According to recent polls, American voters are still greatly concerned about the email “scandal,” which has played such a key role in Clinton’s low ratings for “honesty.” This concern is misplaced, as the Congressional Hearings that followed FBI director James Comey’s public announcement of the results of their investigation clearly proved that Clinton never lied about her handling of classified emails.
Unfortunately, you had to be closely following the hearings to recognize this, as the media, while hammering away on a daily basis at Clinton’s lack of “transparency,” paid no attention to the revelations that exonerated her.
I’d love to leave the email scandal behind. But since prospective voters have not, I feel obligated to return to it yet again and point out that two little clips prove it was not Clinton but FBI director James Comey that was being “evasive” in his original report. Follow along with the following 3 points; it won’t take long! And then, do pass this along to any site or friend (or class) who can make good use of it.
1. In his original report, Comey claimed that Clinton, contrary to her statements to the public, had received 110 classified emails (out of 30,000 the FBI had recovered.) The media’s pronouncement: Clinton lied!
HOWEVER:
2. Under questioning by Elijah Cummings, Comey admitted that only three of those 110 emails had any kind of markings on them at all. Those three, moreover, were marked (mistakenly, as it later turned out) only “internally,” with tiny letter symbols pertaining to specific sentences within the emails.
SO: None of the 30,000 was clearly designated in a header as “classified” or “confidential.” NONE. Just as Clinton had said.
3. In his earlier statements, Comey (a Republican) had dismissed the importance of the lack of headers, claiming that the emails contained “subject matter” that “any reasonable person should have known… had no place in an unclassified system.” But in the congressional hearing, when questioned by Congressman Matt Cartwright, Comey was forced to admit that headers were standard operating procedure according to the State Department Handbook. This admission exonerated Hillary not only from any crime but also from the charge of lying, and suggests, moreover, that there was nothing careless about Clinton’s handling of classified material, as none of the emails she had received had been properly marked as classified.
The appropriate “header,” far from being insignificant, turns out to be required of all classified documents. Ellen Tauscher, who served as an Under Secretary in the State Department until 2012 corroborated this. The separation of emails into classified and unclassified piles and marked accordingly with the appropriate header — prior to Clinton receiving any of them — was taken with utmost seriousness and done very rigorously. Indeed, there is no other valid means of identifying a classified document.
For any viewers relying on television “news” — MSNBC as well as Fox — these
exonerating exchanges never happened, because their importance was never turned into “breaking news” or a “headline” story.
And today, Joe Scarborough had the nerve to be amazed at Clinton’s low ratings for honesty. The true “scandal” of this election is the media coverage!