Ethics Bulletin! Hillary Apologizes! And It’s Pathetic!

September 8, 2015September 9, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just can’t bear to put up another Hillary photo, and the graphics for “fake apologies” are all memes, so here’s an adorable bull dog puppy.

I really, really wanted to be through with Hillary Clinton today…this week…as long as possible. You’ve got to believe me!

Then comes this breathless announcement from ABC News: Hillary finally apologized!

Of course, when you have said repeatedly that there was nothing to apologize for, and you aren’t going to apologize, see no reason to apologize, because you did nothing wrong, and it was allowed, and lots of others had done similarly without anyone making a fuss, and the whole thing is nonsense, and made up by Fox News and Republicans, and then you apologize because you can’t stop the criticism and your advisors are saying “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HILLARY, THE MEDIA IS BEGGING YOU TO APOLOGIZE AND MAYBE IF YOU GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT WE CAN BURY THIS!!!!,” what kind of apology is it?

An insincere apology. A desperate apology. A cynical, dishonest, Machiavellian apology, containing no contrition, humility, acknowledgement of wrongdoing, remorse or acceptance of consequences. In other words, not an apology at all. Just another tactic,

Is anyone really fooled by this? If you are, what’s the matter with you?

Even by fake apology standards, this was awful. Clinton said (my comments in Hillary Soul Black):

“I do think I could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier.

You mean better as in not using one rationalization after another, lying , falsely claiming that the e-mails of the Secretary of State contained no classified information before you adopted the Clintonian “no e-mails marked as classified?” Or better as in doing a better job lying?

“I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that.

Because Clintons never appreciate the need to tell the truth unless they are about to be exposed. Because Hillary is only running for President—why would she appreciate the need to be transparent and honest to the public? Why, though, was the alternative to doing a better job answering questions sending out one smirking, talking-point programmed surrogate after another to say that the issue was a sham? Why didn’t she appreciate the need not to do that?

“What I had done was allowed, it was above board.

In other words, she still refuses to admit she did anything wrong! What’s she apologizing for? And no, it was not above board, because it was a secret private server specifically designed to keep Clinton’s communications hidden when she wanted them to be. “Above board” means “in open sight; without tricks, concealment, or disguise.” Her handling of the e-mails was the opposite of “above board” by definition. Continue reading →

UPDATE: Hillary’s Ongoing Corruption Of Democrats, Progressives, and The News Media, Featuring MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell And Washington Post Editorial Cartoonist Tom Toles

September 8, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

First, Toles. This cartoon ran on Sunday:

Isn’t that nice? The whole e-mail episode, investigated by the FBI, raising issues of mishandling of classified information (which is a crime), destruction of evidence (which can be a crime, but is always unethical and suspicious) and competence (Hillary says the security implications of making sensitive communications on a private server never occurred to her!), and which Clinton continues to stonewall and lie about, is just an invention of the news media!

Poor Hillary! Look how frustrated she is! How can sending out paid spinners and liars to muddy the water and confuse the issues be a cover-up? How can destroying e-mails before they can be reviewed be a cover-up? How can the State Department employee that she paid to moonlight as her private e-mail tech taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying to Congress be part of a cover-up? How can an obvious cover-up be a cover-up?

This isn’t an ‘editorial cartoon.’ This is Spinning for Hillary, and for the Post to give it center page dominance on its editorial page is endorsing deception and partisan propaganda. Toles has always been a simplistic progressive hack; his cartoons make his predecessor Herb Block look even-handed. This goes beyond hackery, though, to misleading the public. Or do you believe this is his real opinion? If so, he is too naive and dim-witted to have an editorial voice.

Andrea Mitchell’s Hillary enabling is of a different sort: rank cowardice. Continue reading →

Tales of The Corrupted: David Ignatius’s Hillary E-mail Scandal Whitewash, PART TWO….And, As Usual, The Sequel Is A Horrible Disappointment

September 5, 2015September 5, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

David Ignatius: Liar, undisclosed Clinton operative, disgrace. Your move, Washington Post.

This, it turns out, is even worse than I thought. Ignatius, whom I once respected, is more corrupted than I thought. The mainstream news media’s shameless and unethical enabling of Hillary Clinton’s lies and misconduct is worse than I thought, and I already thought it was bad.

In this post, I highlighted an op-ed column by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, which used classic rationalizations to argue that Clinton’s conduct wasn’t a “scandal’ because 1) it wasn’t a crime; 2) if it was a crime, it was unlikely to be prosecuted; 3) everybody does it, and 4) the public is used to such misconduct, so it can’t be a scandal.

One of Ignatius’s sources, extensively quoted, was, in his words, “Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information.”

What I didn’t know, and Ignatius’s readers didn’t know, but Clinton knows, and Smith knows and Ignatius definitely knew but intentionally didn’t disclose to his readers, was that Jeffrey Smith… Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Lawyer’s Ned Beatty E-Mail

September 4, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Arizona Supreme Court Rule 41(g), permits attorney discipline based on the bar’s determination that an Arizona lawyer has engaged in “offensive conduct.” Now Dennis Wilenchik, an Arizona lawyer who got in a nasty e-mail exchange with a client over a fee is challenging his “admonishment,” a significant form of bar discipline, based on the surprise declaration of his contentious client that he was never offended. An admonished lawyer will usually accept discipline by consent, which in Wilenchik’s case includes a one-year probation period and anger management treatment.

The e-mail exchange began getting heated when Wilenchik called his client, who owned a medical marijuana consulting business, a “cheap asshole.” Later he threatened to sue for his fee, to which his client replied,“Bring it, bitch!”

Wilenchik’s evocative response: “OK drug dealer—I look forward to the many nights and mornings when you think of my name and squeal—you mean nothing to me. Check out the movie Deliverance.”

You know, like in this classic film moment…

Yes, cultural references to film classics are very useful. Still, it was this reference that clinched it with the disciplinary committee.

Wilenchik’s lawyer says there is newly discovered evidence showing that the client’s complaint to the bar was based on a claim that the client feared he would be gang raped because of the reference to “Deliverance.”

In a declaration, the complaining client now says he wasn’t offended by anything in Wilenchik’s emails:

“In fact, I thought that Mr. Wilenchik’s last Deliverance email to me was rather humorous actually, and stated in such a manner that neither I nor any reasonable person would or could seriously construe this to be a real intent to harm me or my family. Moreover, Mr. Wilenchik’s last Deliverance email to me was exactly what I would expect anyone, including a lawyer, to write after I sent an email saying, ‘Bring it bitch.’ In other words, these emails were harmless banter which I instigated and therefore it is impossible for me to have been offended.”

Your Ethics Alarms Labor Day Weekend Ethics Quiz is this:

Does someone have to be offended for a lawyer’s conduct to be sufficiently offensive to warrant discipline?

Continue reading →

Tales of The Corrupted: David Ignatius’s Hillary E-mail Scandal Whitewash

August 30, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is how the world ends. The ethical world, anyway…

I am charting the Clinton Corruption of the Democratic Party and how it spreads to other populations, like progressives, feminists, journalists and voters. I fear that a map of the projected progress will look like one of those scary plague or zombie computer progressions in scenes from movies like “Outbreak,” showing the entire nation turning blood red over a series of progressions beginning with a single carrier in Montana or someplace. “We have 72 hours, gentlemen, until the whole nation is infected!”

Still, there is hope. Last week I was struck by the sad cast of Clinton surrogates that her campaign trotted out to argue that it is ridiculous for anyone to think that a Secretary of State should be expected to follow her own department’s best practices, take proper steps to protect sensitive communications or tell the truth. The most raving was Howard Dean, who essentially adopted the Big Lie approach employed by James Carville. “Look,” Dean told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd last week, “this is, in fact, manufactured partly by a press that’s bored and partly by the Republicans….She can’t be blamed for this. So I look at this as the usual press frenzy, the pack journalism, and I think it’ll go away, because there’s no sense to it.” Dean should have also mentioned the bored FBI, the bored judges, and the hundreds of bored lawyers I have discussed the issue with in ethics seminars. If there is one of the latter group who agrees with Dean (who isn’t being paid by the Clintons), he or she hasn’t had the guts to say so out loud. Then Hillary sent a sacrificial lamb to Fox News, a poor ex-Bill Clinton State official named Ellen Tauscher who looked terrified…

….spoke in a shaky voice, stumbled and stuttered and made no sense at all, teeing up junk like this…

TAUSCHER: Look, Secretary Clinton has former foreign service officers, civil servants. I did as undersecretary too, that make sure all of this information is protected. It is physically impossible to move things from the classified system to the unclassified system. We are only talking about the classified system, unclassified system. Everything on the classified system is where it belongs and there is no question about that. The Federal Records Act makes very clear that the person that transmits the information is responsible for the classified — classification of the information. And is it possible that Secretary Clinton was passed something by somebody and somebody and somebody? Yes. That would have been true if it had been on the state dot-gov e-mail system. But I mean, I think that we all understand that Hillary Clinton is held to a different standard. But let’s get it straight. Let’s be lawful and let’s be smart about this. We’re talking about unclassified e-mails. We’re not talking about classified e-mails, we’re talking about unclassified e-mails and they are clearly subject to what people interpret…. And there are differences between the State Department and the intelligence community right now.

As Olsen Johnson said in response to Gabby Johnson’s “authentic frontier gibberish” in “Blazing Saddles,” “Now who can argue with that?”

My impression was that no articulate, honest, credible Democrat was willing to defend Clinton, hence the campaign’s reliance desperate resume peddling hacks like Tauscher and principle-free madmen like Dean and Carville.

This week, it was more of the same. On “This Week With Martha Raddatz Pretending To Be George Stephanopoulos,” Hillary’s designated liar was a state senator I had never heard of who refused to answer Raddatz’s questions. My favorite exchange: Raddatz asked her about polls showing that a majority of the public believes that Hillary lies and isn’t trustworthy, and whether this wasn’t a serious concern for the campaign?

“Well, I certainly don’t feel that way!” the surrogate answered, with that frozen smile these people get when they have to stick to talking points and admit nothing.

Still, the Clinton Corruption Contagion (CCC) is spreading to the thoughtful and credible. The venerable Cokie Roberts, on the ABC roundtable today, has embraced the deceptive and misleading media spin that the only issue is whether the e-mail revelations ultimately costs Clinton significant support. No, that’s not the issue at all, at least not the one the news media should be concerned with. The issue is what Clinton did and what she said, and whether being incompetent, conflicted, reckless with sensitive communications and lying about it repeatedly, plus destroying evidence, disqualifies a former Secretary of State from being considered as a legitimate Presidential contender. Cokie Roberts’ analysis has now deteriorated into “Will Hillary’s lies and blame-shifting work?”

Hearing her talk like that is like watching Dana Wynter open her cold, inhuman eyes post-podding in “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.”

Then there is David Ignatius, one of the Washington Post’s more trustworthy pundits, who authored an op-ed some CCC infected staffer headlined “The Hillary Clinton e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t.” Continue reading →

The Clinton E-Mail Scandal, Part Two: The Corrupter, The Corrupt And The Corrupted

August 14, 2015August 15, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Like so many political scandals, the Hillary Clinton e-mail mess has multiple benefits even as it reveals the scabrous underside of the American political culture. Prime among the benefits is that it provides a useful test of who is trustworthy and perceptive, and who is untrustworthy due to an excess of bias, partisan fervor, warped values or just mush-for-brains.

The stunningly cynical and dishonest statement by Clinton communications chief Jennifer Palmieri, dissected in Part One, revealed that the Clinton machine really does have zero respect for the intellect of the American public, that the Clintons still believe that you can lie your way out of anything (even if the lies make no sense), and that a lack of ethics really does eat away at gray matter.

Look: every week, sometimes three times a week, I harangue lawyers about how they are ethically obligated to take careful measures to protect proprietary client information that is stored or communicated through electronic means. They immediately comprehend how it is essential, especially government lawyers. Why? Because the government is the most vulnerable of clients, among those who can be most hurt by careless information technology, and is ahead of much of industry and the private sector in developing policies and methods of keeping information as secure as possible. Hillary Clinton’s casual lies about how her “home-brewed” server was no big deal is literally stunning to these lawyers, because they know that no high ranking government official is as cavalier about official e-mails as Clinton’s repeated statements would suggest she was. As is a pattern among Democrats during the Obama administration, Clinton’s dissembling is designed to fool the ignorant, because the ignorant are many and useful. It is based on the assumption that nobody, certainly not the news media, will enlighten them sufficiently to understand the magnitude of what Clinton did, and the breathtaking audacity of her lies. Continue reading →

The Clinton E-Mail Scandal, Part One: Ethics Corrupter For President! Her Campaign’s “Nonsense” Memo

August 13, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I’m just making an analogy here–I’m not saying those tentacle-shooting vamps in The Strain are Clinton supporters. That doesn’t mean they aren’t, though…

Portraying the currently developing scandal regarding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails while Secretary of State as just politics and the “kind of nonsense” that “comes with the territory,” Clinton flack Jennifer Palmieri sent out a detailed message to Clinton supporters and Democrats. It is designed to mislead them about the critical issues raised by this matter, which are certainly not nonsense, to coordinate with the news media, which is trying desperately and unsuccessfully to embargo this story because it is damaging to Democrats (more on this in Part Two), to make the public dumber about how leadership and government works, and to provide slick rationalizations to those Clinton supporters inclined to be part of the disinformation campaign.

This is sinister and disgusting stuff, the essence of ethics corruption. For an unethical leader, like Clinton, to gain power, she must make a large proportion of the public insensitive or outright ignorant of basic ethical principles, and, if possible, as unethical as possible. The effort to trivialize this serious example of what’s so wrong with Hillary Clinton as just another “vast right wing conspiracy” is part of this process. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is An Unethical Politician!

August 9, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Aren’t they a cute couple?

And dumb as two bricks in a swamp!

Michigan state Rep. Todd Courser (left) had an email sent to his Republican supporters that falsely claimed he had been caught having sex with a male prostitute. That’s right: he sent out his own, self-smearing lie, apparently because he thought this would help him distract attention from another scandal, a heterosexual one. The married father of four is having an extramarital affair with fellow state Rep. Cindy Gamrat (right), a married mother of three.
Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Hillary Clinton, As Well As Her Spokespersons, Directly And Intentionally Lied About Her Emails, And The News Media Has An Obligation To Make That Clear

August 4, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The fact that Hillary Clinton is a serial liar and is preparing to deceive her way to the Presidency of the United States is of utmost importance to the nation. This is a fact, by the way. So far, the news media has allowed the usual Clinton strategy of obfuscating, denying, confusing and blurring instances of their misconduct, as well as distracting attention with new scandals involving them (like this one), succeed as it has in the past. This must stop. Contrary to the Clinton Credo, character matters, and the greater the power a leader has, the more it matters. A leader who engages in blatant lying has no respect for those she leads, and cannot be trusted. Those who cannot be trusted should not lead. The news media has an obligation to let us know who cannot be trusted.

It is as simple as that.

We watched that classic Clinton strategy in action when two inspector generals announced that they were calling upon the Justice Department to investigate Hillary’s alleged mishandling of classified Sate Department materials via her private server, in violation of government policies, her own department’s policies, and responsible stewardship and principles of cyber security. Immediately, Clinton began muddying the water and boring the public by launching a dispute over whether or not it was a “criminal” investigation, using undue influence to get the New York Times to change its story, and suddenly making the controversy about the messenger rather than its message.

Oh, the Clintons are good at this, no doubt about that.

Now here is another example in the same controversy. Though Clinton has insisted that there was nothing classified on her email system and that any dispute is just a technical dispute “between agencies” 41 of the messages turned over to State by Clinton were recently given classified status by the State Department. Clinton’s word-parsing defense has been that she did not send or receive any material marked classified, but as law professor Jonathan Turley explained succinctly (he has been in the classified loop in the past), virtually anything coming out of the office of the Secretary of State would be automatically considered classified as a matter of course until it was reviewed and determined not to be classified. Clinton’s denials are based on typical deceit designed to fool the uninformed: her exchanges on her illicit private e-mail server weren’t classified because they were made on her illicit private e-mail server!

(Meanwhile, there are all those other e-mails Hillary had destroyed before the State Department could review them and after she knew that they would be subpoenaed. Who else has them? Never mind: we trust Hillary’s judgment, right?)

Writes Turley in his latest post on this topic (like me, the usually liberal George Washington University law professor professor seems to be especially offended by Clinton’s dishonesty, recklessness and smug denials ): Continue reading →

UPDATE: Hillary’s Ongoing Corruption Of Democrats, Progressives, and…

July 26, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how Hillary Clinton was gradually converting her admirers into sociopaths, making her a particularly toxic ethics corrupter. I haven’t written here as much about ethics corrupters as I should have, but Hillary will give me many opportunities to rectify that situation. To quote the Ethics Alarms glossary,

“An ethics corrupter is someone, usually a celebrity, a public official or an accomplished and successful individual, who behaves unethically and forces those who admire him or her, or what they have achieved, to defend indefensible conduct as a matter of loyalty or cognitive dissonance. As a result, the defenders warp their own values, using rationalizations to excuse or justify conduct they once correctly understood was wrong…”

Now Reason has seen the light: Continue reading →

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