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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / No Longer Breaking News that was Poorly Reported and Lost in the Shuffle: CNN & Hillary Clinton’s Email Edition

No Longer Breaking News that was Poorly Reported and Lost in the Shuffle: CNN & Hillary Clinton’s Email Edition

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Last Friday CNN reported that:

The FBI has not yet interviewed Clinton as part of its investigation. As CNN first reported, investigators have not found evidence to support criminal charges against Clinton and none are expected, but no final determination will be made until that interview has taken place.

This was the fifth paragraph of a longer report dealing with emails about the US drone program. The context was of State Department officials emailing Secretary Clinton about the drone program, which is classified, during the Winter holidays (Christmas to New Years) in 2011 while on leave, away from the office, and unable to access the classified email systems, but still having to conduct their work. It is also spillage – the information was sent to her, she did not go and take classified information and purposefully place it into an unclassified email. This CNN report got lost in the shuffle over the weekend, for obvious reasons, but its important to highlight it nonetheless.

Reader Interactions

96Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    FBI: Is this all bullshit?

    Clinton: Yes.

    FBI:. Ok, we’re done. Thanks for stopping by.

  2. 2.

    JPL

    Even though Director Comey is a conservative Republican, he will be labeled as an Obama appointee, who just followed orders.

  8. 8.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: Because there is a persistent drumbeat that she’s going to be indicted, that she’s under criminal investigation, that she’s done something criminal. None of that is true and the reporting to the contrary has been few and far between.

  9. 9.

    rachel

    @Major Major Major Major: Because there are still a number of idiots insisting that the FBI wants to haul her away in handcuffs and would do so any minute now if it weren’t for the Obama cover-up. I don’t know if those other idiots are still claiming she was sending out drone strikes.

  10. 10.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: And, from HRC interviews I have seen, the media news divas still have to ask BS emgailgazzi questions every single time, and then smirk that HRC wasn’t really responsive, no matter what she says. Edit: or what the facts are.

  11. 11.

    hovercraft

    @Baud:
    You are a paid shill and a liar Baud, I know you are colluding with Hillary. I have it on the best authority from Hugh Hewitt that she is under criminal investigation. Or did Obama get to Comey ? Plus ‘real progressives’ tell me she will be indicted and Bernie will be the nominee.

  18. 18.

    Origuy

    I don’t know if anyone posted this here; Louis CK’s take on the election:

    Hillary Clinton: “Here’s my license. Here’s all the thousands of flights that I’ve flown. Here’s planes I’ve flown in really difficult situations. I’ve had some good flights and some bad flights, but I’ve been flying for a very long time, and I know exactly how this plane works.”

    Bernie Sanders: “Everyone should get a ride right to their house with this plane.” “Well, how are you going to do that?” [C.K. asks in the voice of the person choosing the pilot, before pivoting back to Sanders’s answer.] “I just think we should. It’s only fair that everyone gets to use the plane equally.”

    Trump: “I’m going to fly so well. You’re not going to believe how good I’m going to fly this plane, and by the way, Hillary never flew a plane in her life.”

  19. 19.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @maryQ: Today he was tweeting that the Superdelegate system needs to go.

    After they’ve all flipped to him, of course…

  22. 22.

    Baud

    @Villago Delenda Est: I don’t mind getting rid of supers in the context of other reforms, particularly getting rid of caucuses.

    Or maybe say the supers get to vote only if the pledged delegates are withim a certain percentage of each other.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @schrodinger’s cat: I’m not sure how to link to the tweet machine, but I see that Tapper called Obama’s speech a ‘tirade’ and did so not on his personal account but on his show’s account.

    And he is giving some ex-House GOPer Mike Rogers, who has been given a CNN show, a platform to rave incoherently against Obama, for which Tapper provides misleading titles and summaries.

    I’ve disliked they way Tapper does his job for a long time, by the way. I don’t know why, but his brand of corporate hackery and self-promotion bothers me more than most. Maybe because he is better at covering it with a fake journalistic sheen. But, maybe I am just biased against him.

  24. 24.

    trollhattan

    @Adam L Silverman:
    That indictment will come riding in on the back of the Whitey Tape, waving a copy of Trump’s Hawaii birth certificate investigation report. “Yee-haw! Now lemme just whip this out.”

  26. 26.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @jl: Tapper needs to get a new job. One more fitting his skills and temperament. One where he asks “do you want fries with that?”

  27. 27.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @trollhattan: You remember the 90’s? When Ken Starr was saying “indictments are just around the corner” at least once a week? And they never came?

    This is the summer rerun season, but geeze, this is not TV Land!

  30. 30.

    jl

    @schrodinger’s cat: More than anyone on non-Fox News media, I intensely distrust and dislike the way Tapper does his job. Only guy I can think of who comes on and I literally want to start yelling and throwing things through the video screen.

    I actually trust and respect the likes of Fox Newsers Megan Kelly and Shephard Smith more.

  31. 31.

    JWR

    @hovercraft:

    D.C. with 41 % in Clinton 78.8 Sanders 21

    Yes, but in your heart of hearts, you know that in the GE, Sanders! is by far the stronger candidate to take on Il Donaldo!

    PS to Bernie!, Go away!

  32. 32.

    JPL

    @schrodinger’s cat: Normally a sitting President doesn’t call the presumptive nominee of the other party dangerous. What Tapper didn’t say is the presumptive nominee is dangerous.

  33. 33.

    James E Powell

    @Adam L Silverman:

    You may recall that in the late 90s, for like two or three years, nearly every guest on the Sunday shows would advise us that the indictments against Hillary Clinton would be coming any day.

    They hate her. If things go right, they will be saying stuff like this for the next eight years.

  34. 34.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I hate the idea of superdelegates, but I do like the idea that if the democrats were crazy enough or deluded enough or had been misled enough to vote for our version of a donald trump… that the superdelegates would be there for a course correction.

    OT, if Donald Trump has a breakdown or some other crazy thing happens and is no longer a viable nominee, can the republicans just vote someone else in at the convention?

  35. 35.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @JPL: The presumptive nominee might as well be on Daesh’s payroll. He’s doing everything Daesh wants a western politician to do.

  36. 36.

    JPL

    @jl: Were you around when Jake was whining on this site about us being mean to him. It was before CNN, but I bet he still checks periodically. It was hilarious.

  37. 37.

    Baud

    @WaterGirl:

    but I do like the idea that if the democrats were crazy enough or deluded enough or had been misled enough to vote for our version of a donald trump…

    I take that personally.

  38. 38.

    NotMax

    @hovercraft

    Pace those Sandersnistas hanging on to the fringe of reality by their fingernails, voters in D.C. are, by definition, Washington insiders and therefore shouldn’t count.

    ;)

  42. 42.

    James E Powell

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    What you say about the press/media is true. I’ve noticed that when they are introducing a story about Trump they anchors smile at each other – like they are introducing a story about Santa Claus or a bear in the swimming pool – and then they toss it to the reporter who is also smiling. This is how they handled Arnold’s first run for governor – as if it were a story about a film opening or a celebrity’s appearance at a public event.

  43. 43.

    WaterGirl

    @JPL: I recall the President taking some major swipes at CNN at the WHCD. I don’t recall if he actually named Jake Tapper, but I think he might have.

  45. 45.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jl: Rogers was the House Homeland Security Chair in the previous Congress. The on screen lede, not the chyron/crawl, whenever CNN reports on the President’s remarks has included “tirade”. That’s how they’ve decided this should be framed. Its an editorial decision and they’re going sticking to it.

  46. 46.

    jl

    @JPL: I don’t remember that. Must have been before my time, or I didn’t know who he was and didn’t notice.

    So, Tapper bothered to loiter around almost top 10,000 political blogs and whine about anonymous commenters being mean to him? Figures.

  48. 48.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: Don’t take it personally. If I weren’t so terrified by Donald Trump, I might just write in Baud!

    In fact, if I weren’t so lazy, I would get my ballot, write you in, take a photo with my phone and then go out, say I spoiled my ballot and ask for a new one, and vote for Hillary Clinton. I got tired just writing all that. :-)

  53. 53.

    Will R

    @Adam L Silverman: I posted this over at the old man’s site a few days ago. He didn’t address it. Most there feel she is guilty and that Obama is behind the lack of an indictment.

  54. 54.

    NotMax

    @WaterGirl

    Short answer: Yes.

    Longer answer: If he does not drop out in such a case, the rules of the convention can be changed by vote during the convention to release enough delegates bound on the first ballot (even then, the vote of some would not be affected dependent on applicable state rules) to deny him a clear win.

    All hypothetical, as it ain’t a-gonna happen.

  55. 55.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Time to update Upton Sinclair: “When fascism comes to America, it will be crowned by an orange combover & carrying a grudge.”…

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    @efgoldman: Good point, but I bet the Republicans never thought they would be in that position, either.

    I come from an IT background where it’s said that “we wear belts and suspenders”. You always need to be prepared for the unexpected and have a backup plan.

    Edit: maybe superdelegates need to be kept under some sort of “break in case of emergency” glass.

  57. 57.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jl: It wasn’t just Tapper’s show. It was also Blitzer’s and the annoying brunette that’s on around 7 PM EDT. I was at the gym and could see the tv between sets.

  59. 59.

    SFAW

    @JPL:

    Even though Director Comey is a conservative Republican, he will be labeled as an Obama appointee, who just followed orders

    Actually, during their closed-door meeting, Hitlary said to Comey, “So, do you remember what happened to Vince Foster? Do you think that you have better bodyguards than he did? If you want to find out — the hard way — you just TRY pressing for an indictment.”

  65. 65.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: I think ‘tirade’ is misleading. But i was referring specifically to Tapper putting a title and summary of the Rodgers interview that did not accurately represent what he said, and what his criticism of Obama was.

    But I can see how Tapper’s misrepresentation would ‘Trumpify’ the link, and maybe get more clicks, so Tapper figures, ‘what the heck, go with it’. Or Tapper is deeply deeply biased himself, in an almost juvenile way, if he thinks he is accurately representing what Rodgers said.

  69. 69.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Will R: I’m aware. He’s linked to John Schindler’s commentary and op-eds on the matter. This would be the same guy suspended from his professorship at the Naval War College for texting pictures of his genitals to women that didn’t request pictures of his genitals:
    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/28/too-late-to-pologize-for-nsa-revenge-porn-leak.html
    http://www.stripes.com/news/us/navy-professor-resigns-after-racy-photo-inquiry-1.297789

    Not exactly a credible source…

    What’s interesting is when she was Secretary of State he spoke and wrote highly of her. He felt she was outperforming his expectations.

  70. 70.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @jl: It’s all about the clicks. Tapper is a creature of the MSM’s addiction to ratings, clicks, whatever, because it translates into revenue, and Tubmans are the only thing that matter to his paymasters.

  72. 72.

    SFAW

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    What conventions have the media and the GOP followed regarding a sitting President, in Obama’s case?

    That no Demon-rat President, especially a blackity-black black one, shall be allowed to govern?

  73. 73.

    raven

    Kill the gays preacher.

    “But these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed. Because, in Leviticus 20:13, God’s perfect law, he put the death penalty on murder, and he also put the death penalty on homosexuality. That’s what the Bible says, plain and simple.”

  76. 76.

    JPL

    @SFAW: Vince Foster should be off limits. Use another name. Many years ago, I saw President Clinton on the Larry King show speaking about his friend, and not being able to protect him from the vicious opinion pieces. It was one of his greatest regrets.

  78. 78.

    normal liberal

    @WaterGirl:
    He did – something about Tapper giving up journalism by going to CNN.
    The audience tittered, then went quiet as they thought it through.

  79. 79.

    Anne Laurie

    @jl:

    I’ve disliked they way Tapper does his job for a long time, by the way. I don’t know why, but his brand of corporate hackery and self-promotion bothers me more than most.

    First time Jake Tapper crossed my radar was his YUUUGE! BREAKING! SCOOP!!!! that first-term President Obama was occasionally sneaking smokes. I may not have been the only person whose first impression of Tapper was of a self-dramatizing narcissist who interpreted all “news” only as it related to his own extremely trivial concerns…

  81. 81.

    Anne Laurie

    @NotMax:

    Racking a brain is perhaps handy to let it dry out after a brainwashing. :)

    Maybe Tapper’s brain racks like a shotgun, before he ejects tiny pellets scattered in a wide pattern?

  82. 82.

    Tom Q

    @efgoldman: When I thought about this, the best I could come up with was Jerry Springer — who, of course, long ago was an elected Democrat as mayor of Cincinnati. (Though that alone makes him more strongly qualified than Trump.)

  83. 83.

    maryQ

    @WaterGirl @but I do like the idea that if the democrats were crazy enough or deluded enough or had been misled enough to vote for our version of a donald trump… that the superdelegates would be there for a course correction.”

    That IS the idea of super delegates. You can’t hate the idea of super delegates and love what they are for. Sanders has promoted the idea that they exist for nefarious purposes. They exist for course correction, and would only override the majority a sure loser had a slight majority of pledged delegates.

  88. 88.

    SFAW

    @JPL:

    Vince Foster should be off limits. Use another name.

    Spare me. Has Hillary been accused (by wingnuts) of murdering anyone else? Jim McDougal? Ron Brown?

    OK, so do the following ones meet with your approval?

    “So, do you remember what happened to Moe Greene? Do you think that you have better bodyguards than he did? If you want to find out — the hard way — you just TRY pressing for an indictment.”
    “So, do you remember what happened to Emilio Barzini? Do you think that you have better bodyguards than he did? If you want to find out — the hard way — you just TRY pressing for an indictment.”
    “So, do you remember what happened to Iosef Tarasov? Do you think that you have better bodyguards than he did? If you want to find out — the hard way — you just TRY pressing for an indictment.”

    … and so forth

  89. 89.

    Elizabelle

    @Adam L Silverman: This looked like material for one of your posts.

    Caught an article this morning, from the LA Times. (But first, a link to the original Harvard report, which is much more hard-hitting, because some of the LA Times’s narrative struck me as both nonsensical and self-serving):

    Shorenstein Center Report (from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government): Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle

    author: Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press

    Now, the LA Times recap. News coverage of campaign greatly aided Trump and hurt Clinton, study finds

    News coverage of the early months of the presidential campaign strongly boosted Donald Trump’s bid and put Hillary Clinton at a disadvantage, according to a new study from Harvard that is likely to add to the heavy volume of complaints that the media aided Trump’s rise.

    ….But the problem was not that news media actively favored Trump, wrote the study’s principal author, Thomas E. Patterson, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who for many years has studied the intersection of the press and politics. Instead, reporters did what they naturally do – look for stories about subjects that are new, different and unexpected. Trump fit that bill precisely and knew how to take advantage.

    He “exploited their lust for riveting stories,” Patterson wrote of the news media. “The politics of outrage was his edge, and the press became his dependable, if unwitting, ally.”

    [Elizabelle: Calling bullshit on that; the press is lazy and would feed us Kardashian stories 24/7 if it pulled money into media owners’ pockets. Plus, news staffs have been decimated. They go for what’s cheap and easy and looks controversial. Further, I suspect media owners are all about favorable tax treatment for themselves, and less serious about their “watchdog”roles. Lapdogs, more like it. Trump figured that out but good.]

    … The Democratic race had a notably different pattern. Not only was coverage significantly less, but, more notably, stories about Clinton overwhelmingly took a negative tone.

    In contrast with every other major candidate, the majority of stories about Clinton were negative in all but one month in 2015. The exception was October – the month in which Vice President Joe Biden announced he would not run for the nomination and Clinton both dominated her first debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and held her own in 11 hours of grilling from a congressional committee investigating the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

    Fox News stood out for the most consistently negative coverage of the Democratic front-runner, but across the board, each of the eight news sources published more negative than positive or neutral stories about Clinton during the year, the study found.

    Part of the reason for the negative tone was that a higher share of stories about Clinton dealt with her record and positions on issues than with the campaign horse race. The record and issue coverage heavily accentuated her problems, the study found. At the same time, the horse race stories tended to focus on her losing ground in polls.

    “Whereas media coverage helped build up Trump, it helped tear down Clinton,” Patterson wrote. “Trump’s positive coverage was the equivalent of millions of dollars in ad buys in his favor, whereas Clinton’s negative coverage can be equated to millions of dollars in attack ads, with her on the receiving end.”

    [Elizabelle: Some of the LATimes take sounds like bullshit too. Hillary’s problem is her record and stand on the issues? Hell no. Issues are barely covered. It’s that “email” and “scandal” was inserted into just about every story or broadcast I ever saw, for months upon months upon months. And lots of pearl clutching about how untrustworthy and unlikeable she is. I really thought MSNBC might have issued an edict: but for the 3 hours of libtard programming in evenings (Maddow, etc.), every time you bring up HIllary, you have to bring up the emails.]

    Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders could hardly get press attention, although when it finally turned to him, it was the most positive of any candidate’s.

    The Vermont senator often complained that stories about him mostly focused on the campaign horse race and not on the issues he raised, but that may have helped him, Patterson noted: The horse race stories mostly fit into a narrative of Sanders “gaining ground,” which almost always presents a candidate in a positive light.

    Over to Adam, who is way better at condensing this stuff.

    The Shorenstein report sounded worth discussion.

    The for-profit media helped the GOP build their Frankenstein monster, and don’t let them off the hook for “doing what they naturally do.” They’ve become toxic. Some of the foreign press has covered the 2016 election and its issues far more accurately and fairly than the careerist lapdogs/buckrakers here.

  91. 91.

    Carl W

    @Major Major Major Major: Cool. One strange thing. If you go to the back yard, type “look at rosie”, and press Enter, nothing happens — it’s like it just doesn’t recognize that you pressed Enter.

  93. 93.

    MisterForkbeard

    @shomi: I’m pretty sure emailgate is a nothingburger, but I believe this particular article is talking only about a set of mails related to drones. If that set of mail constitutes all of Hillary’s classified mails on the subject, she’s in the clear. If there are other mails in question, then the article doesn’t necessarily say anything about the legality of those mails.

    Again, I think it’s all crap and she clearly didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m trying to read the article as literally as I can.

  94. 94.

    Cat48

    Malcom Nance, my favorite terror expert, was asked about the investigation a few months ago and he said it was nothing but it had been highly politicized for: Reasons.
    ok?

  96. 96.

    lol

    @Baud:

    The best solution I’ve seen is to prohibit superdelegates from voting on the first ballot. Gives you the fail safe against someone like Trump winning a plurality of delegates but makes it impossible for them to override a majority of voters.

    It also preserves the prestige and status of being a DNC delegate who automatically gets to be on the convention floor which is almost certainly 90% of the reason we have superdelegates in the first place. Elected officials hate losing privileges like this and preserving their delegate status will eliminate one huge reason they’d oppose reform.

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