Hillary Clinton’s Emails & Media Power

Before I post about “Succession,” A memory refresher on the power of the media to steer the course of elections

I’m in the middle of writing about the latest episode of “Succession,” which creator and writer Jesse Armstrong has said was influenced by the 2016 election. He had largely in mind the shock of what happened, which left many of us dazed and distraught. But the episode is also about the power of media machinations. And it occurred to me that before I dive into the episode itself, it might be useful to repost a piece of mine that has appeared in different forms in my two books on the election and several articles.

The piece is not about the entirety of media influence on the 2016 election—for that, please see my books on the election, especially The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. This piece focuses on one particular but very potent narrative, one which arguably—thanks to the interference of James Comey and a cooperative media—dealt a fatal blow to Hillary’s campaign just as Trump was in serious trouble from the “Access Hollywood” tapes. As in “Succession,” the killing stroke was delivered at virtually the last moment. But in the case of the 2016 election, it was the culmination of a narrative, constructed by the media and continually deployed by Clinton’s enemies, that circulated for months before the election.

I hope you’ll forgive me for crowding your mailbox this week—I’ll be posting my “Succession” review tomorrow night—but I think it’s important (although not the only important factor) to understanding why “Succession,” although a satire, is a satire that cuts deep and true.

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The email “scandal,” like many previous investigations into the Clintons, was a whole lot of nothing blown into nuclear proportions by the GOP and helpfully served up in an endless stream of tasty, poisonous portions by the mainstream media. For weeks, we snacked on high-calorie accusations and insinuations — including some delivered by Vladimir Putin via WikiLeaks. And then, just as we appeared to be stuffed to the brim and our attention had turned to the Trumpish behavior that had shaken Michelle Obama (and thousands of other American women) to her core, we were presented with a flaming dessert, courtesy of James Comey.

1. A Scandal is Born

Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the Benghazi Hearings on October 22, 2015 was an extraordinary event and a dazzling performance. Clinton “delivered tirelessly, knocking back the Republicans one by one,” wrote Edward Isaac Dovere,”[and]”reminded people of everything they like about her,’ said one of the senior advisors. ‘It’s toughness, but also a calm, adult presence of someone you can actually see being president of the United States.”

Chairman Trey Gowdy, who had “been conducting the investigation like an overzealous prosecutor desperately trying to land a front-page conviction rather than a neutral judge of facts seeking to improve the security of our diplomatic core”, was not to be defeated, however. For just as one investigation into Bill Clinton had led to another…and another…and another, the Benghazi investigators, simply by asking for some emails, struck a fountain of perpetually flowing liquid gold for their purposes.

March 2, 2015: The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt made it public for the first time. The Benghazi hearings had revealed that Clinton “exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state.” The Times publishes the story with the provocative headline:

“Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules”

In the piece, Schmidt described Clinton’s “expansive use” of the private account as “alarming” and “a serious breach” and noted that Clinton and her aides had also failed to retain her letters and emails as required by federal law.

“Breaking Rules” was, of course, a dog-whistle for Clinton scandal-seekers. We had been told so many times that she and Bill live by “rules of their own” that the piece hardly required fact-checking. Or did it?

The fact is that there was no “serious breach.” 2009 Federal Register Regulations pertaining to the use of emails specifically allowed “employees of certain agencies,” including the State Department “to use non-Federal email systems.” That’s why Secretary of State Colin Powell did so, as well as every other Secretary of State until John Kerry.

It was only in 2013, after Clinton had left office, that the “rules” were changed, the National Archives updating their guidelines to say that employees should generally use personal email accounts only in “emergency situations,” in which cases all of the emails must be preserved “in accordance with agency recordkeeping practices.” According to those practices, moreover, it was not the responsibility of the Secretary of State or her aides to preserve her emails, but the State Department itself — which it did. (That’s how those not submitted by her were later “discovered”.)

In 2013 — again, to be clear, after Clinton left office — the State Department asked all former Secretaries of State to provide copies of work-related emails from personal accounts. No one except Clinton did. Clinton: “I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totaled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them.”

It was totally legitimate, by the way, for Clinton and her lawyers to delete her personal emails from the stack submitted to the State Department, as the Justice Department made crystal clear in May 2016 when the conservative watchdog group “Judicial Watch” brought a lawsuit. “There is no question,” the Justice Department’s civil division attorneys wrote, “that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server.”

But this was Hillary Clinton, after all, queen of political duplicity. Who knows what those deleted private emails were “shielding”? On March 3, Schmidt followed up his March 2 story, describing Clinton as engaging in a practice that “protected a significant amount of her correspondence from the eyes of investigators and the public.” He quoted Jeff Bechdel, spokesperson for America Rising, a conservative PAC that produces opposition research on Democratic Party members:

“Unfortunately, Clinton’s own political calculation and desire for secrecy, as evidenced by her exclusive use of personal email accounts while at State, is preventing an open process and full, fair review of her time there.”

Bechdel was a GOP spokesperson, and there was no “evidence” tying Clinton’s use of a personal email with “political calculation” or “desire for secrecy.” But this was clearly a narrative that reporter Schmidt felt no obligation to correct. Indeed, in his own editorializing the day before, he had said much the same thing, just using more cautious journalistic euphemisms, like “echoes” instead of “as evidenced”:

“The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.”

For the casual reader, skimming the story on a commuter train or while eating breakfast, what undoubtedly stood out were the phrases “lack of transparency” and “inclination toward secrecy.” They were such familiar ingredients in the coverage of that manufactured hermaphrodite “The Clintons” — and quickly became headlined in every story. Within a week, Clinton’s emails had become an “imbroglio” that “engulfed her nascent presidential campaign.” References throwing shade on the Clinton’s “past” — the details of which few readers/viewers, particularly if they were young, were actually familiar with — provided rhetorical flourishes and metaphors for reporters: “Can she reinvent herself or will she be forever dogged by how she has approached controversies in the past?” “Even friendly Democrats wondered whether she and her team were capable of turning over a new leaf.” And Clinton was chastised for being so slow to answer the charges. She had “allowed the controversy to swelter for days.” Would she now finally “show contrition?”

Contrition was not something that Clinton felt she owed anyone, as she hadn’t done anything she considered wrong. But Rep. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who was chairing the House panel investigating the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, felt otherwise. Salivating over this fresh opportunity to bring Clinton down, he said he planned to haul the former secretary of state in for hearings “at least twice.” Gowdy also said he saw “no choice” but for Clinton to hand her server to an independent arbiter who would sort through her emails and decide which of them should be made public. “Secretary Clinton alone created this predicament, but she alone does not get to determine its outcome,” he said.

Later the same day, CNN’s John King ran a piece called “Hillary Clinton’s email scandal is exactly what you can expect from her presidential campaign.”

“Secrecy. Shielding documents. Accusations of arrogance and hypocrisy. Debates about the letter and the spirit of the rules. A public defense — but also jitters and disbelief — from fellow Democrats. Legitimate criticism along with some eye-rolling conspiracy theories from Republicans.

We have seen this movie before. …

What is past is prologue.”

Yes, if you are determined to tell the story that way.

2. Clinton Becomes a “Criminal” (Courtesy of the New York Times)

July 23, 2015:

The Times posts a story entitled “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email.” It began with the lede: “Two inspector generals have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as Secretary of State, senior government officials said Thursday.”

The Facts: As Elijah Cummings and the Justice Department immediately confirmed, there was no “criminal inquiry” at all, but rather a review under the Freedom of Information Act of whether some emails not previously marked “classified” ought to have been. This had nothing to do with Clinton herself, and didn’t constitute a “criminal referral.”

The Times later changed the headline and the lede, but insisted the story didn’t require an explicit correction, allowing those who seen the original headline — including early morning news show pundits — and had gotten the impression that Clinton was under criminal investigation to run with that misinformation for a full day. Ultimately, the Times printed a correction, admitting that their story had “misstated the nature of the referral to the Justice Department regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email account when she was Secretary of State. The referral addressed the potential compromise of classified information in connection with that personal email account. It did not specifically request an investigation into Mrs. Clinton.”

Barely anyone noticed the correction. It’s the way these things tend to work. Headlines make the front page; retractions are buried. The same thing has happened, time and again, with Clintonian “scandals. “We saw the pattern with Benghazi,” Eric Boehlert told Chris Hayes, “We’ve seen it with e-mails. If you want to get nostalgic go back to Whitewater, go back to travel-gate, go back to the Clinton pardons. This is over and over again. We create these investigations. Republicans are briefed on them and then they spin these fantastic tales to the press who types it up because they think it’s a great story…. Every time, every time when we go through it, these facts don’t hold up…But, once you put that in the pipeline, once you put that out there, wait, Hillary is going to be indicted? You can’t walk that back.”^[1]

3. Clinton is Vindicated but No One Knows It

Skip ahead to the presidential campaign. While Trump is given a free ride by the mainstream media and Sanders’ “momentum” is the big narrative about his campaign, the “email scandal” becomes the dominant Clinton story of the year that follows.

Although no evidence exists that she is hiding anything, she continues to be criticized for “not coming clean.” She maintains, at the February 2016 presidential debate, that she “never sent or received any classified material” and in a press conference in May that as far as the private server goes, “What I had done was allowed, it was above board.” But reporters badger her for more. They want contrition, an apology for her use of a private server — and ultimately, Clinton gives it, in a September 8 interview with David Muir on ABC:

“In retrospect, certainly, as I look back on it now, even though it was allowed, I should’ve used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”

The next day she repeated that she did not “send or receive classified material on the private account.” USA Today describes the apology as an “about-face.”

On May 26, however, Clinton was vindicated when the State Department Inspector General releases its 83-page evaluation of email management. Its major criticism, as Rachel Maddow reports — and visually demonstrates with a huge, unwieldy stack of paper — is reserved for the “archaic archiving system” that Clinton had to work with: an “abysmal system of record-keeping” in which the “only approved” method for archiving emails was by printing and boxing each one that was received or sent. No indexing or electronic storage, just physical “filing” of thousands and thousands of pages in box after box of printed emails.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, issued the following statement in response to the report:

“The Inspector General confirmed what we have known all along — that Secretary Clinton followed the practice of her predecessor when she used a personal email account. While Secretary Clinton preserved and returned tens of thousands of pages of her emails to the Department for public release, Secretary Powell returned none. Republicans need to stop wasting taxpayer dollars singling out Secretary Clinton just because she is running for President. If Republicans really care about transparency, they will work constructively with Democrats to focus on fixing what this report shows are longstanding, systemic flaws in the State Department’s recordkeeping practices for decades.”

Cummings’ press release was substantiated by a piece in Forbes magazine, which concluded that as regards Clinton’s handling of emails, the evaluation “does not add any new serious charges or adverse facts.”:

“….Certainly, the widely reported fact that it’s an 83-page report makes it sound like it is big. But half is appendices. Half of the rest is not about the Secretary’s emails, but about cyber security. Of the two-dozen pages that are even remotely about Secretaries’ emails, a lot is taken up by retracing the dreary history of records and archival policy. The remainder involves all the secretaries going back two decades — not just Clinton and Powell, who are alike, but also ones of no particular interest, like Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and also John Kerry. There’s just not a lot of new facts about Clinton…. [T]he big criticism in the report is regarding the failure to print and file email in a retrievable way. But as the report shows, the Office of the Secretary of State has rarely succeeded in doing that. …Since that is a general problem, why pin it particularly on Clinton?

A report that says so little new against Clinton, amounts to a vindication”

Cummings agreed: “The IG’s report does not substantiate Republican claims that Secretary Clinton somehow committed a crime by using personal email. The report does not include any findings that Secretary Clinton engaged in criminal wrongdoing.”

But if Clinton was “vindicated,” you certainly couldn’t tell from the headlines and television tickers:

“Clinton’s Violation of State Department Email Rules.” (ticker on MSNBC)

“State Department Report Slams Clinton’s Email Use” (CNN)

“State Dept. inspector general report sharply criticizes Clinton’s email practices”(Washington Post)

“Hillary Clinton Is Criticized for Private Emails in State Dept. Review”(New York Times)

4. James Comey’s Abuse of Power and the Media

Bordo July 6, 2016 Facebook page:

Yesterday, I was just finishing up a blog-piece on Hillary’s ‘honesty problem’ when my bathroom break took me past the TV and news that at 11 a.m., James Comey, director of the FBI, would be making an announcement. Hold that last paragraph! And the piece remained unfinished while I watched, as Comey recommended that no criminal charge be brought against Hillary Clinton, but went on to publicly chastise Hillary and the State Dept. for “extremely careless” behavior with emails.

The media gave about five minutes to the fact that Clinton was cleared of any criminal activity in her handling of emails. The far hotter story was her “carelessness” — and, of course, the implication (not stated by Comey) that she had “lied to the public.” Without allowing themselves a moment to examine Comey’s words with care or to question any contradictions or missteps the FBI director may have made, commentators immediately began to weave his report into their favored narrative of Clintonian “untrustworthiness.”

“It’s a complete political indictment of her conduct,” declared MSNBC journalist Kristen Welker. “A direct disputation of the stories she’s been telling,” added political commentator Chris Cillizza. It demonstrates that “trust and honesty continue to dog the Clinton campaign” (Chuck Todd). Claiming that Comey had “completely disputed Hillary’s claims,” Andrea Mitchell predicted “grave political problems” for Clinton.

By the time Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace got in on the act on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” it had predictably become a tale of bald-faced deception on Clinton’s part. The show began with artfully arranged side-by-side clips contrasting Clinton’s statements with Comey’s “assessments.” Guests who tried to caution against hurried conclusions, like Steve Rattner and Howard Dean, were interrupted and talked over. Nothing was allowed to interfere with the “untrustworthy Clinton” thread.

5. Comey is Forced to Retract His Criticism, But the Press Doesn’t Notice

On July 7, 2016, House Republicans, unhappy with Comey’s failure to indict Clinton, had asked him to answer questions from them, which he agreed to. Grilling him, they got little more than a slight elaboration of the “extremely careless” assessment.

But when Democrats took over the questioning, things got potentially rockier for Comey. First, Elijah Cummings, pressing Comey, got him to re-state, more explicitly, that only three of those 110 emails had any kind of markings on them at all which would have alerted the recipient to their classified status. Those three, moreover, were marked (mistakenly, as it later turned out) only “internally,” with tiny letter symbols pertaining to specific sentences within the emails.

Then, Congressman Matt Cartwright forced Comey to admit that the emails with the internal “c”s were not properly marked according to the State Department Manual, and that his previous comment that “any reasonable person” would have known the emails were classified was implausible, if not an out-and-out falsehood. To judge un-headed emails as classified was in fact a standard that was unreasonable to apply. To the contrary, it would be a “reasonable inference” that the three documents missing the header were not classified.

Holding the manual in his hand, Cartwright calmly got right to the point:

MATT CARTWRIGHT: “You were asked about markings on a few documents, I have the manual here, marking national classified security information. And I don’t think you were given a full chance to talk about those three documents with the little c’s on them. Were they properly documented? Were they properly marked according to the manual?”

JAMES COMEY: “No.”

MATT CARTWRIGHT: “According to the manual, and I ask unanimous consent to enter this into the record, Mr. Chairman.”

CHAIRMAN: “Without objection so ordered.”

MATT CARTWRIGHT: “According to the manual, if you’re going to classify something, there has to be a header on the document? Right?”

JAMES COMEY: “Correct.”

MATT CARTWRIGHT: “Was there a header on the three documents that we’ve discussed today that had the little c in the text someplace?”

JAMES COMEY: “No. There were three e-mails, the c was in the body, in the text, but there was no header on the email or in the text.”

MATT CARTWRIGHT: “So if Secretary Clinton really were an expert about what’s classified and what’s not classified and we’re following the manual, the absence of a header would tell her immediately that those three documents were not classified. Am I correct in that?”

JAMES COMEY: “That would be a reasonable inference.”

Comey’s admission exonerated Hillary not only from any “carelessness” or “negligence” but also from the charge of lying about “not sending or receiving any classified emails.” It would have been entirely “reasonable” for her to conclude that the emails not appropriately marked were not classified — exactly as she had been saying for months.

If you were watching the hearing it was a revelatory moment. But how many viewers caught the exchange? It occurred in the middle of the work-day, and the evening news, far from presenting it as a bombshell, virtually ignored it and  continued to  hammer away at Clinton’s “carelessness” and “lies” about her emails. Thus, for any viewers relying on the mainstream media--MSNBC as well as Fox — these exonerating exchanges never happened.

In fact, the media dug its heels in even further on the “lying Clinton” issue, and the saga of “Lying Hillary and her emails” went on and on. It was no surprise, then, that even after Comey’s exoneration, polling showed that 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton had indeed broken the law by relying on a personal email address, “with another 36% piling on to say the episode showed ‘bad judgment’ albeit not criminality.” Those numbers are ghastly, considering — as demonstrated in this piece — that she had in fact broken no laws or behaved carelessly, but they are unsurprising, given the overwhelming negative attention that network and cable news has paid to Clinton’s emails — more airtime, as Mathew Yglesias reports, than to all policy issues combined: During the entire general election campaign, June 7 to November 8, Clinton only led over Trump in quantity of media coverage 4 times: once was when she had pneumonia, once was during the DNC, and the other two were during and right after James Comey’s announcements.

Thus, “a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election,” creating a misleading impression of Clinton’s character and competence and vastly overshadowing coverage of both her accomplishments and her policy proposals. Is it any wonder that so many people had a totally false impression of what a Clinton presidency would be like? Between Sander’s labeling of Clinton as a Wall Street lackey and the GOP obsession with her emails — both of which were lavishly covered by the mass media — the Clinton campaign was defined by negative sound-bytes. It wasn’t the case that she had “no message”; she wasn’t given the space to deliver it, as the email “scandal” swamped the media.

^[1] February 21, 2019 addendum: On Tuesday in The New York Times, tucked into an article on how President Donald Trump had battled investigations against him for the past two years, the New York Times made an astonishing, seemingly accidental confession about a massive failure in their coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

“Using Congress’s oversight powers, the Republican lawmakers succeeding in doing what Donald Trump could not realistically do on his own: forcing into the open some of the government’s most sensitive investigative files — including secret wiretaps and the existence of an F.B.I. informant — which were part of the Russia inquiry,” said the article. “House Republicans opened investigations into the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case and a debunked Obama-era uranium deal indirectly linked to Mrs. Clinton.”

So now it’s a “debunked” deal? “This is not the first time The NY Times has “quietly” (that is, buried) an admission that it had misreported a story about Clinton. As I write in my book, they did the same thing with misleading and false stories about Clinton’s emails. These two faux scandals alone (Uranium “deal” and Emails) dominated the overwhelmingly negative coverage of Clinton in the msm and broadcast news. Yet when they retract, it takes a magnifying glass to notice.