For Those Who Don’t Get It, Here’s Hillary Clinton’s Imaginary Email Problem Explained

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:19 pm

The Sunday shows went Clinton email again today, as apparently there is no dead horse that won’t be publicly beaten some more in an effort to prop up Donald Trump as a contender.

Hillary Clinton can’t say it this way, but I’m going to explain her email “problem” in a way that everyone can understand, since it’s still going on months after the FBI concluded there was no evidence of intentional wrong-doing.

Almost all politicians in executive branch positions have an email scandal in their background (the House and Senate are not subject to FOIA laws). Well, at least the Republicans who have run for President and VP in the last eight years. Those stories the press ignored, largely because the public really doesn’t care.

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Hillary Clinton was repeatedly the most admired woman politician in the world. She was going to run for President in 2016 and Republicans had no one to run against her except Jeb Bush (branding problem) and no dirt on her, save for their other conspiracy theories they planted in the public’s mind when Bill Clinton was President.

So Republicans came up with a very effective idea to use their leadership in the House of Representatives to “investigate” Hillary Clinton’s emails for a year. They turned up nothing embarrassing save for classified versus unclassified drama and missing emails (another thing Republicans can hardly claim is a real problem). No worries, though, because the point was to investigate her again. This was concurrent with years long Republican-led Benghazi investigations into Clinton that also went nowhere. Sensing a political agenda yet?

Then the FBI delivered the fatal blow, coming from a Republican Director no less, that Hillary Clinton hadn’t done anything criminal. She had been “careless”. But she had also not deliberately deleted emails. She also didn’t know the emails were classified. There was NO THERE THERE.

Careless is nothing compared to Mitt Romney’s deliberate avoidance of FOIA laws by taking the computer equipment with him and his staff, as “the Romney administration’s e-mails were all wiped from a server.” Furthermore, “‘The governor’s office has found no e-mails from 2002-2006 in our possession… Before the current administration took office, the computers used during that time period were replaced and the server used during that time period was taken out of service, all files were removed from it, and it was also replaced.’”

Or Scott Walker’s private router as county executive, that he used to mix campaign business with taxpayer funded county business for which two Walker aides were convicted of misconduct. “Two Walker aides who used the private router were later convicted of misconduct in office for doing political work while they were being paid by taxpayers.”

Or Jeb Bush’s two private email addresses scandal.

Republicans can’t even afford to have this conversation since there is evidence that several of them deliberately hid emails or had aides actually convicted (which is sort of like being investigated for years and coming up not guilty, but NOT), but that doesn’t stop their complete hypocrisy in alleging that Clinton has a problem with trust or being dishonest.

To those whose last hope rests upon the idea that she was “careless” and can’t be trusted with classified information, I give you Sarah Palin’s hacked Yahoo account upon which she conducted state business for Alaska, allegedly in charge of keeping Putin at bay over our airspace.

If it’s the designation of classified upon which some are hanging their last hopes, Former Sec. of State Colin Powell explained that the State Department retroactively classified some of his emails and refused to release them to the public in their retroactive classifying binge. Powell also admitted that he used a private email account for public business while holding the same office as Clinton. According to Sen. Chuck Schumer, Clinton’s private email system was even based on the system that Powell used and they couldn’t find a majority of Powell’s emails.

I could go on and on with other politician’s email scandals, and Donald Trump who hasn’t even been in an office (any office) subjected to FOIA laws, stands accused of destroying email evidence in a lawsuit- so the odds that he would conduct himself on par with Clinton are low. Chances are he would be worse than careless.

But this is literally all Republicans have. So now we are chasing down how Clinton explains her situation in a Fox News interview and then a presser during which she tried to explain her Fox News explanation. She explained her mistaken conflation as a “short-circuit” and now Republicans are running with that.

Clinton clearly laid out that by “short-circuit” she meant she didn’t explain the reason she conflated the FBI with the public. But Republicans are saying this makes her an unstable liar and she must explain. The unstable liar is in leading the Republican Party, actually.

The media airs this stale desperation for their own reasons.

Sure, it’s complicated but no doubt Hillary Clinton is trying to grasp why anyone is still talking about this. What can she say, when she most likely wants to ask, what in the Hell is wrong with you people?

The woman has answered and answered and answered and answered. If you don’t get it yet, you are the problem, not Hillary Clinton. It’s time to stop sniffing around for a scandal in this over-picked field.

The press and Republicans need to let this dream die, because there is no there there. The more this is pushed after it’s been thoroughly investigated the more questions it raises about the people pushing it.

Let it go.


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