As details continue to surface about how the Chewer-in-Chief spirited top secret classified documents out of the White House – essentially turning Mar a Lago into a crime scene – I can’t help but recall a news report that was buried on page 16 of The New York Times one fine day back in October 2019.
The story began: “A years-long State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that…there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.” The story then quoted the State Department – and remember, this was Donald Trump’s State Department: “There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
I’m well aware that life is unfair, and that there’s no crying in politics. But for the sake of perspective alone, it’s a worthy exercise to compare Hillary’s nothing-burger to Trump’s illicit banquet – and to ponder anew, as we must, the saturation media coverage that she had to endure in 2015 and 2016. With each new revelation of Trump’s cavalier treatment of classified information (not to mention his inept toilet-flushings), the nonstop scrutiny of Hillary’s non-scandal (“BUT HER EMAILS!”) looks ever more disgraceful. And tragic for this benighted nation.
The mainstream press – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, et al – anxious not to be branded as “liberal,” bent far over backwards to ensure that they’d be perceived as tough on the Democratic frontrunner. To quote a few sample stories, Hillary’s private email account “raised questions” and had “confusing reverberations” and added “a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate.” Even in 2019, when The Times reported that Hillary had been cleared (this was the story on page 16), it said that the State Department’s exoneration “appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Um, hang on: She was “dogged” by the “controversy” because the mainstream press did the dogging and made it a controversy.
Meanwhile, we now know that Trump, during his forced exit from the White House, treated classified material as personal property (a blatant breach of the federal Presidential Records Act); that back when he was playing at being a president, aides were reluctant to bring him classified material, lest he be tempted to leak it; and indeed (heck, we knew this in 2017) he did leak classified material to Russian bigwigs visiting the Oval Office.
Yet somehow Hillary was the “dogged” with the vague unfounded suspicion that she might be a risk to national security.
How many members of mainstream press have owned up to their tragic screwups? There must be at least a handful, but the only one I can cite is Jeffrey Toobin, the CNN legal analyst. After Trump’s State Department cleared Hillary, he said on the air: “This is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on (her emails) and that’s something that I have felt a great deal of responsibility for, because I talked about the emails here at CNN. I wrote about it in The New Yorker, and I think I paid too much attention to them, and I regret that, and I hope the lesson is learned.”
The lesson should be obvious by now: False equivalence is a crime against factual reality.
And with each new revelation about our document-chewer, I am increasingly tempted to plunk down $32 for the latest in cap apparel: It says BUT HER EMAILS. Granted, that message wouldn’t play well in red states where “lock her up” remains a mindless mantra, but, all in all, it seems like money well spent.