Let's put our heads together on the Clinton e-mail scandal

[paulthompson]

87. How to proceed?

I'm encouraged that this idea is getting some interest and energy.

I think it's time to get a little more organized. Many hands make light work. We should divide up tasks to maximize each person's skills and reduce duplication of effort.

I think we need to come at this from multiple angles. Different people have different levels of interest, so we should present the information in different ways. For instance, we could have a one-page summary along the lines of understanding Clinton's e-mail scandal in a 1000 words or less. We also could come up with visuals and photos and such to help attact the attention-challenged folks.

Then we could have more in-depth summaries, to make a more convincing argument. The Clinton campaign has put out a FAQ on the scandal that's several pages long. Or course it's nearly all partian spin. But it would be a good idea to have something of similar length from the other point of view.

Then, I think a timeline would be a good thing to have too. Fewer people would look at that, because it would be even more detailed, but it could provide the best understanding of what's going on, and it could be a resource for researchers and journalists to get fully caught up on everything.

Furthermore, the scandal is so big, we should try to break it into pieces to better understand it. For instance, there's the Clinton Foundation aspect that is a big can of worms all by itself, and apparently a whole branch of the FBI investigation is looking just into that. We could create a team just to look into that.

Then there's the IT/hacking/computer aspect. How secured was Clinton's server? Did hackers break into it or not? What about all the technical understandings of servers and their security and so forth? Hopefully, there are some people here who have a special knowledge or interest in that, and could make a team to focus just on that.

Then there's the legal aspect. The legal system is so complicated that it would be great if we could have some people with a special knowledge or interest in that form a team. They could look at the relevant law and try to parse which laws were broken, if any, quote legal experts, and the like.

Then there's the whole classification issue. What do things like "top secret" or "born classified" or "overclassified" mean? Who has the right to determine what's classified or not? What if the State Department says something isn't classified, but the CIA says it is? Hopefully we could form a team to help make that easily understandable.

I'm just brainstorming off the top of my head. There could be other teams formed. Suggestions are very welcome.

If you're interested on one particular aspect or another, and think you have time to help out, please let us know here.

The bottom line is, this scandal is sprawling and confusing. I just spoke to a friend yesterday about politics, and he asked me, "What is that e-mail scandal all about, anyway? I thought it was just another bogus Republican witch hunt, but now I'm not so sure." By the time I finished explaining, he was shocked and appalled. I think there are a lot of people like that out there. The media has done a REALLY poor job on this. We need to try to do the job they should have done.

I'm reminded of last night, how the media wasn't reporting at all on the results from Hawaii, so a few Sanders supporters got together and crowdsourced it. There was even an article in USA Today about their efforts, which turned out to be very accurate. We can do the same about this scandal, and have a real impact.