The latest attempt to smear Hillary Clinton makes me wonder who might be behind it and how powerful they must be.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened.
The New York Times – yes the New York Times! – ran a story a couple of days ago reporting that a criminal inquiry was being “sought” into the former Secretary of State’s emails. You know, the emails Republicans have been whining about for the last umpteen months, protesting against her use of her personal account for some state business.
According to the Times, “sources” told them two inspectors general want the federal Justice Department to explore criminal charges against Hillary.
It was a lie. And the Justice Department said so.
Secretaries of state have been using their personal email accounts for public and private correspondence since the coming of the Internet, and Secretary Clinton just did what her predecessors had done.
That, according to the Times story, amounted to the “mishandling” of sensitive classified information – a potentially “criminal” offense.
With the Justice Department debunking its “scoop,” the Times altered the story to get rid of the nonsense about a criminal inquiry into Hillary’s behavior but added stuff about a “new report” claiming she sent “at least four emails that contained classified intelligence information from her private server while at the State Department.”
The rest of the media quickly picked up the Times “expose,” with the right-wing echo chamber in full cry.
The story is very bureaucratic and riddled with hair-splitting semantics, but it seems to boil down to when stuff was classified. Apparenly the “sensitive” information Secretary Clinton revealed was not marked “classified” at the time she revealed it but either was or should have been classified later on.
What is it about Hillary that makes some reporters so relentless? And so reckless with the facts?
Remember Whitewater and all those other “scandals” that turned out to be red herrings? It’s no wonder Hillary once complained that she and Bill were the target of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.”
She has since backed away from that remark but in a recent CNN interview she cited “people” who “write books filled with unsubstantiated attacks against us and even admit they have no evidence” and “constant attacks coming from the right.”
There can be no doubt that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been under attack ever since they entered politics. Two respected journalists, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, wrote a book about it (photo above). They painstakingly identified the antagonists, described their tactics, traced the millions of dollars that subsidized them, and examined how and why mainstream news organizations aided the plot to bring the Clintons down.
I know that was then; this is now.
But I wonder about the way the media is treating Hillary, compared with their apparent affection for Bernie Sanders.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Bernie, too. But let’s face it, this self-proclaimed “socialist” isn’t going to win the presidency of this country. Not at this time. You and I know most American voters aren’t ready for that.
Hillary, on the other hand, has a very good chance of trouncing the Republican nominee, whoever he turns out to be (no, it’s not going to be Carly Fiorina).
Could that be the reason – a major reason anyway – that the corporate media seem so biased against Hillary?
