We are now officially in Hillary-in-Wonderland world . . . A senior aide to Hillary Clinton has suggested that the FBI would be happy to discover that Hillary's infamous email server was wiped--and not with a cloth.
Interviewed by John Heilemann on today's With All Due Respect, Jennifer Palmieri--Communications Director for Hillary's campaign--insisted that finding that the server was thoroughly scrubbed is "the outcome they [the FBI] want."
The Associated Press works very hard to ensure that its subscribing outlets and low-information voters who rely solely on its work — knowingly or unknowingly — never learn about Hillary Clinton's smart-aleck, sarcastic, condescending, reality-avoiding behavior.
Tuesday night, four AP reporters (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) — Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun in Washington, with the help of Ken Thomas and Eric Tucker in North Las Vegas — failed to report that Mrs. Clinton cut her press conference short after getting a genuine question from Fox News's Ed Henry, and that part of her answer to Henry's query about whether her hard drive was wiped was "With a cloth?"
While all three network morning shows covered Hillary Clinton’s ongoing e-mail scandal on Wednesday, the broadcasts focused on the Democratic front-runner being “fed up” with controversy and “defiant” in her response to legitimate questions from the press.
If she were anyone but a Clinton, would Hillary's campaign not be kaput? Imagine: you're a big Dem donor, elected official in an early primary state or grassroots organizer trying to decide whose bandwagon to jump on. You turn on Morning Joe today, and there's Ron Fournier, MSM member-in-good-standing and someone who's said he's voted for Clintons more than anyone in DC, saying about the email scandal that Hillary "might pay a big price criminally." Schnikes! Where did you say Bernie Sanders is appearing next?
As baleful as Fournier was about Hillary's fortunes, something Joe Scarborough said might be even more ominous. Scarborough revealed that he's receiving emails from aides to President Obama who "cannot believe she keeps saying that this was okay with the White House . . . they cannot believe inside the Obama White House that she continues to act this way." Consider: all President Obama needs to do is raise an eyebrow at his Attorney General Lynch, and Hillary could be in indictment-land.
The “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC all mentioned on Tuesday evening Hillary Clinton’s decision to take questions from the press in Nevada concerning her e-mail server scandal and, as usual, they parroted Clinton campaign talking points in touting how Clinton “vigorously defended herself” in the press conference concerning what’s become a “stubborn political issue.”
Yesterday, CNN.com published a attempted defense of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State by Eleni Kounalakis. An "Editor's Note" before the piece begins describes Ms. Kounalakis as the "United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013," the author of a book on her time there, and "a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group" (as in "Madeline Albright").
The "editor" at CNN "forgot" to mention one "little" thing, noted by John Hinderaker at Powerline: "... she was one of Hillary’s top (2008) fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State."
While all three network morning shows covered the latest development in the Clinton e-mail scandal on Tuesday – that over 300 e-mails are being reviewed for classified material – all three broadcasts also touted the Clinton campaign defense that the former secretary of state “never sent or received any e-mails that were marked classified at the time.”
After having ignored Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal since Saturday night, ABC emerged out of the wilderness during Monday’s World News Tonight to again cover the latest development while CBS and NBC went in the opposite direction Monday evening and ignored the story following three minutes of airtime on their Monday morning newscasts. On NBC, Katy Tur made sure to mention to viewers that Republican Governor Scott Walker (Wisc.) was heckled by “union protesters at the Iowa State Fair today.”
In the late 1980s, the Bears (a briefly great band, not the football team) pointed out, “This world hangs by a slender thread/Trust.” Daily Beast columnist and MSNBC pundit Alter argued Monday that Hillary Clinton’s current political malaise is rooted in her failure to trust the American people rather than in any real wrongdoing on her part.
“Hillary’s problem is not the emails story itself, but her response to it, which has been halting and defensive,” declared Alter. “The reason so many voters don’t trust Hillary is she doesn’t trust them. Trust is reciprocal. If she trusted the public more, she would be mixing it up in the media more, like [Donald] Trump, and betting that the public will eventually sort out the truth.”
You know those super-fast-talking disclaimers run at the end of some ads? The kind of CYA things the lawyers force the advertisers to say? That's what Mark Halperin's pro forma praise of Hillary on today's Morning Joe brought to mind.
Halperin first ripped Hillary's campaign as the most "unresponsive to basic questions" he's ever dealt with, and reported that "elite Democrats" are worried about being stuck with scandal-ridden Hillary as their candidate. But Halperin apparently felt obliged to include this bit of posterior-protecting pablum: "she's still an extraordinarily strong candidate, she's a great public servant. She's, I think, right now, the most likely person to be elected president."
Today on ABC's This Week, Jonathan Karl reported that "Platte River Networks, the Colorado company which set up (Hillary) Clinton's servers, told ABC News that it's highly likely that a full backup of the server was made, meaning those thousands of emails she deleted may still exist."
This from all appearances huge development has only drawn the interest of several center-right blogs and outlets, a few of which include Twitchy, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller. The establishment press to this point appears determined to ignore it. Can anyone imagine a similar level of disinterest in a highly significant story affecting a Republican or conservative presidential candidate — or, for that matter, the press standing by without pushback if the candidate exhibited the level of mocking, defiant arrogance Mrs. Clinton has consistently shown?
The Week’s Paul Waldman agrees with conservatives that the undercover Planned Parenthood videos raise a profound moral issue, but disagrees sharply with them over what that issue is. In a Friday post, Waldman asserted that “this controversy simply has nothing to do with fetal tissue” and claimed that it’s really about the right’s disgust with women’s sexual “autonomy.”
“Republicans have always hated Planned Parenthood, not only because it provides abortions but because it's a forthright advocate on behalf of women's rights to control their own reproductive lives,” wrote Waldman. “Nothing is more horrifying to a certain kind of conservative than a woman who has sex because she wants to, and does so without being punished for her sin.”