Why Hillary Clinton Has Been Ducking The Media

by JASmius



When the not-given-to-hyperbolic-overstatement Ed Morrissey describes The Empress's press conference yesterday as a "disaster," you have your answer:

In a brief two-minute exchange with Fox News’ Ed Henry, Hillary tried changing history by claiming totally voluntary transparency, and then put on a dumb-grandma act when asked about an act to which her attorney admitted months ago. Hillary then abruptly ended the presser when the questions about her e-mail server kept coming. It’s practically a primer on how not to handle crisis communications.

To review: Mrs. Clinton takes credit for turning over emails that the Federal Records Act never allowed her to have in her private possession in the first place, takes credit for "transparency" in the FBI having seized (one of) her server(s) after she stonewalled them on it for almost six months, and makes a joke about Bounty picker-uppers in response to a question about the server being justice-obstructingly wiped.  And then she, in the words of the Hill, "pulled the plug" and fled.

And there are still people who wonder why Democrats are panicking.

Seriously:

“There is definitely concern out there,” said [David] Brock, who also serves on the board of the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA. “In speaking with people, I’ve learned that the qualms go away once they know the facts and the evidence, which most people are not taking the time to sift through.”

But that message isn’t always getting out there, he said. “The class of general Democrat pundits and strategists are often unwilling to buck the conventional wisdom in Washington: they go on the air, they hedge their defenses and they don’t argue the case effectively,” Brock said, without naming any specific individuals. “That’s because they’re more interested in looking reasonable to their colleagues in the media than winning the fight.” …

Remember when Bill Clinton was ruminating how to overcome all his scandals to win reelection in 1996 and came to the conclusion, "Well, we'll just have to win, then."  Same idea.  Interesting that Brock is applying that same template to the media so candidly.

“It needs its time to work its way through,” said Brock of the [lie]s the campaign is trying to put out. “It seems to me [the Republicans’] strategy is if they shoot enough blanks it could have a marginal effect.”

Yeah, that natural alliance of the Republicans and the Obama DOJ.  Brock should wish that their ammunition was as "blank" as his upside-down view of his heroine's, um, pickle.

But Brock isn't as topsy-turvy as Paul Begala, who actually appears to believe that more Hillary congressional testimony will actually help her cause:

“I hope Hillary testifies,” agreed Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton adviser who serves on the board of Priorities USA. “The Republicans have created this straw-woman, so when the real Hillary shows up, strong and knowledgeable and reasonable and responsible and fact-based, she’ll kick their butts.”

You mean like she "kicked Ed Henry's butt" yesterday, Paulie?  And you want to see her take on Trey Gowdy next?  A political Don King, Begala ain't.

But even that isn't the most ridiculously desperate example of pro-Hillary spin.  Matthew Miller argues at Politico today that the "real scandal" is that the State Commissariat ever classifies anything:

As a former Department of Justice official who regularly dealt with classified information, I am glad a team of officials from the FBI, the intelligence community and other agencies is not currently reviewing every email I sent and received while I worked in government. If they did, they would likely find arguably classified information that was transmitted over unclassified networks — and the same thing is undoubtedly true for other senior officials at the White House, the State Department and other top national security agencies.

IOW, the "everybody does it" defense.  Although I doubt Mr. Miller ever ran all his work email through his own server he kept stored in his "man cave".

The sheer volume of information now considered classified, as well as the extreme, and often absurd, interpretations by intelligence officials about what is and is not classified, make it nearly impossible for officials charged with operating in both the classified and unclassified worlds to do so without ever mixing the two.

From the intelligence community’s perspective, the border between these two worlds looks like a brick wall. Many intelligence officials spend their entire day working inside so-called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, designed to be impenetrable to eavesdropping, and using only separate, classified email systems to communicate with others in government. In these hermetically sealed environments, there is no need to ever sort through the differences between classified and unclassified information.

But for officials charged with dealing with the public, the media and other governments, the lines become much harder to draw.

Mayhap they are, mayhap they aren't.  But the point is, it is not the unilateral, freelancing prerogative of even the Commissar of State to decide what should and should not be classified, but rather that of the agencies that produced and classified that particular information.  If Mrs. Clinton wanted classified information declassified, she should have gone to The One and asked him to issue the orders doing so.  But then, if she'd done that, she might have had to explain why all her emails had the domain name "clintonemails.com" instead of "state.gov," it might otherwise have gotten out sooner than it eventually did, and she'd have had a premature tempest of a headache on her hands that was better left deferred (and in her mind, forever buried).  Or, as the old saying goes, "It's always easier to obtain forgiveness than it is permission".

And for her, it clearly is.  But it's sure getting in the way of her lifequest for the Democrat presidential nomination and that White House gig she's always considered to be her birthright, isn't it?  That is going to be immensely more difficult to spin away than even her most toadying lapdogs realize.


UPDATE: Here's an interesting wrinkle - Huma Abedin-Weiner's and Cheryl Mill's State blackberries have been destroyed - but they were destroyed BY Foggy Bottom AFTER the two Rodham henchwomen turned them in.  Might Lurch have to start looking of his shoulder?  That's awfully hard to do when hobbling around on a crutch.