Two current stories have been bugging me and I’d like to dissect them a bit.
First, is the Clinton email “scandal”. Before proceeding, I’ll declare that I am for Bernie Sanders and would like to see him as the Democratic nominee this year. However, I still think there is no meat to this scandal and it is a distraction from the real issues.
Clinton email scandal
A recent report from the Inspector General has fanned the flames of the email issue recently: www.politico.com/…
As far as i can tell, the main and only clear violation of anything here is being late delivering copies of official emails for archival.
“At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."
Ok, she was late turning over all her emails. Not good. But does this constitute any violation of law? It is referring to “department policies” which are not law and have no sanctions specified if the policies are not followed to the letter. It refers to these policies “being implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act”, which is a law, but the policies and the law are not the same thing. It’s highly unlikely that an official being late meeting an arbitrarily department-chosen date-line for surrender of the records would constitute an actual violation of the FRA, and I very much doubt the FBI investigation looking into this would ever treat it as such.
And what about context here? Have other Sec States or similar officials honored these deadlines? No. According to the report itself, the office of Sec State (and others) have “longstanding, systemic weaknesses" in department record keeping. Past SS’s like Colin Powell missed such deadlines to a much greater degree than Clinton, as have many other officials, yet it has never been treated as a scandal, let alone a crime.
The report goes on to question her use of a private server. While noting explicitly that use of private email accounts was something that was allowed, the report questions whether the use of a private server to store such emails was allowed. Its answer is that there was nothing that actually forbade use of such a server. Instead it talks to “current [chief information officer] and assistant secretary for diplomatic security”, who were not in that position when Clinton was in office but who (now) say in hindsight that they would not have authorized an exclusive use of a private server. This begs a couple questions. There was no explicit rule against using a private server. The people in those offices at the time would have all known that Clinton was using a private email account. If this wasn’t ok, why didn’t the (then) chief information officer or assistant secretary for diplomatic security say something?
More meaningfully, if private email accounts are allowed, which they explicitly were, why in the world would private servers not be allowed? That makes no sense whatsoever. If a private email account is allowed, but a private server is not, that means you’re requiring the Sec State to use a private company to store the emails from that private account, which would mean the employees of that private company would all be able to see the Sec State’s emails. How in the world is that better than using a private server? It simply makes no sense that private accounts would be allowed but private servers would not. It is no wonder that Clinton, knowing that use of a private email account was allowed would believe that a private server was allowed to generate and store them, and the stuff about use of a private server seems like a red-herring. If you are allowing use of private accounts (which they were), then this requires a private server. The only question is whether this will be maintained by the author of the emails (Clinton here) or by some private company (like say Google) whose employees could then all read the Sec State’s emails. No matter how hard I try, I can’t figure out why the former option is somehow worse than the latter.
Regardless of all this, there doesn’t seem to be any law dealing with the use or non-use of private servers, just department policies and hindsight say-so’s about what such policies should have been.
As a side note, the report also confirms that officials are allowed to delete their personal emails. The claim by some that she wasn’t allowed to do this is false. There is also no officials or agency that vets the personal emails of officials to see if they’re “really” personal or not (the gist of some Clinton email conspiracies). The author/official decides that and nobody else. Period. That is the standard every official has operated under. If you don’t like that, fine, but you can not say Clinton did anything wrong just because she deleted personal emails. You also can not just say you don’t trust that they’re personal, or that someone else has to decide this besides her, because then you’re applying a double-standard just to Clinton. Some third party supposedly has to vet all of her personal emails first, even though no official has ever been held to that standard. No, sorry. Doesn’t work that way.
What’s left therefore is whether classified information was actually mishandled in violation of any law. All I’ve heard on this front is that there were a small number of emails (sent to Clinton by others) that contained some form of information that some officials today believe should have been classified at the time but wasn’t. Even if this were so, this would amount to a few instances of unintentional or incidental mishandling at most, and would not meet any standard of willful mishandling necessary for a crime.
This is also why i think the FBI investigation is very unlikely to result in an indictment. We’ll see what the FBI decides on this, but if you’re thinking that maybe Sanders will get the nomination if Clinton gets indicted, I’d advise you not to hold your breath. As far as i can tell, there’s no reason why this would or should happen, because I can’t see any clear crime in all this, just a lot of hype, conspiracy theories, double-standards and people who would very much like to see someone other than Clinton become president playing with all three.
Anatomy of a Lie: Hillary will “clinch” nomination on June 7th
Now i turn to another bullshit issue, this time aimed at delegitimizing Sanders rather than Clinton.
The main issue here is that it’s become clear that many national news networks intend to lie to their audiences on the night of June 7th and declare that Clinton has “clinched” the Democratic nomination.
When i say “lie” here that is not an accusation or an opinion. It is an objective observation of fact. Mathematically, Clinton can not clinch the nomination until the convention on 25-28 July. All claims to the contrary rely on assuming that future votes of super-delegates will go a certain way.
The word “Clinch” means certainty, not “likely”, “very likely” or even “extremely super duper likely”. Clinch means something has been made certain, and therefore assumptions and “clinching” does not mix. None of those things are certainties. No projection, no matter how likely you believe it is, is a certainty. But a number of pundits and news networks that are biased toward Clinton want to re-define these terms through equivocation and pretend it is. A good example of this deceit is an article by 538 (who btw, has been very biased toward Clinton this cycle and has been wrong in quite a lot of its projections, particularly regarding Trump), called “Clinton Will Likely Clinch The Democratic Nomination In New Jersey”. This concludes as follows:
June 7 is the last major date on the Democratic calendar, but Washington, D.C., will hold a primary on June 14. And Sanders has also said there will be a “contested convention” because Clinton has no realistic shot of reaching 2,383 delegates without superdelegates. That’s true. But whether we like it or not, superdelegates count.
The problem with this claim and the entire reasoning of the article is that superdelegates do not count until they actually vote, which will not be until 25-28 July. If Clinton needs them to clinch the nomination, then it follows directly that Clinton can not “clinch” the nomination until 25-28 July. Prior to that date all one can do is project that something is “likely”.
We can see the difference in the very title of the article “Clinton Will Likely Clinch The Democratic Nomination In New Jersey”. Why does 538 say “likely” here? Why aren’t they just saying she’s clinched the nomination now? Well, they’re waiting to find out how NJ voters actually vote. The polls for NJ make it seem very likely she’ll win, so why not just say she’s “clinched” already? Because the statements of NJ voters about who they intend to vote for in polls before the actual vote don’t count for anything. Only their actual votes on June 7th count. NJ voters are under no obligation to vote the way they said they would in a pre-vote poll and they can change their minds for any reason and on the basis of events that have not yet happened. Thus, it does not matter what they say about how they intend to vote in the future. That doesn’t “clinch” anything. It only counts when they actually vote that way, and 538 rightly has to stick to using the word “likely” for the NJ vote because we do not know for certain how NJ voters are actually going to vote on June 7th yet.
What 538 would like us to do however, is suspend these facts and reason and the English language when it comes to the votes of “superdelegates”. Unlike with NJ voters, where non-binding polls of how people intend to vote do not count, with superdelegates suddenly non-binding polls of how they intend to vote do count and are suddenly the same as actual voting that hasn’t taken place. This is how 538 attempts to selectively turn what should be a “likely” into a certainty (“clinch”).
Declaring projections to be facts is lying. Words like “clinch” mean something in the English language. It does not mean “something I think is extremely likely to happen”. It means something that is now certain, no "likely’s” about it. The outcome of the nomination is not certain on June 7th, no matter how likely you think a certain outcome is, or want it to be, and saying otherwise is lying.
We should all keep this in mind when June 7th rolls around and keep tabs on which pundits and which networks actively lie to their viewers to advance the campaign narratives and candidate they prefer.
Conclusions
Bernie Bros — There isn’t really any meat to the email “scandal”. It’s mostly conspiracy theories, people getting confused by techno-babble and double-standards applied to Clinton by political opponents (and no, Hill-bots, not because of sexism). There’s shitty record keeping in executive branch offices and apparently always has been. Some policy changes have been made because of this which may make this a bit better going forward, but if you’re expecting Hillary to be arrested and Bernie to then sweep into the nomination in the wake… Don’t hold your breath. There isn’t really anything there, just a lot of people who would prefer to see someone other than Hillary Clinton become president letting their imaginations run wild.
Hill-bots — Bernie is not dropping out of the race. Get over it already. Besides being annoying in constantly suggesting or demanding that he do so, you’re now intending to lie to people in a vain attempt to make that happen. The Democratic Party decided on a specific primary system that means a close race like this is never “clinched” until superdelegates actually vote at the last minute. Before that moment, it’s all still projections, no matter how likely you think those projections are. You do not get to torture the English language and re-define words to change “likely’s” into certainties just because you’d like it to be so. If you insist on pushing that line you should expect, and deserve, to be called out for lying to the American people. And given the trustworthy ratings that Hillary’s been sporting recently, you should probably not do that, for self-preservation if nothing else.
Well, glad to get that off my chest. If you disagree or think I have any of it wrong, please feel free to say why in the comments. I’m open to different views.
