I don’t particularly want to post on this, but I feel like somebody should, for the sake of intellectual integrity.
Hillary Clinton and her team ignored clear guidance from the State Department that her email setup broke federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers, a department audit has found. Her aides twice brushed aside concerns, in one case telling technical staff “the matter was not to be discussed further.”
The inspector general’s review on Wednesday also revealed that hacking attempts led forced then-Secretary of State Clinton off email at one point in 2011, though she insists the personal server she used was never breached. Clinton and several of her senior staff declined to be interviewed for the investigation.
Some more.
The audit did note that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had also exclusively used a private email account, though it did not name any other prior secretaries who had done so. But the failings of Clinton were singled out in the audit as being more serious than her predecessor.
“By Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated,” the report concluded. “Secretary Clinton’s cybersecurity practices accordingly must be evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives.”
Republicans said Wednesday the audit showed Clinton was in clear violation of the Federal Records Act and endangered national security.
To me, this is a perfect political storm. The defenses are incredibly hollow. For Clinton haters, this confirms everything they already believe about her.
And, not to beat the drum again, but there are thousands upon thousands of e-mails to pick through.
This doesn’t even touch the subpoena issue.
An unforced error of epic proportions. And to those who say, “Double standard! Colin Powell did it!” That argument would be better if Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney did it. We always went pretty easy on Powell; hell, he endorsed Obama.
One other thing: my take, most Americans look at this and think one thing: I’d get fired for that.
It’s a horror show, and it’s not going away.
Hillary’s response is that the emails were fine, and the IG is wrong.
She’s perfectly capable to argue the unarguable, and to deny the undeniable.
Is that a presidential skill? It was not something tried in earnestness by the highest office since the George W Bush WMDs and the Bill Clintonesque “I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky”.
We have been spoiled by Barack ‘No Drama’ Obama, and will live to regret him.
Unbelievable, really. But, I doubt the IG report or the fact the it happened will be that damaging in the end. It’s just noise to most people at this point. Something juicy that comes out in the emails on the other hand….who knows? Ugh.
…from what I’ve been able to gather from today’s reporting sure, the lives of Clinton and her supporters would be easier if she had handled this differently. HRC is the first to admit that. However, in the scheme of things this report seems to fall somewhere around slap on the wrist in terms of consequences.
When I worked at the State Department and possibly prosecuted. I certainly would’ve been stripped of my security clearance. I haven’t talked to a single member of the military, intelligence or foreign services who doesn’t understand this or feel the same way.
what this report does it highlight an issue within the state department over a longer period of time.
The real one is on going.
Never worked at State, but I did work at a defense contractor for a couple years.
That being said, the rules have always been different for political appointees than for professional staff and contractors. The nature of the political appointment is that you have more leeway to act in what you perceive the public interest to be, especially in regard to classified information. It’s unclear to me exactly how Clinton’s private server advanced the public interest, but one could at least make the case.
To the extent she violated policy (and not law it’s important to note), these policies were not all in place over her entire tenure. From what I gather this is policy only so if the facts of your case were identical maybe there would be job consequences, but not prosecution, for you.
was there a security breach? was there anything criminal? That’s the question. This is intra-bureaucracy BS, with all the hype around this, all we get is a ding on recording keeping?
They admit it’s been an issue with over a period of the last 5 Sec of States. The also had to concede that they never actually asked Clinton to use their network. Really? What a bunch of dolts.
The worst part of this bureaucratic exercise was finding out Clinton used a Blackberry. A Blackberry?
Not really sure why, other than institutional inertia.
They are significantly harder to hack than iPhones or androids.
…showing how there are larger structural issues on the theme of not quite having joined the 21st century yet, which are bigger than any one Secretary’s email habits.
More silly-season nonsense.
Any gain or loss from this “story” happened YEARS ago. This is just silly-season nonsense, hyped for its ratings value more than anything else.
I think the mainstream media are looking for ways to draw attention to the campaign, and I think the supporters of Mr. Sanders are grasping at straws.
There’s nothing here.
I am a Clinton supporter in the general and I believe Bernie should drop out after California. His platform committee participants are already doing damage to the party in the general by passing really fringey resolutions on Palestine and other irrelevant issues when they should be focused like a laser on income inequality and social/racial injustice-two issues Trump will take us way back on.
That said, there is a block of white male working class voters who went for Obama four years ago who won’t vote for Hillary. Sexism plays a part, but the idea that the Clintons are corrupt and have benefitted from a corrupt system isn’t going away and it hurts her trust worthiness in poll after poll. And this investigation plays into the hands of a right wing Congress that has now unified behind Trump. There is a reason the polls are neck and neck right now and this is one of them.
I respect you, Christopher, Fred and others for your passionate and largely positive advocacy of your candidate and your respectful tone towards the man she vanquished in this primary. It’s definitely incumbent upon Bernie supporters to unite now. We have a two bit caudillo versus a potential Humphrey/LBJ figure and that’s the easiest choice I will ever make in an election.
That said, Hillary supporters have to recognize these own goals are self inflicted wounds that have nothing to do the 90s, Ken Starr or the VRWC. They didn’t tell her to take Goldman money or to disregard the rules every State Department employee takes an oath before the flag to uphold. She made those mistakes all on her own and has yet to apologize for them. Apologizing for them now and moving on is the best course of action, the bleeding stopped on Monica when the president stopped lying about the personal misconduct and redirected the questions towards the constitutional overreach of the impeachment gang.
Let’s take them one by one:
You’ve said this many times, but there continues to be little evidence for this claim. White male working class voters have been among the worst groups for Democrats going back decades, and certainly the political landscape on this front has changed little on this front since the Obama election and re-election. You are welcome to provide data to back up your frequent claim on this score, but I see no indication of it at all.
Sure it does. Just like Benghazi and the 1,000 other investigations the right wing has thrown against the Clintons since Whitewater and Vince Foster. I’m not sure why we should allow the right-wing to dictate the conversation here. It’s a testament to the power of mud-slinging that so many people (especially younger people not around for the 90s) believe all of the crap slung at Hillary for years in public life.
I was not aware that all State Department employees take an oath before the flag to uphold internal bureaucratic policies (some of which, as in this case, have been for years unclear and unenforced). Employees do take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. And to be clear: the violations here were of State Department rules, not mishandling classified information or any other of the BS charges Republicans have been hurling around for months.
She specifically apologized back in September of 2015. I’m not sure what else you want her to do. Perhaps go on an “apology tour” as Republicans have claimed Obama has always done?
In short, I wish that Democrats and liberals would not cave so easily to the impressions of the Clintons (and other Democrats) that Republicans have built and continue to build. Is this email story newsworthy? Sure is. Did Clinton make a mistake (and apologize for it)? Sure did.
But is it, as the original post suggested an “unforced error of epic proportions” and a “horror show”? Hell no, and it is frankly embarrassing and disheartening that some liberals are so easily played by the spin doctors of the Right.
Sorry to dishearten and embarrass you, but I’m sticking to that characterization.
Can a circle of supporters agree to ignore this? Sure, have your fun.
But several aspects of this are damaging:
– Willful and deliberate deviation from established procedure.
– Apply a “reasonable person” standard to this. If you worked for the State Department, how often would you e-mail the Secretary him/herself? And when you did e-mail them, would it be about the lunch menu, or something more sensitive?
– The personal character reference. HRC, by her own account, wanted to avoid scrutiny. Hey, here’s an idea: decline the job and retire to private life, not take it and then run for President.
– All of this taken together reflects a truly disturbing double standard and disrespect for public service. Now she says she believes in transparency, but her actions say otherwise.
Sorry but this stinks to high heaven. The most benign explanation is bad, and any more cynical look at it is worse.
A disaster.
Obviously I’m not a Hillary supporter, but I’m thinking about this as I’m doing something at work.
My company (and myself in working for them) utilize lots of outside services for work functions. Staples Online for purchasing office supplies, an outside bank for a purchasing card, phone services, etc.
What if, when I am registering for all these things, I put my personal e-mail in, my home phone number, and my home address?
Time goes on, and the company accesses those accounts and finds all that info. Then they see that I’ve deleted the history in the account.
I say I’m sorry. What would you think?
Remember when Sanders himself stated that he was “sick of hearing about your damn emails” to Clinton?
Hillary Clinton has a “disrespect for public service.”
Yes, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
She just backed out of her pledge to debate Sanders in California.
Because she doesn’t have to, right? Good politics.
But she gave her word, to us the public. If “disregard” is the wrong word, please tell me what the right word is.
have Fox News sponsor a debate with a candidate who has already lost the primary. What could go wrong?
She broke a pledge.
Are we going to spend the entire campaign apologizing for her?
Are going to spend her entire presidency apologizing for her?
It’s exhausting. JUST KEEP YOUR WORD. is that really too much to ask?
I know she has declined to debate, but I’m not aware of when she said she would. Even if you do find it for me I’m still inclined to shrug my shoulders and say plans change.
First deny that Hillary agreed to it. Then, when it’s proven that she did, just argue that it didn’t matter that she broke her word, as she is going to win the nomination anyway. Sometimes, in my experience, people even revert to again denying that she broke her word as well.
People really need to stop with the BS.
In February, an agreement was hammered out between Bernie, Hillary, and the DNC to have 4 additional sanctioned debates, with the final one occurring in May in California. This euphemism of her “declining to debate” is misleading. The only way one can intellectually honestly describe Clinton as not having broken her word would be to be aware of any mutual agreement between Bernie and her so that they would cancel the previously agreed up debate in May in California.
I’d be remiss were I not to include the additional context. This isn’t the first time either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton pulled this punk move. In March, FOX News was attempting to have a debate between Bernie and Hillary, which she declined. FOX then turned to Trump to see if he would be Bernie’s opponent. Trump accepted and then later gave another one of his BS excuses about a “scheduling conflict.” For then left with no opponent for Bernie, decided to go forward with just an hour-long townhall with Bernie, to which Hillary upon getting wind of it, decided then that she would shop up to debate him on FOX.
Seriously, it’s getting quite embarrassing to witness the denial about the similarities of poor character, untrustworthiness, and thumbing their noses at agreements and standards that Trump and Clinton share.
…but it’s fine with me to change strategy to focus on Trump, to whom your comparison with her is absolutely outrageous.
You should stop posting provocative posts. Never mind arguing. I know, i know this is a place for progressive Democrats to argue with each other and those promoting third parties and troublesome conservatives. I get tired reading BMG sometimes, except for your provacative posts. And Porcupine…
Sanders Minimum Wage promise, his own web site on Interns:
Snif, snif, please.
You’re talking points are rather irrelevant here. Whenever I link to polls showing Trump does better with this demo in critical states than Clinton people pick cherry picked polls to respond or say they are irrelevant. Whenever I cite my personal experience people say she’s different because like Colin and Condi there are different rules.
Then thereis the ageist attack that I’m too young to remember the 90s. I’ve been following presidential politics since I was 4 and I was 10 when my president lied to me on television when he could’ve avoided the entire distraction of impeachment by simply telling the truth and admitting he got a BJ. It wasn’t the end of the world when he finally died.
She didn’t really apologize, she said she made some errors and then made excuses for why she has a seperate email. She should say once and for all her judgment was flawed and she held herself to a double standard that was unfair and then focus on all the illegal and mafia affiliated activity of Trump and his real estate gang in the 80s. But she isn’t being aggressive in responding to this, like you and too many here she is pretending this stuff isn’t a big deal.
Her approval ratings are in the toilet, people trust her less than Trump and think she is more corrupt than Trump. At some point she should actually refute these charges and fight back against Trump. She isn’t.
And you can blame millennials and Bernie supporters all you want, but I’m also old enough to remember that a great Democratic president once said he buck stops here and took accountability for his actions. With the Clintons the buck always stops with someone else, usually a Republican whom they ceaselessly demonized when they aren’t busy enacting their economic agenda or kissing up to them for political support.
She is the duly elected nominee by millions of votes. Bernie is irrelevant now, he is causing damage by staying in and having his supporters press ridiculously fringey resolutions into the platform on issues irrelevant to Americans outside of the campus. I am not arguing against her on policy or the qualifications or whether she will even be a good president. I am saying she is being a lousy candidate for president and she should course correct before the ship runs aground.
It is a newsworthy story? Yes. Is it a problem? Sure. Does it hurt with Hillary’s image? Not disagreeing. I said this in my original comment.
But this pretty clearly falls in the category of “run of the mill scandal.” Frankly, nobody really cares that much about the emails. If they did, the State Department would have enforced their own rules years earlier instead of waiting until it became a story.
No, the reason this is a bigger deal is not because the issue itself is a “disaster”, which is ludicrous, but because it it supposedly one more thing added to everything else we “already know about the Clintons.” But “what we already know about the Clintons” is the product of a multi-decade — and apparently successful — attempt to paint the Clintons as hopelessly corrupt, horrible public servants, and possibly even murderers.
I have no particular like (or dislike) for the Clintons. I thought Bill was a mediocre and largely overrated president. There are several other Democrats I’d likely prefer over Hillary to be the party’s standard bearer. But allowing the right wing to dictate the image they have created of the Clintons — and having that image bought lock, stock, and barrel even by liberals — is especially ironic given that, as you suggest, Democrats actually need to be aggressive and fight back against Trump and other Republicans. Instead, we’re left with more insufferable Democratic hand-wringing about how horrible this story is and how horrible Hillary is.
Some people think it’s nothing (and were voting for her no matter what)
Some people think it’s big (but were already not voting for her)
Some people this will have no influence whatsoever on their vote.
But……at the end of this list are there 2-3% of the voters who say “this is a big deal, I would have voted for her, but now I’m not” ?
Or “I’m not sure who I was going to vote for, but this determines it for me”
If this election is close, and that 3% swing changes a couple states, this then becomes a problem for her.
except that — absent any major new revelations about this story, of which there have been none in months — I think the key percentage you cite is closer to 0%.
If the FBI finds all of this new information indicating that Hillary herself acted “recklessly” and recommends an indictment (highly unlikely), then yes, this becomes a different story. But for now it has all the makings of a media-driven “game-changing” moment of which there are apparently dozens during the course of a campaign.
We’ll have to see what the polls say a little further down the line.
I wonder if it’s a bigger number than those that care about what Trump said to a woman in the 80’s?
The evil Republicans didn’t tell her to take money from Goldman, it didn’t tell Bill to fund his foundation with Saudi blood money, and it didn’t tell her the State Dept rules we all swore to uphold when we got our clearances somehow stopped applying since she was at the top of the Acheson Building. From the janitor to the SoS nothing is supposed to leave the damn building!
I had to store my hard drive in a safe after using it with a combination only I and the counter Intel team had access too. I was swatted everyday coming in and out to see if I brought any material out of there. And yes it pisses me off they keep playing like the rules don’t apply to them. She will end her primary limping to a nomination, probably losing to Sanders in California and with this story dominating the headlines.
Trump just said he will make the GOP a workers party, he won’t cut social security, and his main priority is fighting for the folks who haven’t gotten a wage increase in 18 years. Meanwhile, Hillary won’t even fight for 15 and she thinks America is doing better than Denmark. You want liberals to be bold and stop crouching defensively? Tell that to the Clintons. That’s been their MO for 25 years.
Adopt the rights ideas and use social issues and right wing vilification to make them palatable to the left. Meanwhile Trump is adopting the Sanders/Warren rhetoric since he knows that’s where the voters are this year. They want change and they feel Obama has been a tepid leader. They don’t want more of the same, they want something bolder that channels their rage. Trump is fitting that bill, Sanders fits it, Hillary still refuses to at her peril. This is not the year to be an adult centrist defending an elitist status quo out of touch with America.
but not in the way you think. It’s liberals shooting on their own side, while conservatives sit content knowing that apparently their long-term strategies succeeded.
By the way, and relatedly, it’s true that Hillary hasn’t fully embraced the Fight for 15 — at least not outside of higher cost of living areas where she has explicitly endorsed a $15 minimum wage. But Donald Trump hasn’t endorsed a $12 minimum wage, which is what Clinton says should be the baseline everywhere (with $15 minimums in those higher cost of living areas). In fact, Trump explicitly said the opposite — that American ““wages are too high.”
And yet you state that “Trump just said he will make the GOP a workers party” and that “his main priority is fighting for the folks who haven’t gotten a wage increase in 18 years.” That simply isn’t true, and for someone who already stated that he’s voting for Clinton, I’m not sure why you take Trump at face value here. The idea that “Trump is adopting the Sanders/Warren rhetoric” is absolutely ludicrous, and you should know better.
No more own goals, please.
…that she would sign a $15 minimum wage if it managed to hit her desk. Trump is the definition of faux-populist. Ultimately, he only looks out for himself. The revelations that he was rooting for the 2008 housing collapse should be the end of that discussion and any notion that he favors the middle and working classes.
He has filled with conspiracy theories. I wish the system had an “ignore user” setting.
I thought we were pretty simpatico. John T May has had a really rough head, but few work as hard as he does for the party and its principles. He’s a great spokesmen and writer, but he definitely has been blinded by Hillary rage in much the same way you and others are blinded by Hillary loyalty. I’ve always been cautiously optimistic about her promise as a president and downright fatalistic about her capabilities as a candidate. Nothing this cycle has proven my intuitions wrong on either front.
As much as you’ve moved left over the years you still have an annoying habit of trying to find fault on all sides at times. Do you really think CMD of all people here is going to be blindly loyal to a candidate? I’d like a confirmation from CMD about to whom he was referring since my eyes are having trouble determining which comment his was a response to.
What is this second grade?
As HoyaPaul says, she’s been there and done that. This idea that she should apologize her way through a campaign is bad politics and nonsensical. How many times is she supposed to apologize? Every time a report comes out?
And who she should apologize to? Who has she wronged? The State Department? The American people? Give me a break. Save the apologies for real harms and real victims.
Or we could keep taking about this forever because she won’t apologize. I think she should do the former -in the issue of moving on. Whoops, I’m sorry, my mistake, I won’t do it again – and we can all move on.
I was widely covered:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/09/08/hillary-clinton-apologizes-for-e-mail-system-i-take-responsibility/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-apologizes-for-email-setup-as-secretary-of-state-1441745045
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/hillary-clinton-email-secretary-of-state.html
Can we move on?
“That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility for it.”
– Hillary Clinton, September 2015
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/09/08/hillary-clinton-apologizes-for-e-mail-system-i-take-responsibility/
You are mistaken if you really think an apology truly “ends the issue” for the GOP attack machine.
How does it end the issue? It’s an issue whenever the media or Trump mentions it. What does Clinton do? Say, it’s not an issue I already apologized for that? Apologies work better in person than in the public sphere where people are playing politics and lying for advantage. This isn’t second grade and there’s no school principal to shut it down.
And in this case, as HoyaPaul says, she already apologized. Does she have to apologize every time there’s a report on this? Every time someone brings it up? What happens if Trump asks her to apologize for Benghazi? Deny she has anything to apologize for? Apologize for something that’s not her fault.
Personally, I believe strongly in apologizing when I’ve done wrong, but I don’t have a VRWC pursuing or a Presidential campaign to run.
..I Was Wrong…
Her apology, as such, is like those faux retractions of words – I am sorry IF my words offended/hurt/mislead anyone. Not – I am sorry.
IMO, she is a paranoid narcissist who cannot admit she was WRONG about anything – not as a power usurping First Lady, or as a Senator, or as a Secretary, or even about Bill – whom any self respecting woman would have left decades ago. But to do so would mean she was WRONG about him.
People didn’t understand what she was trying to say; they misinterpreted her motives; she is being attacked by mindless detractors of the VRWC who did something REALLY bad over THERE…
But she is never…Wrong.
If she had said “I was wrong” then the three words you would be sanctimoniously demanding would be “I am sorry.”
There is a paranoid narcissist who cannot admit error running in this campaign, but he sure isn’t running as a Democrat.
…because she wasn’t.
Bailiff, call the next case!
Thanks for sharing your opinion of Ms. Clinton. I illustrates why I pay so little attention to so much of your commentary.
Are you a credentialed therapist? Have you ever met Ms. Clinton? Do have ANY IDEA what “paranoid narcissist” actually means, or are you just repeating phrases that sounded good when you heard them somewhere else?
Ms. Clinton was a “power usurping First Lady”? Really? So much for empowered women. Did you prefer Ms. Reagan? Or were you happier with Mamie Eisenhower? Was Eleanor Roosevelt also “power usurping”?
I guess you also claim deep insight into their marriage (“whom any self respecting woman would have left decades ago”). Would you support her today if she left him? I doubt it. I suspect you’d be criticizing her for not standing by her man, or criticizing her because of her choice in a husband.
Do you also argue that Mamie Eisenhower was not “self respecting” because she stayed with her husband even after his affair with Kay Summersby? Do you hold Eleanor Roosevelt in similar contempt because she stayed with FDR even after learning of his affair with Lucy Mercer? Let’s not forget Jackie Kennedy, who stayed with her husband even though his extra-marital activity made Bill Clinton look like a choir-boy.
How about this spin:
– Bill Clinton’s “infidelities” were well within the envelope of what real presidents have always done
– Her behavior as First Lady has absolutely nothing to do with this
– Her decision to stay with the man she loves (and his to stay with hers) is her business and her business alone.
– She has already apologized multiple times
– There is absolutely NOTHING new in these revelations
Yes, I do think less of a woman who allows herself to be used by a lying spouse as a shield to give him respectability. It may be ‘her decision’, but that does not prevent others from thinking her complicit in lying.
Although I imagine your questioning diatribe was intended to be rhetorical
I see. So you think less of Ms. Clinton because she and her husband have made an arrangement that apparently works for them. The fact that they’ve been married more than forty years apparently means nothing to you.
How do you feel about the other women I cited? Eleanor Roosevelt first learned of FDRs life-long affair with Lucy Mercer 1918, more than a decade before his first election in 1932.
Do you also “think less” of Ms. Roosevelt? How about Ms. Eisenhower?
It doesn’t sound to me as though my guess missed the mark at all. You say I guessed “wrong”, and then confirmed that you claim deep knowledge of the situation. Are you sure that Mr. Clinton lied to her? Are you aware that many marriages have mutually-agreed on “understandings” of what is and is not ok? Are you aware that many married partners explicitly agree that oral sex with others is acceptable? Are you sure that Mr. Clinton was not, in fact, acting in accordance with a marital “contract” he had with his wife? You do understand that there is no evidence of anything beyond oral sex in all the dung that the GOP flung up against the walls, right?
Finally, so long as we’re talking about marriage, fidelity, and so on, what is your opinion of the GOP nominee? What say you about Melania Knauss, the current (and third) wife of Donald Trump? She is 18 years younger than him. Where do his two ex-wives fit into your picture of acceptable marital affairs? Perhaps you prefer Mr. Trump’s decision to have a child with Marla Maples, marry Ms. Maples two months after the birth, and divorce her six years later. You see, read, and hear of his various and many statements about women, marriage, wives, and sex just like the rest of us.
Do you have an opinion about that irony that Mr. Gringrich, head persecutor during the impeachment fiasco, was himself having a lurid affair with a much younger woman the entire time? Or that Mr. Livingston, the heir apparent for the House leadership, was also embroiled in embarrassing relationships? Does it matter to you that Mr. Hastert, the “Mr. Clean” who ultimately replaced Mr. Gingrich, just confessed to actually being a serial molester and abuser of his students?
I wonder if you apply NEARLY the same standard to Mr. Trump and the GOP that you claim to apply to both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Regardless of party.
And if the Clintons created some kind of mutual contract as you describe, it doesn’t make them any less liars since you promise fidelity in the presence of God and these witnesses.
We all have bedrock beliefs. Marital fidelity happens to be one of mine.
Nancy Reagan?
… and raise you seven full, ultimately fruitless, congressional hearings (five in the House, two in the Senate) on what happened at Benghazi. Seven full investigations in search of a crime…
The highlight of her testimony before the House “Select Commitee on Benghazi” was her riposte to the chair of the ‘Freedom Caucus’ (sic) “I’m sorry that doesn’t fit your narrative, Congressman. I can only tell you what the facts are”
Pretty much sums up the whole ball game, right there.
We took oaths and swore not to take classified info out of the building. Chelsea Manning will see sunlight an hour a day for the next three decades for what she did, and she broke the same rules Clinton did. There is a wide chasm between what Manning and Clinton actually did with the info they illegally gathered offsite, and the intentions and consequences of their violations. But progressives who were right to complain about Petreaus getting a wrist slap in comparison to whistleblowers have been utterly hypocritical here.
I’m owed an apology, so are all the employees of the department who had faith she would follow her own rules and guidelines that she set for the department to follow! This is not leadership by example
or the buck stops here. I haven’t heard her admit she broke rules and there are consequences to those actions she should have anticipated.
then clearly you need to research both of those situations more because they are nothing alike.
Sorry to be so blunt, but right now it’s like arguing with right-wing conspiracy theorists on this thread.
There is simply no comparison between what Manning did and Clinton’s e-mail server. Manning deliberately gave huge amounts of highly classified information directly to an irresponsible media organization without any regard to how they would be used.
It’s like comparing someone who uses their dog’s name as their password to someone who sold their company’s secrets to the Chinese.
It right wing nut time with this stuff. I don’t think that this is over and I’ve commented that there are real investigations which are on-going. This particular one turned out be to useless, plus with all the hype around it made is worse. You are making things up and connecting things that are not accurate. JimC last two posts were the same.
Once we have the FBI report available then we’l have something to discuss, many of the commenters which you define a Clinton loyalists are not. You need to step out of bizarro world.
Chelsea Manning literally stole classified material, put it on digital media, and knowingly transferred that media to an organization in order to ensure that the classified material was published. I am glad that Chelsea Manning did what she did, and I think our treatment of her has been cruel and inhumane.
Hillary Clinton used a private email server for material that may or may not have been classified at the time. She did so in order to AVOID disclosure, even to government officials.
Your attempt to conflate the actions of Chelsea Manning and Hillary Clinton is WAY out of line — you’re out there beyond even the right-wing hate crowd.
You need to walk this one back, my friend.
Hillary’s defenders try to argue that it was a victimless crime.
I would think that after sticking one’s head far enough into the sand that it might eventually come out on the other side of the Earth and be forced to confront some sunlight.
Hillary Clinton perfectly embodies the expression “Rules are for the little people.”
There does not appear to be enough writing one could do on a wall that would be read by supporters who are arguing that we should send a candidate so incredibly seen as untrustworthy to be our nominee, let alone as a politician who has recently “evolved” during the primary campaign to hold positions that we could plausibly believe will fight on behalf of once she’s in the Oval Office.
…but I am not aware of her lying about the email issue in the sense of ever denying that she handled it this way, or anything else for that manner. Keep in mind when you answer that I have a very high standard for what constitutes actual lying.
I’m a Sanders supporter. I have some serious concerns with Hillary Clinton, both from a policy perspective but also from a corruption perspective. I could probably get past the policy issues, but I’m having a hard time getting past the other issues.
The largest issue, in my opinion, involves the Clinton Foundation and how intertwined it is with big-money, special-interest players, payments for speeches, the State Department, and Hillary Clinton. I understand that Clinton supporters are not going to criticize her over this because of the wagon-circle aspect of politics, but I think this is a really big deal, one that shouldn’t be ignored.
We have never seen a presidential candidate who has received so many “free” dollars from so many different special interest groups. Cheney worked for Halliburton, but he actually worked there for his paycheck – and it was still a angle of corruption for the Bush administration. Clinton gets six figures for an hour’s speech.
Really ponder this for a minute: Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation received massive donations from large global players, including foreign nations. These donations would not have happened had Bill and Hillary Clinton not been involved with the foundation. It is very likely that they would not have happened if Hillary Clinton had not been Secretary of State and/or was a favorite candidate for president.
That at the very least, the appearance of corruption.
Think about this down to the local level. Imagine that everyone knows that this person in your town will be running for mayor – he just hasn’t taken out papers yet. Many businesses start giving him money to give talks in front of them. Crazy, stupid money – on a local level, maybe $10k per talk. He raises a million dollars this way.
That person’s wife also runs a charity. It does some really good things, like provide books for poor kids, tutoring, etc. All of a sudden, those same businesses start giving money to the charity. Lots of money. Stupid amounts – tens of thousands of dollars each. People who previously had no interest in giving to charity are all of a sudden giving money to this charity.
Now that person declares that he is going to run for mayor. His wife will continue the foundation, by the way, and she hopes that people will continue to donate to it.
That mayoral candidate has a lot of personal money to kick into his campaign because he made a lot of $10k speeches before declaring his candidacy (and picked up a few checks even after declaring, but whose counting?).
How can this not be seen as a massive conflict of interest? Massachusetts’ standard is a mere appearance of a conflict of interest – not the written declaration of quid-pro-quo that the Supreme Court seems to be moving towards.
State Representative Paul Adams was fined $4k and had to forfeit $45k in loans for accepting gifts from his parents and brother right before he declared his candidacy. I doubt that gifts from family members would change his opinion of them, but he was still found to have broken the law. Would it have been legal if he simply said “they paid me for a speech I gave to them”?
So my main concern with Hillary Clinton is that I believe that her interests are not with me, and that if push comes to shove, they will be with the various groups that have personally given her and her husband tens of millions of dollars over the years, and her foundation hundreds of millions of dollars over the years.
And P.S., I believe that she set up her email server specifically to prevent this intertwining of interests from becoming public knowledge. The personal email server allowed her and her staff alone to decide which emails to release as “public” and which ones to conceal as “private”.
She and her team made a political calculation that she would be better off in the long run having control over what got released into the public domain and what didn’t. It was a judgment call. No way to know if it was the right call or not because we can’t see what she has successfully sheltered from public view and therefore can’t assess if she would have been better off than she is now with the current controversy. We’ll find out in November.
…she would know better than most employees how the public records laws work. She knew she was choosing to be non-transparent for her own political gain.
%0,000+ pages of emails were all about Chelsea’s wedding?
The sheer depth of the lack of honesty, malfeasance, and maliciousness of essentiallly the entire national GOP with respect to her and her family, for more than two decades, i have very little issue with the judgment call.
Especially as that party has so thoroughly abandoned even the pretense of conservatism over the last 15 years, during which te that party actively sought to harm the United States for its own benefit. That judgement has been borne out over the last year when it was revealed not only to be not conservative, but also unprincipled and frankly depraved.
I am fairly certainly they didn’t have access to her classified servers, and if anything, it’s significantly easier for them to hack into her private ones. Has the GOP done this it’s a crime worse than Watergate with its ramifications on security and the constitution. They didn’t. This was an own goal. Politically and from a national security standpoint. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese, Russians and Iranians know exactly where every comma was in these emails.
The entirety of the Ken Starr affair was an exercise in searching everything in order to find anything of use to the GOP. Oh, and, as has been shown repeatedly, truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can make something sound bad on Hannity. Were I in her shoes, I would likely have made the same call. A mistake? Sure. But, one ranking somewhere on the importance-meter lower than “being mean to Paula Jones in 1990.”
Your last sentence is the sort of thing that appears on breitbart. The only own goal here is the degree to which liberals, who ought to know better, accept everything that comes from Hannity et al. unquestioned.
I have never gotten the impression that information that sensitive was in those emails. I’m sure HRC of all people would know better. If their classification was subject to such delay the level of sensitivity is clearly not that obvious.
…about all the money coming into the Clinton Foundation designated for literally making the world a better place. My understanding is that the bulk of her speaking fees also went to charity.
The ends do not justify the means here. Let’s say that the worst case is true: Hillary Clinton is telling people “if you want me to even start to listen to you, donate to the Clinton Foundation – the more you donate, the more I will listen”. That is called “pay for play” and is both illegal and the antithesis to democracy.
Regarding your second claim, that “the bulk of her speaking fees went to charity”, that claim – or a variant of it – has been rated false by Politifact. They have documented 51 speeches for which Clinton was directly compensated. That debunking didn’t even investigate if all the other fees went to the Clinton Foundation, which is what Hillary Clinton stated in 2014.
CNN has documented that Bill and Hillary Clinton received $153 million in speaking fees since 2001. That includes $21.6 million that Hillary Clinton collected from April 2013 to March 2015 – a period when everyone knew that she would be running for president.
…plus the Good Lord apparently did not bless me with the mind reading capabilities He gave to “everyone” who “knew that she would be running for President” between April 2013 and March 2015. I don’t care how much went to charity, just repeating the claim she had made.
Your understanding doesn’t seem to be based on anything but wishful thinking… Sorry.
Ed Schultz who has turned Sanders mouthpiece practically was speculating on Facebook that this could flip the nomination, but that’s all I’ve heard from that side so far.
I do not approve of her stand on health care or worker’s wages. That does not mean I hate her.
I’m tired of this line of thinking, this smearing of anyone who dares not support the Clintons. “What?, you’re not wearing a Hillary button? Why do you HATE her?”
I’m tired of the portrayal of her life as one of endless persecution, “She bears the scars of years of attacks of her enemies”..Yeah, well those scars include a bank account with over a $100,000,000. , $50,000 a week vacation rentals, oh, the pain, the humiliation, the shame. The poor woman is weeping all the way to the bank.
No, I do not hate her. I oppose most of her agenda. I’m tired of her self appointed martyr image. But I do not hate her. In fact, I have more pity and disappointment for her than dislike. She could have been much more, done much more, but she is paralyzed by her own paranoia and that paranoia is why she is in this particular mess, isn’t it?
I didn’t mean you. But HRC definitely has haters. Legions of them.
Why do so many hate her? Who are they and what are their reasons? Why her more than Elizabeth Warren or Barbara Boxer or other female Democrats? I’ll need specifics.
As First Lady, she had more power than many vice presidents have. Some people resented that.
I don’t think her haters hate her more than Warrrn or Boxer, but she might be President, so they worry about her more.
Many thought that Nancy Reagan had more power over the Ronnie than Bush had. I thought so . She consulted a damn astrologist to influence the scheduling of important events.
So, back in your corner.
…You will have to ask them to be sure. I suspect the reasons are twofold: A) she grew up Republican and, ultimately, rejected it… and thus any success on her part would more than repudiate the cause… 2) she’s a visible component of a visible marriage that is visibly an equal partnership and the conservatives don’t want their wives to get any uppity ideas.
I suggest you’re not getting exactly how much some people hate Elizabeth Warren (who also grew up Republican and who repudiated it). I don’t know much about Barbara Boxer.
Is this the “conspiracy” that she blamed when Bill got caught? Conservatives liked Nancy Reagan. Nancy had a lot of control over Ronnie.
So again, you fail to make as case other than one that a paranoid person would make. “It’s those people” ……it’s all of “them”…..
anyone here, but the right-wingers after the Clintons were real. The conspiracy was an exaggeration, but Richard Mellon-Scaife was funding a lot of it. David Brock was part of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vast_right-wing_conspiracy
Warren hasn’t been picked on for 25 years. She got a small dose of bullshit with the attack on her Native American heritage. The Clintons had White Water and a number of non-issues paid for and delivered by the right-wing. John, you know what conservatism was like in the 1990s. There’s more room for Warren today than there was then. Back then, the Harvard professor, indian, divorced Warren would have had a much more difficult time of it.
What was is about Bill and Hilary that supposedly made the right wingers go after them? They were all for Wall Street deregulation, welfare reform, NAFTA, Bill even looked at privatizing Social Security to a degree. Why would any real power people on the right want to stop them?
I think this was all a show and if there was any “right wing conspiracy” it was far different from what is being said.
It’s like asking: “why do people hate Obama”? It has a pretty simple answer.
Republicans despise Bill Clinton for taking credit for things they allegedly got him to cave on (ex. “We ended Welfare as we know it) and thus co-opting their positions so they then have to take more extreme positions to be the party of opposition.
Or, at least that’s the take of the person who wrote II. The ratchet effect, which I’m not completely unsympathetic to.
at the point the GOP is now: destroy your opponent. Don’t compromise. Destroy. It was more about power than policy, in my opinion. The Right, however, is crazy. There’s no reason to think Scaife didn’t think Clinton was the anti-christ.
Check out the Arkansas Project and Scaife’s use of his own newspaper to spread the stories. Here’s a New York Times article. When you have a billionaire funding things, it’s not hard to find people to do your dirty work.
Ditto for Obama, and like Obama there is a racial element. Obviously Bill Clinton is not himself black, but he championed policies of racial justice while Arkansas Governor that did not sit well with the neo-Confederate crowd. The Clintons also represented in their minds all that had destroyed the culture during and after the 1960s – draft dodging, pot smoking (whether or not he inhaled), women’s liberation. Did you know that Hillary Rodham had the audacity to at least at first keep her own name – oh the horror! If you want a comprehensive answer to your question I would recommend the book The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.
…or being the martyr that has become Hillary’s stock in trade. Why is that?
Learn some history.
The person you’re trying to convince was a conservative back then — undoubtedly as open to contradiction then as currently. He is not going to remember the 1990s the way you’ll remember the 1990s.
…have been so successful over the past generation that they’ve managed to get even some progressives to believe their talking points. Boxer and Warren have never been nearly so targeted.
There are some key differences between what Colin Powell did and what Hillary did.
-Powell used both in house and private email, but only used private email because – before then – email only worked within the department.
-His private server was kept in his office, not off site.
-Copies were made of his emails on the private server for proper record keeping.
What Colin Powell did is a whole lot more excusable, in a time period when the state department was still only learning what that whole email thing was even all about. His successor didn’t even use email at all, in any capacity…
Apologists for Clinton would have you believing that Colin Powell set up some private email server in his house too, never turned over any of the emails when he ended his tenure, and deleted thousands of the emails according to his private discretion once he was asked to turn them over.
Clinton’s practice of using a personal server for official email didn’t result in any event of practical importance. Conclusion: the issue is primarily about political games, not substance. I agree with Marshall: a nothingburger.
“didn’t result in any event of practical importance”
How do you know this when we do not know who may have hacked into it and what they have done as a result? I doubt there is any terrorist organization out there who would say, “we take full responsibility for this most recent act of war against USA and the West and we’d like to acknowledge the support that Madam Secretary Clinton provided on her unprotected home server.”…
has no evidentiary value.
How do you know that the NSA isn’t watching us as we type?
Leaving a child in a locked car in the summer is still a very bad thing to do even if no one can prove that there was no harm done to the child.
If I get pulled over on the pike for going 100 in a 65 zone, can I just tell the trooper, “Hey, no one was hurt and lots of people speed. Let me go and I’ll promise to slow down?”
There is a reason why Clinton needed approval to do what she did and it was because doing so put the nation at risk.
to your previous comment, not arguing about the problem of a freelance server.
after everything Edward Snowden revealed, we should all assume that the NSA is gathering almost that much data on all of us.
Josh Marshall has turned into an insufferable hack.
a source on the Nevada Convention and never referred to him because he seemed like a Clinton partisan. I’m a Clinton partisan, but I want facts or authoritative sources.
All I observe about Josh Marshall these days is when he’s getting clowned for being snide about Bernie and his supporters on Twitter. One of his more common refrains appears to act out the get-off-my-lawn routine about young people or about Bernie not being a “real Democrat.” Meh, I don’t know.
If he reported as truth that chairs were thrown at the Nevada Convention, then he’s about as respectable as a source as the writers of the National Enquirer.
-Her private server was much easier to hack than the State Department. I’m sure China and Russia and many, many others would have loved to hack the Secretary of State. Do you want to assume they were unsuccessful? Were I the Department of State or the CIA, I would work under the assumption that they had every email of hers.
-Her Blackberry was also called out as an issue because of security vulnerabilities, and she was repeatedly warned about it. And ignored it. Not only is it possible (indeed: likely) that her Blackberry was hacked, but it could have been hacked in such a way as to be used to access other areas in the State Department in the proximity of wherever she took that phone.
Let’s all pray this has no real substance and is merely political gamesmanship, but the truth of the matter is China and Russia (and any other country in the world) are certainly not going to volunteer whether or not they hacked into her phone or private server, and it’s safer for our country to assume the worst and mitigate from there.
Finally, the fact that she has refused to a) admit she broke the rules and b) apologize for breaking the rules is demonstrative of an extreme character flaw, and one that drags this story forward — drip drip drip — instead of nipping it in the bud.
If Hillary wins — and given the alternative, I hope that’s the case — it’s only going to be because the Republicans were so stupid as to nominate Trump. Any other candidate would have beaten her, and most would have crushed her — with all the coattail issues that would come with that.
Our party is very, very lucky, but we should never be so foolish as to nominate someone as deeply flawed and horribly unpopular again.
…as others have demonstrated. I also think she would have had a strong chance of defeating any other potential GOP nominee.
Her explanations over the past year simply don’t fit the facts in the report. Apologies aren’t real when the explanations of what happened resulting in those apologies are lies. When she admits that she committed gross violations of policy and proper procedure, and that those mistakes put national security at risk — and then apologizes — it will count. Not until then.
The assertions you make are still subject to some dispute anyway.
if she wants to win.
Link
The link and quote you provide here are opinions — not facts — from a far-right blogger and talk show host, Ed Morrissey.
Just want to make that clear.
To be precise.
(I was not aware he is a right-winger; the link said Yahoo Finance, I assumed it’s legit.)
But that doesn’t prove much, frankly.
The words “recklessly” and “negligently” are legal standards. Neither the IG’s report nor any other investigation in this matter has found negligence or recklessness by Clinton — or anyone else, for that matter. Nothing else in the quote you link to has been substantiated by actual facts produced by investigations.
That’s fine that we disagree on this (or any other matter). But just be cautious about the sources.
you need to acknowledge and move on. yes, there is an investigation and we will get more info on anything that could be considered criminal.
But this ain’t it. It’s like quoting what Rush Limbaugh spews out of his mouth and calling it facts.
n/t
Every email sent to her from a .gov, and every email sent by her to a .gov, is saved on government servers.
“She should’ve asked permission!” – from who? She was the head of the department.
Sounds like you didn’t read the report nor care to discover the answers you speak, assuming the question was sincere…
to bail her out of this mess. This absolutely has nothing to do with him. He has not even brought it up, but sticks to disagreement on policy issues and her votes. As for “fringy” platform statements, as far as I know they haven’t been settle on yet. The appointments have just been made, and a clear majority still favor Hillary Clinton. So this is not germane to the subject at hand.
It is up to Secretary Clinton to get herself out of this mess. At present she has decided to sweep it under the rug. “It will not interfere with my campaign.”
She disregarded the rules maybe inadvertently, but that goes to carelessness, or did so purposely leaving a big question mark as to her motives. However proper record keeping in the State Department is not a little issue. Quite frankly I am surprised how loosely she operated on this issue. If it’s a pattern this is troublesome, if not maybe it will pass.
AFAIK he’s still “sick and tired of hearing about her damn emails!”
“Another Boomer who is clueless about tech. Next?”
You can make the case they should care more, but I don’t think they honestly do, apart form the partisans who are just looking to turn everything into Defcon 1.
The Clinton’s always skirt the rules and get away with it because the GOP overplays it’s hand. An honest investigation into our Libya strategy, why it failed so miserably, and how Hillary’s role as architect of said strategy affects her instincts as President would be been a fine investigation.
Blaming her for having not having foreknowledge of the future and failing to expand the scope of her duties in an unprecedented fashion to micromanage embassy security wasn’t the way to go. Whitewater and the blowjob were shady, but perfectly legal things for them to do. And nobody died from these errors unlike the massive failure in Iraq, which to date, no major member of government has been held accountable for.
I’ve held my tongue (or keyboard as the case may be) on this thread regarding references to Clinton’s impeachment and related matters even though I believe he was right in much of how he handled it. I really didn’t WANT to relitigate the 1990s, but the way Trump is talking it sounds like we might not have much choice in the coming months. Meanwhile, PLEASE resist any temptation to whine about a President supposedly lying to you at a tender age about matters that frankly you really should not have been familiar with at said tender age. It just needlessly hurts the team.
Is what Clinton did. The Republicans didn’t make him get a blowjob from an intern and lie about it. Something most Americans would be fired for I might add in a corporate environment. Dad found out his hero Kennedy was a womanizer long after it didn’t sting, I had to find out as a 9 year old and its Bills fault. The buck stops there. They are hurting our team with their continued skirting of the rules and refusal to apologize. I want a progressive President, Hillary is capable of being one, but she is losing this campaign with own goals left and right.
The standard you offer would disqualify at least FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK and probably others. Your emotional reaction to what his own wife accepted — twenty years ago — is perhaps a projection of your own standards. It should be completely irrelevant to today’s campaign.
If you think that men and women don’t exchange oral sex (and more) in corporate environments, then you REALLY need to spend more time in corporate environments. Seriously.
You’ve written at length here about generational differences and attitudes. Your condemnation of oral sex is a throwback to the 1950s. Today’s under-30 generation — and especially today’s teenagers — treat oral sex as little different from extended kissing.
You really are way outside even the right-wing fringe here. The behavior of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky TWENTY YEARS AGO has NOTHING to do with the current election. Your attempted conflation of Ms. Clinton’s email decisions and the behavior of Chelsea Manning is far, far beneath you.
I really encourage you to get your feet back on solid ground and reel in your commentary.
Oral sex between consenting adults is none of my business, but between an employer and an unpaid intern it’s an entirely different area. If Clarence Thomas was disqualified from the bench for his treatment of Anita Hill which didn’t even involve actual activity with a subordinate. It was unwanted, and arguably wanted in this instance, but we can all agree that it was a profound lack of judgment on his part, a shameful thing to do to Hillary and Chelsea and an ordeal he could’ve avoided had he been faithful in the first place or at least honest about it when first questioned?
I strongly condemn the right wing witch hunts into the Clintons, past or present, but I also condemn their cavalier attitude towards them that doesn’t improve their political standing or situation. And always makes matters worse.
Her poll numbers are in the gutter almost approaching Trumps, there has to be a point when Democrats can move past this couple and embrace a new generation and a new agenda. Unfortunately the Obama presidency wasn’t that moment, but we need a new bench and new blood. I’m voting for her since I think she will do a good job and I reject the racism and facism of her opponent, but let’s not pretend they arent ethically compromised in the eyes of a majority of Americans. Wishful thinking and cognitive dissonance won’t make the threat of a Trump Presidency go away.
If history is any guide all this unpleasantness did was RAISE the poll standings of both Clintons – Bill for being seen as a political victim and Hillary for being seen as a personal victim. The GOP insisted that when the Starr report was released or Clinton’s testimony was broadcast the people would turn on him, only to watch in horror as the opposite happened.
Especially in light of his willful ignorance of actual sexual
Misconduct in the Baylor campus as Bob has pointed out. I will say I think we can all agree , especially Hillary, that we wish Bill choose another course of action. That said-it’s getting pretty meta and counter factual at this point so I’ll quit while I’m behind with the BMG crowd. It will bite her in the fall, hopefully not enough to spoil the election.
Now you attempt to conflate Clarence Thomas with Bill Clinton? The title to “Mad Men” in your title turns the facts on their ear and is itself insulting. Whether you wish to admit it or not, many adults like to have sex with each other, inside and outside the boundaries of marriage. That has been true before, during, and after the “Mad Men” era.
In fact, the key thing that has changed since the Mad Men era is that during that time, women who enjoyed such activity were “sluts”. Your commentary essentially says the same about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton.
I note that you slide by the OBVIOUS difference — in the case of Mr. Thomas it was both unwanted and also initiated by him. Ms. Lewinsky was reluctantly coerced into testifying against Mr. Clinton. The evidence is compelling that not only did she consent, but she in fact initiated whatever they did. There is no legal standard that jeopardizes an executive who is propositioned by a subordinate.
You don’t know that it was a “shameful thing to do” to either Ms. Clinton or to his daughter. You, like others here, make unsupported assumptions about boundaries that the Clintons set for each other. The fact remains that, like it or not, Bill Clinton had a relatively long history of doing similar things in the past — Hillary Clinton was aware of that and they remained married.
The standard you set for Bill Clinton was violated by many or most of our Presidents. I remind us that Thomas Jefferson was a famous and prolific philanderer, and the activities of JFK put Bill Clinton to shame.
The behavior of Bill Clinton twenty years ago is absolutely irrelevant to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. This entire discussion is repulsively sexist and misogynist.
…that any of that tawdriness saw the light of day. The questions that led to those revelations never should have been asked!
Had he the judgment not to engage in a relationship with a woman barely out of her teenage years likely to tell her friends and had he the judgment to be honest about it when first asked the whole thing would’ve blown over instead of wasting two years of America’s time and turning his presidency into a punchline.
Starr abused his power, Gingrich and Hyde were hypocrites with their own affairs, and everyone in this drama acted poorly except for Hillary ironically enough. She’s the only one who came out of the scandal with her dignity intact.
But had Clinton not engaged in the misconduct we would never have heard about it. That’s irrefutable. Had he not lied about it it would’ve gone away. He already confessed to adultery as a candidate and the American people moved on relatively quickly once he did finally tell the truth. I think those two facts are irrefutable. Avoiding the mistake and avoiding the coverup would’ve saved him a ton of grief, even if absolutely the investigation overstepped its authority. No one is arguing the Republicans were anything other than opportunistic, but it’s a poor planner that gives his enemy such a full quiver of arrows to sling.
…but I have to admit part of me enjoyed watching him give a huge one-fingered salute to his political enemies.
There was nothing shady about either.
Bill Clinton accepted oral sex from a consenting woman who told her friends before she left for her DC assignment that she was looking forward to earning her “presidential kneepads”. There was no “there” there — that’s why, when all the dust settled, the only thing Ken Starr got was perjury. Even that was itself shaky.
Whitewater was NOT shady. Hillary Clinton made an investment and did well as a result.
You are repeating lies and half-truths that Richard Mellon Scaife and the rest of the extreme right spent hundreds of millions of dollars perpetuating in the 1990s. There was no truth then, and there is none now.
What’s next, will you be making snide insinuations about Vince Foster?
I find it offensive to women and labor. It displays how the Clinton and their ilk view the rest of us, as amusements for their pleasure, as pawns for the power trips.
Like Zoe Baird who though it was moral to pay a housekeeper $6.25 an hour while she raked in $156.25 an hour.
To Baird and her ilk, we’re just servants, to Clinton, we’re concubines.
Welcome to the New Economy and the New Democrats.
Funny how you, as a self-described white male, find it so easy to criticize women who make decisions differently from your patriarchal and sexist views. I remind you that there’s NOTHING about “labor” in this discussion. Ms. Lewinski chose to initiate a sexual encounter with Mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton accepted that invitation, for oral sex. Ms. Clinton knows of it and has chosen to accept it.
I find your commentary insulting to Ms. Lewinski, Ms. Clinton, and to every other woman who dares to assert her own views of what is and is not acceptable behavior.
Women have as much right to initiate sexual encounters as men, and frequently do. Many of those sexual encounters are with other women. Many of those women do so while in stable and secure marriages.
The partners of every marriage set their own boundaries on acceptable behavior of each. There are marriages where ANY contact with opposite-sex people (including even telephone calls) is prohibited except when a spouse is present. There are marriages where each partner is encouraged to do whatever they like with whomever they like. It is not your place or mine to declare what boundaries any other couple chooses for themselves.
It is particularly offensive for you to limit your criticism to women.
of employers sexually exploiting their employees….
Would it have been nice both morally and politically if he had rejected her advances? Sure, but SHE initiated this activity and is no victim.
Mr. Clinton actually helped Ms. Lewinsky after she left the WH. Ms. Lewinsky never made any claims of harassment. Ms. Lewinsky was brought into the case reluctantly after Linda Tripp, a coworker, secretly and many say illegally recorded phone calls where Ms. Lewinsky talked about her affair.
Ms. Lewinsky was coerced into testifying by Mr. Starr, who used the tapes from Ms. Tripp against Ms. Lewinsky (Ms. Lewinsky had submitted a deposition to a separate case where she said she had not had a sexual relationship with Mr. Clinton).
If Ms. Lewinsky was exploited by anyone, it was by Linda Tripp and Ken Starr.
You’re WAY out in Rush Limbaugh land on this. Way out.
advancing the claim that the Clintons “helped” Lewinksy after she left the WH is a bit much. She may have engaged in that relationship purely because that’s what she wanted (and I agree: she was an adult and could do that), but the Clintons backed the bus up and rolled right over her in the aftermath. I’m not going to blame Bill for that — I’m not sure his Presidency could have survived had he done otherwise, and Lewinsky is not blameless — but let’s not have revisionist history and pretend that the Clintons were somehow benevolent helpers of Monica Lewinksy.
It doesn’t sound as though you’ve spent much time paying attention to what actually happened and to Ms. Lewinsky herself.
Your assertion that the Clintons “backed the bus up and rolled right over her in the aftermath” is pure drivel, supported only by your irrational passion against the Clintons.
Ms. Lewinsky herself wrapped it up rather succinctly in a 2014 People interview (when she was 41):
The commentary here about all this has gone WAY over the boundary of fact. Too many here are repeating, as fact, utter fantasy — or worse, right-wing lies planted by billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife.
I’ve had just about enough of people who were barely alive at the time promoting absolute fantasy while attacking those of us who know better as offering “revisionist history”.
The fact is that Bill Clinton offered recommendations and support for Ms. Lewinsky. That is part of the transcripts offered in the multiple groundless legal proceedings the right wing put him and the country through. That is the reason no charges of harassment were ever offered.
Those transcripts are hard to find and search online, I’ll offer a cite if when I find the references if you insist. I think we should let the whole episode drop.
NONE of this is relevant to the question of who should be elected president in 2016.
…that the interview you linked is just about the only public comment she has made in the years since Bill Clinton left office. All indications are that she LIKES the fact that she has faded into the background and has gotten on with her life. If these things come up again this year HRC can handle it, but what’s more offensive to me is the prospect of dragging this private citizen back into the spotlight against her will.
She gave a freaking TED talk about how bullied she was over it last year, dude.
And guys like Tom promote such bullying by describing her as the initiator and Bill Clinton as some victim.
Here is a partial transcript of the Ted talk.
I’m sorry, but this comment turns the truth on its ear. Of COURSE she was bullied, abused, and shamed — BY KEN STARR!
Here is an excerpt (emphasis mine):
There is no anger, only heartbreak, directed at Bill Clinton in that excerpt. It isn’t Bill Clinton she’s talking about in this interview. It is, instead, people like Linda Tripp, Ken Starr, and — yes — YOU (emphasis mine):
When you write ” guys like Tom promote such bullying by describing her as the initiator and Bill Clinton as some victim”, you simply lie. You ignore the villains in this piece, and instead project your bias onto the players who were harmed.
The bully was Ken Starr, not Bill Clinton. Monica Lewinski was betrayed by people she thought were her friends, people like Linda Tripp (who was being PAID by Ken Starr — using slush funds provided by Richard Mellon Scaife — to do so). There was no wrong done when Bill Clinton and Ms. Lewinski had their relationship, certainly nothing like what you describe here. Bill Clinton did NOT bully her, he tried to help her. Now, twenty years later, you compound her pain by using it to advance your own distorted view of today’s world.
You are perpetuating a miasma of LIES planted by Ken Starr and the rest of the right wing paid by Mr. Scaife at the time.
Please stop.
OK, so maybe not absolutely the only time, but it’s been relatively rare and my point stands about dragging her back through the mud. Neither Tom nor anyone else said Bill Clinton was a victim of her advances. He’s a big boy and can certainly handle himself with a 20-something. He WAS a victim of a political witch hunt, however. She WAS also the initiator of the sexual relationship, which I’m pretty sure no less an authority than the Starr Report indicates.
Here is a summary chronology of the scandal.
I draw your attention to the following (emphasis mine):
The facts argue compellingly against your baseless attacks.
Go on, @Tom. And was it Ken Starr too who put the words in Hillary’s head to refer to Monica Lewinsky (the woman you say she helped) as a “narcissistic loony toon”?
Was it Ken Starr who told Hillary to blame Monica Lewinsky as having taken advantage of her husband who was under stress and dealing with a death in the family (when as reported, upon Monica entering his office, he’d pointed down to her to get under the desk to suck him off)?
And gee, with all that help Hillary provided to Monica, it’s shocking SHOCKING that Monica would go and repay her this way. What an ungrateful whore that Monica is!!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10811894/Monica-Lewinsky-Hillary-Clinton-blamed-the-woman-for-Bill-Clintons-affair.html
Hillary Clinton’s private thoughts about Ms. Lewinski are totally irrelevant to this.
You are digging in twenty-year-old muck in order to accomplish some purpose that escapes me. Mr. Sanders ran and lost. Ms. Clinton will be the nominee. Mr. Clinton and Ms. Clinton remain married.
It was Ken Starr who turned Monica Lewinski into a household name. It is because of Ken Starr and Richard Mellon Scaife that we are having this shameful exchange twenty years after the fact.
Your exploitation of Ms. Lewinski’s pain (not to mention everything else) — and your total disregard for the truth — disgusts me.
Not only do they have some Democrats parroting their policy complaints against the Clintons, but now they have them practically justifying impeachment. Lots of Hillary Derangement Syndrome coming to light on this thread:(
…23 years. Actually had to look it up.
There’s a name for people who can’t let go of the past. Wish I could remember what that name was…
Kimba Wood?
It’s the opposite of the name for people who keep voting in the same people and expect a different result, eh?
…expecting (and often hoping for) much the same result. HRC as a combination of her husband’s and her would-be predecessor’s third terms will do just fine in my book.
while financial gains from a more productive work force have all gone to the .1% and we remain the only developed nation without health care as a right……We have Democrats like you”hoping” for such things…
We’ve been through this before, so in the words of Prime Ministers deflecting exhausting questions I refer my honourable friend to comments I have made previously on this matter.
n/t
if the FBI report is as devastating as this one, particularly if some people are prosecuted over it.
Let’s all hope that doesn’t come out in the weeks leading up to the race.
In fact, I hope the FBI gets the hell to it and releases whatever report they’re going to release now.
Only a fevered imagination could fantasize anything negative about the leader of the most powerful government agency mixing Clinton Foundation and State Department email in a single account, hosted on an unsecured server in a bathroom closet, all to evade FOIA. Secret Service agents were in the house on many occasions!
What could possibly go wrong?
How could she possibly abuse this setup?
The misogynistic attacks need to stop.
I’m taking Judy’s wise advice and moving on, but my last word is this:
We ignore this at our peril.
To dismiss it, or to say it’s right-wing spin, is to evoke greater peril, in my opinion.
A sincere apology would help. It wouldn’t solve it, but it would help.
There could be an apology every day for months, and the next day someone would say “she won’t even apologize” and you are back at status quo ante. This sort of stuff is impervious to reality.
We OVERESTIMATE the effect of comments, but not at our peril.
There is no peril here. It may feel like our comments are really, really important, but they have no direct effect on politics or the public. If a BMGer flaps her wings, there isn’t a tornado in China. There’s nothing. You can pretty much ignore anything without peril at BMG.
Some posts may have some influence on BMG, but not on national politics in a state that reliably votes for a Democratic president.
I apologized for picking on you, Jim. I don’t think you quite mean what you say, but I’ve seen similar things from JTM. There is NO PERIL for Hillary Clinton at BMG.
Your comments don’t matter. Your post doesn’t matter. Except to us. We are a sometimes contentious, little community, and speaking for myself, reading and arguing with what others say makes me more knowledgeable and sharpens my arguing skills. But there’s no import to our comments, and rarely any import to our posts.
The idea that our arguments here have some greater effect is foolish. We don’t ignore it at our peril because there are no stakes.
There is no peril. Seriously. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on, the fact of the matter is whatever you post here or put in the comments has almost no import.
When I say “We” I usually don’t mean BMG, but the Democratic Party writ large.
I think there is peril, as in danger of losing, is HRC and by extension the rest of us try to ignore this or dismiss it.
there is no “by extension the rest of us try to ignore this or dismiss it.” Ignoring or dismissing it here at BMG will not any effect.
I apologize for quibbling with you. I’m not trying to be a jerk or direct this to you in particular. I suspect that if we realize the actual effect of our commentary, we might be more temperate in our exchanges. I’ve seen the same phenomena in the other direction. Something negative about a candidate, and people go into hush mode and tell others to be quiet about it.
We’ve had reasonably strong evidence that BMG is read routinely by officials and their staff in both the White House and on Capital Hill. Elizabeth Warren announced her Senate candidacy here.
I don’t think we should muzzle ourselves, but I think there is evidence that we DO have influence beyond Massachusetts.
read a lot? I don’t think so. I thought David said most readers don’t look at the comments.
Diaries? Occasionally. But I very much doubt that’s the case on national politics.
In the case of Clinton’s emails? No criticism of Jim, but what does he say that hasn’t been said elsewhere and in front of a larger audience?
I don’t remember any of the editors describing statistics for reading diaries versus comments. I do remember multiple references to the imbalance between readers and contributors (typical of most online sites).
There have been several times during my tenure here when I’ve seen arguments presented at the national level that we made here in our exchanges (not just the thread-starters) days or weeks earlier. We have no monopoly on conversation or rhetoric, so it could just be that these arguments were obvious and would emerge whenever the specific issue is engaged.
Still, I think it our influence is likely to be greater than your initial comment suggests.
Mostly on the Beacon rather than Capital Hill side of life, but it’s still prominent. Certainly the most prominent in the state, though not everyone is familiar with it those that are tend to be folks in the know and on the inside.
I disagree with the idea of self censorship for precisely that reason. It’s a way out of many for insiders to get the pulse of the grassroots, and if someone from Team Clinton read my commentary here I would hope they would learn from it that I support her and trust her to govern but I am terrified she doesn’t know how to run a winning campaign for this cycle. My fear is probably overstated and reality is somewhere in the middle between the hubris of her supporters and the bed wetting I’m doing. But as a barometer thats more helpful to them than an echo chamber of yes men.
‘
Whitewater… And Travelgate. Ok. Two problems.
and Vince Foster.
Three. Three problems… Oh, and Benghazi.
Ok. Four problems, then.
This is all what we heard before. And before that. And before that. And your response of ‘well, if we dismiss it, we’re in peril…’ is also an iteration of what’s been said before, and might be the sole thing keeping a specific perspective on Clinton alive.
You can’t be angry at the weathermen… at some point their prediction of rain has to come true. This is not a similar instance, Hillary Clinton is not required to be or to do evil, but that’s the frame mind you’ve both bought into and perpetuate…
Escaping repeated accusations is not evidence of malfeasance. It might merely be evidence of a ferocious appetite for accusation by the amoral. At some point the sheer amount of calumny pointed in the Clintons direction has to be judged solely as calumny… not as a near-enough-to-some-vague-truth as to make good people worry… and most certainly not as some reason to give Hillary Clintons every move –and her every misstep — greater scrutiny. to say otherwise would go beyond giving the devil his due into allowing him the benefit of the doubt.
As I said upthread, I posted this in the interest of intellectual honesty. It was the most important political story yesterday. That doesn’t buy me into anything, or perpetuate any narrative.
Disagree with me about its importance? Fine. But please, I didn’t invent American political discourse, and if I’m “perpetuating” anything by engaging, well then guess what? So are you.
I probably took that too personally. Sorry.
I still disagree with it, but I didn’t have to tell you to get lost.
n/t
My parting comment will be that I am not a cassandra but stories like this are a canary in the coal mine. I want Hillary to be president and will work for her in the fall when I have more free time to do so, my wife is voting for her and keeps telling me to shut up about my theories on how Trump can win so as not to jinx the country.
But I am sincerely worried that these kinds of things will be a bigger deal in the eyes of the electorate than anything our side can throw at Trump. His presidency is a terrifyingly real possibility, it’s not probable, but the major nominee of the two parties has recieved at least 47% of the popular vote in the last 6 presidential elections. He will at least get that, which is very frightening indeed. And he may win, which is far worse and something we all have to prepare for.
They’re both two of the best known candidates to ever run for their party’s nomination — who weren’t incumbents — in the history of our republic.
When a candidate is that well known, their favorability numbers are not ever likely to go up. (They are likely to go down, on the other hand.)
They’re tied in the polls now — to the point where people could flip a coin. In fact, given Trump’s ability to dodge sinking polls every time he opens his mouth and says something outrageous — and given that Hillary’s campaign history suggests her polls sink over the course of her campaigns — I’d say Trump is the likelier of the two to win.
If Hillary could get either Bernie or Elizabeth Warren to be her running mate, maybe her odds could flip (Bernie could solidify the base, while Elizabeth could not only help solidify the party’s base, but also knows how to attack Trump and could frustrate him and put him on the defensive for the entire campaign).
However, Hillary should think long and hard about this scandal and her real culpability in it. She may be able to survive a State Department report relatively unscathed, but she *won’t* be able to survive this kind of a report from the FBI, especially if any of her underlings are indicted. (And it seems to me that there’s plenty of evidence to do so.) Unless this State Department report is factually wrong — she should think about the good of the Democratic Party and not her own self interests, and step down.
Bernie’s done. Stick a fork in him.
The debate scheme with Trump would’ve done irreparable damage in the fall had Trump been smart enough to follow through (fortunately for us his choatic campaign flip flopped on that pledge too). A win in California will get his supporters fired up through the convention and there is increasing risk that he will lose control of the movement and it may force him to carry this campaign past the convention in some capacity. Especially with the propensity for conspiracy theories.
I might add Hillary never aired a negative ad against Bernie once this cycle, he really is far less tested than she is against Republicans. So I don’t want any of my criticism of Clinton’s missteps to be perceived as a “Never Hillary” delusion. It’s not-she’s the nominee and she’s my candidate. I just want her and her team to do a way better job than they have been. And it’s time for Bernie to return to the farm, the battle is lost but his forces will be needed in the fall.
You might add that yes, but you’d be repeating more her talking point rather than telling the truth about this season (unless we’re to pretend that the David Brock SuperPACs and her supporters don’t coordinate with the Clinton campaign).
“Hillary Clinton wrong that no negative ads have hit Bernie Sanders”
If so, put up or shut up.
– Hillary trotted out Henry Kissinger as her personal hero.
– David “Anita Hill is a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” Brock became the head propagandist for the campaign of the candidate described as the most pro-woman and feminist.
– Hillary suggested that New Yorkers are scourged by gun running from Vermont, her supporters referred to Bernie as an “NRA shill,” and they served up the narrative that he was to blame for the Sandy Hook massacre…
saying she should step down for the good of the party.
Maybe you should change your name to Pinot Noir.
…David Brock has done a complete political 180 (if he even believed his former propaganda to begin with, which is questionable). He has renounced his treatment of Anita Hill.
n/t