Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal

The State Department’s Cover-Up Tactics: So This Is Trustworthy, Transparent, Honest Government Under Barack Obama’s Leadership, Is It?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

tapper-300x197[Warning: I want to apologize for the snarky and perhaps unprofessional tone of the following post. On second thought, I don’t.]

Barack Obama’s approval ratings have been rising in the wake of the realization that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump are his likely successors.  I can’t blame the public too much for this, as irrational as it is. Place Steve Buscemi next to the Elephant Man, and after a while he’ll seem like George Clooney.

Still, the fact that so many Americans accept/ enable this incompetent, divisive, corrupt and untrustworthy government under Obama is a major reason such unfit candidates as Clinton and Trump have gotten this far. Never before has such incompetent leadership been so extolled, especially by the news media. The standards for what Americans would accept as Presidential leadership have been lowered catastrophically under Obama, and this is one of many horrible results.

Now the State Department—you know, that major Cabinet Department Hillary Clinton ran, the one that looked the other way while its Secretary violated its policies regarding classified material, then tried to cover it up? That one—  has  admitted that a question from Fox News reporter James Rosen about the government’s secret discussions with Iran was deliberately edited out of a video to re-write history and deceive the public. The section related to secret meetings with Iran prior to the nuclear deal—you know, the one that Obama’s foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes boasted about how it was foisted on the American people by duping the media. That one. When Fox News first flagged the missing exchange, Obama’s government dismissed it as a “glitch.”

You know. Like The IRS said that it couldn’t find Lois Lerner’s e-mails.

But this week, finding that it couldn’t stonewall any more, the State Department  told reporters  that “a staffer” had erased part of the footage from the December 2013 briefing before it was posted on the Internet. This censor reportedly did so, the State Department admitted, after receiving a phone call from an “unknown” department employee ordering him or her to do so. “There was a deliberate request—this wasn’t a technical glitch,” State now says.

Though they first said it was. When it wasn’t. To put everyone off the track. Because this is the most transparent administration ever, and has never had any scandals. None.

Do I seem annoyed? I am. Continue reading →

While We’re Firing Biased And Incompetent Journalists, Let’s Sack Gayle King

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
What DOES Oprah see in this woman...

What DOES Oprah see in this woman…

CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King demonstrated on Thursday an unacceptable mindset for a broadcast journalist as we get deeper into the 2016 Presidential campaign, which is to say bias, ignorance, and a complete lack of awareness that biased and ignorant isn’t a wonderful way to go through life.

While discussing the State Department’s Inspector General’s report that exposed the full extent of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, King blithely said, to Face the Nation’s John Dickerson:

“So John, put it in perspective. How big a deal is this really? I was at an event last night, and both Democrats and Republicans were quoting Bernie Sanders saying, ‘I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails’…so how big a deal is it?”

The disgrace is that any alleged journalist could say something this stupid and damning on  live TV without a bag over her head. A fair  translation of the statement is “I am ignorant of technology, the duties of executive leadership and ethics: I see nothing disqualifying about lying, or a Secretary of State intentionally placing the nation’s security at risk for her own personal benefit. I am a Democrat and I only hang around with people who think like me.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Day, Or “Now THIS Is Spinning!”: Hillary Clinton Spokesperson Brian Fallon

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Clinton spin

“While political opponents of Hillary Clinton are sure to misrepresent this report for their own partisan purposes, in reality, the Inspector General documents just how consistent her email practices were with those of other Secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email. The report shows that problems with the State Department’s electronic record keeping systems were longstanding and that there was no precedent of someone in her position having a State Department email account until after the arrival of her successor. Contrary to the false theories advanced for some time now, the report notes that her use of personal email was known to officials within the Department during her tenure, and that there is no evidence of any successful breach of the Secretary’s server. We agree that steps ought to be taken to ensure the government can better maintain official records, and if she were still at the State Department, Secretary Clinton would embrace and implement any recommendations, including those in this report, to help do that. But as this report makes clear, Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email was not unique, and she took steps that went much further than others to appropriately preserve and release her records.”

—-Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, spinning the IG report with revelations which prompted that right-wing rag the Washington Post this morning to call his boss’s conduct, in an editorial, “inexcusable, willful disregard for the rules.”

Wow.

Whatever Hillary Clinton’s campaign is paying Brian Fallon to lie for her, it’s not nearly enough.

Imagine: the State Department IG issues a devastating condemnation of Clinton’s conduct, one that proves (as stated here since March, 2015, because it was obvious that early) Clinton has been lying about her conduct, her motives and the consequences of her actions regarding her personal e-mail server installed precisely to avoid the legal reach of the Freedom of Information Act at the risk of compromising national security, and the Clinton camp response is  to say, “See? She was telling the truth all along!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAryFIuRxmQ

This response is..

Cynical.

Audacious.

Insulting.

Also designed for use by the completely corrupt, like Nancy Pelosi,  typical of Clinton responses to all scandals, and ridiculously easy to expose.

And before I start exposing, let me address the comments of the liberal end of Woodward and Bernstein (that would be Carl), who while agreeing on CNN this morning that the IG’s report is “devastating” in its near complete demonstration of how much Clinton has misrepresented the facts and her conduct to the news media and the American people, summed it all up be saying that Hillary has had “an uncomfortable relationship with the truth.”

To evoke the late Fred Rogers: Can you say “habitual liar”? Sure you can! A woman who has had “an uncomfortable relationship with the truth,” Carl, is a liar. Don’t sugar-coat it and obfuscate. That’s what the Clintons do. You sound like a Clinton! She’s lying. She lied about the server. She lies all the time. You’re a journalist. Just say it, loud and clear. That’s your damn job.

But I digress.

Let’s just go over how poor Brian Fallon’s statement of desperate mega-spin is dishonest, misleading, and, to be blunt, a pack of lies: Continue reading →

What A Surprise: The Inspector General Reports That What We Knew Clinton had Done With Her E-Mails A Year Ago In Fact Was What She Had Done, That She Has Been Lying And Spinning Ever Since, And That Her Supporters Have Either Been Dupes Or Accomplices! OK, I Guess That’s Not Much Of A Surprise…

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Yawning2I’m not sure what to write about this, except that it has to be reported because the Clinton e-mail scandal has been so extensively discussed here since early in 2015. If it’s surprising to anyone, I pity them. If they try to keep denying it, I have contempt for them. If they don’t understand why this issue matters (Bernie…!), I pity them and have contempt for them.

Today the State Department’s inspector general’s report on the Clinton’s e-mail practices was released to the media.  The report makes it clear that Clinton intentionally set up the private server to avoid scrutiny of her personal e-mails, and the various Stygian activities revealed there. In order to do that, she willfully and knowingly violated State Department policies, and placed national security at potential risk.

The report concluded that Clinton failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private email server and that department staff would not have allowed it had she requested approval, because of the “security risks in doing so.”  Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents, the inspector general concluded, and her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed. Clinton should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013. She did not, choosing instead to provide those records in December 2014, nearly two years after leaving office.

So she was not following policy. What she did was not approved.  She did knowingly take risks with sensitive national security information. It wasn’t because she didn’t make “the best choice” that all of this occurred. Clinton was making the best choice for her…her career, her ambitions, her schemes.  The nation’s interests were secondary. If that. Continue reading →

For A Respected Newspaper And Its Journalists, Denial Is Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
..and so is deceiving readers by 'burying the lede'...

…and so is deceiving readers by ‘burying the lede’…

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

In a spectacular example of doing everything possible to hide bad news (in its view and those of most readers…and me too), the Washington Post this weekend made it difficult to learn the results of its own poll, which showed the horrible result–in the Post’s eyes—that Donald Trump now leads Hillary Clinton 46% to 44%…not a lot, but considering that the margin was 11% just a little while ago, big news. Apocalyptic news.

The Post headline? I have the print edition before me now: “Voters accentuate the negative in poll,” with the section of the story (by Dan Balz and Scott Clement) visible on the front page describing how more voters dislike Clinton and Trump that like them. How is that news? Didn’t everybody know that months ago? It also teases that the candidates are in a “virtual dead heat,” but it takes (Mediaite’s Joe Concha actually counted: Thanks, Joe!) five paragraphs and 219 words to timidly admit what the public has a right to know: Trump is now leading Hillary in the Post’s poll (with ABC).

This is more than burying the lede; this is denial, and competent, responsible, objective journalists cannot ethically engage in denial. Bad or good, the news belongs up-front and headlined, because most people don’t read entire articles. Why did the Post do this? It’s emotional and juvenile, and that’s all it is. This is anti-Trump, pro-Hillary bias crippling news judgment and competent reporting. Balz and Clement can’t help themselves from spinning the poll story to make it sound like it’s really good news for Hillary, writing: Continue reading →

The “Lying Hillary” Smoking Gun Video

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI

I know it’s viral now, and perhaps not news. Indeed, the fact that Hillary Clinton is one of the most prolific, shameless, media-enabled and successful serial liars in United States political history is certainly not news, and is undeniable by anyone not yet corrupted by her scorched earth march to power. Nonetheless, this is an ethics blog, and one that has devoted an extensive effort, much criticized as obsessive, to document why the words “ethical” and “Hillary Clinton” must never be used in close proximity to each other. I have to post this.

Does it prove she is spectacularly untrustworthy? Of course it does. Does it prove she is unfit to be President? Yes, except in the horrible hypothetical circumstance that someone even more unfit is running against her, such as, oh, let’s pick someone that no sane and patriotic American would ever consider as a potential President, like Jessica Simps…no, worse, like Alec Baldwi…no, still not bad enough. Okay, let’s say..I know, I know, it’s ridiculous, but…Donald Trump. (I almost said Justin Bieber.)

The stunning thing about the video is that it isn’t nearly complete. For example,  it does not include that dozens, indeed hundreds, maybe thousands, of  instances when Clinton employed deceit, the family specialty. Of course, if it did, the video would be 13 hours long. Days, maybe.

I do have some questions and observations for Hillary Clinton supporters in light of the above. Continue reading →

Follow-Up On “Lying Donald vs. Lying Hillary”: Donald’s Lie Is Worse, And Here’s Why

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Lie vs Lie

Yesterday I asked readers which of our “presumptive” Presidential candidates were revealed as the worst liars  last week: Hillary Clinton, whose stubborn, year long claims that she followed State Department policy in handling communications, that she turned over all of her official emails to State, and that she “never sent classified material on my email, and I never received any that was marked classified” were all shown to be false by new emails that were released to the media, or Donald Trump, who denied that he had pretended to be his own publicist in recorded phone calls unearthed by the Washington Post, despite the fact that he had previously admitted as much in court testimony under oath.

I learned several useful things from the poll results:

1. Most readers don’t bother to take polls. 

2. Clinton’s lie is overwhelmingly believed to be worse, and

3. I measure lies very differently from most people.

To me, the worst lie is the brazen denial of what cannot be denied, done so shamelessly that it sends the message is no big deal. On the old Ethics Scoreboard, I highlighted such lies as a regular feature called the David Manning Liar Of The Month, named after a now forgotten incident when Sony was caught using fake rave reviews from a made-up film critic on its ads for some really bad movies. Sony’s excuse was that since everybody knows those reviews in movie ads are unreliable, there was nothing wrong with using a fake review. Another version of the lies I hate are those labelled Jumbos on Ethics Alarms, the infamous and often funny “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” desperation excuses, like Lindsay Lohan’s “These aren’t my pants!” explanation when arresting officers found drugs in her pockets. Continue reading →

Another Day, More Lies From Donald And Hillary. Whose Are Worse? How Will Their Supporters Excuse Them This Time?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Donald and Hillary

This election is going to be something to watch, with two compulsive, shameless liars each backed by ethically inert loyalists, fighting for the biggest prize in politics. I’m stocking up on Pepto.

Today’s edition of Lying Donald vs. Lying Hillary:

First let’s look at Trump’s lie, because it’s funnier: from the Washington Post:

“A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron” — public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself — who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides.”

This is, of course, an early result of the Post’s “Let’s dig up embarrassing stuff on Trump” project, which Bob Woodward talked about this week. There is nothing wrong with the Post doing this with Trump; what is despicable is that they didn’t do it with Obama in 2008.

On the fake publicist story, the Post has Trump cold. He even confirmed that he masqueraded as “John Miller” and “John Barron” under oath in a lawsuit, and forensic experts have confirmed the voice is Trump’s. Never mind. Now he’s not under oath, so he’s denying it all. Trump  hung up on two Washington Post reporters when they asked him this afternoon about  masquerading as his own publicist in interviews and he lied directly to USA Today, saying: Continue reading →

Facebook Manipulation, Ben Rhodes And Hillary’s Tech Minion’s Missing Emails: Seeking A Path To Objective Analysis (PART 2 of 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

suspicion

In Part I I examined the considerations involved in assessing whether the Ben Rhodes affair, which I also discussed here, is factual and justifies dire conclusions about our government.

Part Two will attempt to objectively assess the two other news stories that seem to compel progressives, in full confirmation bias mode, to deny, ignore, or trivialize, and conservatives, also driven by bias, to take as proof that conspiracies are afoot. Those stories both come down to suspicion and trust:

  • The claims from former Facebook employees that they were directed to suppress news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s “trending” news section, while pushing stories with positive implications for progressive readers.
  • The State Department’s revelation that it can’t locate Bryan Pagliano’s emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior information technology staffer during her tenure there.

First, the Facebook charges. From the Gizmodo “scoop”:

“Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

And, like a typical newsroom, Facebook’s bias is heavily weighted to the left. The Senate has announced that it is investigating news manipulation at Facebook, though I can’t see on what theory.

Facebook unequivocally denied the charges, saying in part,

“Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible. At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.”

Leaving aside confirmation bias and eschewing the six reactions to such stories I listed in Part I (I don’t believe it, AHA! I knew it!, So what?, ARGHHHH! We’re doomed!, Good, So how did the Mets do today?), we’re left with a “he said/they said” controversy that is either a stalemate, with the default judgment having to go to the side that actually has the guts to reveal its name, or a case of “Who do you trust?”

Does this seem like something Facebook would do? Well, let’s see, Facebook already admitted that it had performed unwilling experiments on random users to see if it could manipulate their moods. Facebook was credibly accused of restricting users from access to 30,322 emails and email attachments sent and received by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.  Last month, a report found evidence of  Facebook censorship on pro-Trump and negative Hillary news, and a Facebook employee’s question about whether Facebook should actively take measures to impede Donald Trump was discussed here.  Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a big Democratic donor. Facebook’s fellow social media giant Twitter has been censoring some high-profile conservative users lately.

Gee, are there any reasons not to trust these people? Continue reading →

Facebook Manipulation, Ben Rhodes And Hillary’s Tech Minion’s Missing Emails: Seeking A Path To Objective Analysis (PART 1 of 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

mind-control2

There are at least three news stories sending off toxic fumes right now, all—coincidentally?—suggesting sinister doings on the Left.

First, we have the Ben Rhodes story, where a key Obama foreign policy aide (with no experience in foreign policy but a degree in creative writing) boasts to a journalist on the record about how the Obama Administration, under his brilliant management, tricked journalists into misleading the public.

Second, we have Facebook employees revealing that Facebook is working hard at indoctrinating its users by pushing news items favorable to the Great Progressive Awakening while suppressing stories that might create sympathy for rightward politicians and causes.

Finally, we have the interesting news that the State Department can’t find Bryan Pagliano’s emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior information technology staffer during her tenure there.

In order for citizens to have any chance of processing these events so as to have an accurate, as opposed to comforting, view of the forces directing their fates, they must banish all biases while simultaneously keeping a firm hold on their accumulated experience. How do we do that? Is it even possible?

The immediate, reflex reactions to stories like these, are, in no particular order,

I don’t believe it.

AHA! I knew it!

So what?

ARGHHHH! We’re doomed!

Good.

So how did the Mets do today?

The last one, sadly, is the most common. It is also arguably the most unethical, for the corruption of democracy thrives on apathy almost as much as it feeds upon, and nourishes, ignorance. Most Americans don’t know or care who Ben Rhodes is. Most don’t understand why Hillary Clinton’s emails are such a big deal, and are happy to accept that false narrative, fanned by Hillary herself, that it’s all a big invention by the right-wing conspiracy. Continue reading →