Saturday, President Barack Obama told CBS News’ Bill Plante in an interview that he learned about Mrs. Clinton’s private email system at “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” much like he claims to have learned about so many others of his scandals.

The most recent claim apparently didn’t stand up to common sense scrutiny. After all, one needed only to ask if the President and Secretary of State hadn’t exchanged emails for years. On Monday Josh Earnest told the press that President Obama and Secretary Clinton had exchanged emails, that the President had noticed the private address, and that “The point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address… But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

But few in the media seem to be asking about who actually saw Cook’s email back in 2013. Either the White House has known about the potential political fallout for years, or someone failed to pass the word up the chain of command.

Some members of the media prefer to view this latest scandal, like so many others, as some sort of right-wing conspiracy, with conservatives out to get Mrs. Clinton. Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast stubbornly refuses to define this growing debacle as a “scandal,” writing instead, “If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath.” This implies, again, that opposition to Clinton’s lack of transparency is rooted in politics and ideology, as if real outrage were impossible or unjustified.

It’s not just the right this time, with people like Ruth Marcus, Mark Halperin, Mika Brzezinski, Maureen Dowd and Ron Fournier also taking Hillary to task. It’s enough to suggest a different conspiracy theory: that the left wants to dump Hillary for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), or someone they believe would be more electable, and more to their liking.

And while some in the media may have tacitly admitted that there is already blood in the proverbial water, and that Clinton may see greater challenges coming from other candidates, the narrative persists that the Select Committee on Benghazi was established simply to damage Mrs. Clinton. So the villain in this growing scandal, for Clinton acolytes, is not Clinton herself. It is, instead, the Select Committee on Benghazi, which apparently had known about her multiple private email accounts since at least last summer, according to National Review’s Andy McCarthy.

“The panel’s Republican House members are seizing on the revelations regarding Clinton’s private e-mail domain to expand their committee’s mandate, delay Clinton’s testimony and extend their investigation indefinitely,” write Josh Rogin and Eli Lake for Bloomberg. Similarly, Tomasky writes that “… it smells like the Times may have been rolled by the Republican staff of the Benghazi panel. And hey, great work by them and Chairman Trey Gowdy to use the nation’s leading liberal newspaper in this way.”

Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama were some of the main decision-makers during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, and have always dominated the heart of the Benghazi scandal—as inconvenient as this may be for some in the media.

The media are, once again, accusing the Republicans on the Select Committee of engaging in run-away politicking during an election season. “Republican Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has insisted he wants his investigation to be impartial, not to be partisan nor about Hillary Clinton personally,” reports The Daily Beast. “But the pull of conservatives clamoring for answers regarding the scandal has focused the committee’s attention on the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination.”

These politicized assessments ignore and minimize the valid security and transparency concerns raised by Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account during her entire term as Secretary. But the lack of transparency revealed by this latest Clinton scandal demonstrates that Mrs. Clinton has a problem with humility, and as “heir apparent” for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination may have internalized a feeling of invincibility—as if she is above public accountability and standards of conduct.

The additional debate about fairness to Mrs. Clinton in The New York Times reporting also ignores the larger, overlooked picture: the Obama administration’s culpability in enabling Mrs. Clinton’s behavior. In cases where Clinton’s email was requested by citizens’ groups and news reporters, “the State Department acknowledged receipt of the [Freedom of Information Act] requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents,” The New York Times reported.

According to the Associated Press, the State Department “never suggested that it didn’t possess all her emails” when the A.P. requested records more than a year ago. That is a scandal in and of itself.

To put it mildly, the fact that there were no records to produce from Mrs. Clinton’s service until this recent date likely proved politically convenient for the administration, and provides further evidence of a government cover-up on Benghazi. Now-public records have already demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s guilty knowledge about the attacks. Her pro-active attempts at concealing her communications through the use of a private email server have already been thwarted by the Freedom of Information Act.

The newly released Judicial Watch emails documenting correspondence sent to Cheryl Mills (then-Chief of Staff to Sec. Clinton), Jacob Sullivan (then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), and Joseph McManus (then-Hillary Clinton’s Executive Assistant) provided ample evidence that Mrs. Clinton had guilty knowledge of the nature of the terrorist attack in Benghazi as early as a half an hour after the attack.

“Also littered throughout the State Department emails, obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, are references to a so-called Benghazi Group,” reports Catherine Herridge for Fox News. “A diplomatic source told Fox News that was code inside the department for the so-called Cheryl Mills task force, whose job was damage control.”

And as I have previously reported, the President was told this was an attack by terrorists—not the result of a spontaneous demonstration that got out of control—by his military advisors on September 11, 2012, shortly after the attacks began.

Mrs. Clinton has now requested her emails’ public release, and may hold a press conference in the next several days, according to Politico. Perhaps it was the ridicule from Saturday Night Live that convinced her to speak up, or the sting from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Meet the Press calling on Hillary to come clean if she expects to be the party’s standard bearer. But the process of releasing her emails could take months, according to Reuters, which reports that “The email controversy could intensify long-standing Republican criticism of Clinton’s transparency and ethics.”

Clinton’s request to make her emails public should be treated with urgency, and may yet yield additional information regarding the Benghazi attacks and other administration policies during her time as Secretary. But in a real sense it may not matter now whether the State Department actually releases this set of emails, as they were first vetted by Clinton’s advisers. One must ask: What did these advisers choose to omit?

The media shouldn’t be fooled by these “latest [Clinton] efforts to demonstrate transparency” if they are designed to conceal politically damaging material from the public while appearing to be open and fair. Neither should they accept platitudes from Mrs. Clinton if and when she does hold her press conference. But in an even greater sense, the media spotlight shouldn’t be on Mrs. Clinton—it should be on President Obama. What did he know, and when did he know it?