The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal Was Totally Overblown

[Night Watchman]

Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate:

The fuss over Hillary Clinton’s email has now proved to be one of the most overhyped news stories of this overhyped news season. Look at Tuesday’s statement by FBI Director James Comey. Ignore his self-righteous, scolding tone. Read the facts he’s uncovered, place them in context, and the conclusion is inescapable: As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, California, there’s no there there.

Let’s review the numbers: Examining the 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over, the FBI agents found 110—the back and forth of 52 email chains—that contained classified information. Of these, just eight had material that she should have known was “top secret”; 36 of them had “secret” information; and eight more had stuff that she should have known was “confidential.”

The agents also scrounged through the bits and pieces of 30,000 more emails that she didn’t turn over and found three—three!—that contained classified information: one secret and two confidential.

About those first 30,000 emails, the ones Clinton turned over, the FBI handed them out to auditors at other agencies that might have an interest in the matter, and after months of review they “up-classified” 2,000 emails to confidential. In other words, when Clinton wrote or received those 2,000 emails, she and her correspondents would have had no reason to suspect they were jotting down classified facts. But the reviewers have declared them classified retroactively. Your taxpayer dollars at work.

As anyone who’s ever had a security clearance will tell you, the labels secret and confidential mean next to nothing. When I worked on Capitol Hill in the late 1970s, the government gave me a secret clearance on my first day of work, pending the investigation into my worthiness to hold a top secret badge. As far as anyone knew, I might have been a Soviet spy, carting out confidential and secret documents every night and making copies for my handler. But they also knew the risk was low because there was nothing in those documents that the Soviets would have paid a dime for. The same is true of our various adversaries and stuff marked secret today.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/07/hillary_s_email_scandal_was_overhyped.html

There's no "there" there!

[Hoyt]

1. It was also overblown by people trying to bring her down.

[Agschmid]

3. Still is in some places...

[Cryptoad]

2. "was" ?????

[OnyxCollie]

4. FOIA avoidance should not be an accepted practice by either party. nt

[BlueMTexpat]

5. THIS ...

About those first 30,000 emails, the ones Clinton turned over, the FBI handed them out to auditors at other agencies that might have an interest in the matter, and after months of review they “up-classified” 2,000 emails to confidential. In other words, when Clinton wrote or received those 2,000 emails, she and her correspondents would have had no reason to suspect they were jotting down classified facts. But the reviewers have declared them classified retroactively. Your taxpayer dollars at work.

No, there's no "there" there ... and there NEVER has been.

But that truth will not stop the eternal rabbit hole of GOPer investigations of Hillary Clinton ... no matter what she does. Make no mistake, however. This happens/will happen with ANY Dem Presidential candidate who is likely to beat the pants off a GOPer candidate. The saddest thing with Hillary is that all too many self-styled "Dems" go right along with the tactics.

The advantage with Hillary is that the detractors have been doing this for the past 25+ years. NOTHING has proven to be true. There are only so many times that a person can cry "Wolf" before they have no credibility whatsoever. But it appears that each new generation has to learn those lessons over again.