The instructions from Team Clinton to the media in advance of the latest email dump were clear; you can almost imagine what the directives looked like. Trivialize this, make fun of the whole thing, spotlight amusing things said in some of the messages, build a “woman balancing work and home life” narrative to create sympathy between Madame Clinton and female voters.
Clinton’s media was happy to oblige. ABC News, which sees fit to employ Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos as a “journalist” – and lets him handle coverage of the very same Clinton Foundation he donated to! – didn’t cover the new email revelations at all on Tuesday night, even though they teased the release earlier in the day. NBC News claimed the new emails revealed “a secretary of state who was deeply engaged in the minutia of diplomacy and fascinated by Washington intrigue.”
MSNBC took a stab at justifying Clinton’s outrageous breach of national security protocols by saying the funny/embarrassing tidbits from the latest release demonstrated that the Clintons were right to keep their correspondence shielded from “enemies” they “feel are embedded all around them.”
“Hillary Clinton’s emails illustrate the difficulties of achieving work-life balance,” argued the Huffington Post, going for the soft-focus approach. Newsweek took top propaganda honors by misinforming its readers that Clinton voluntarily released all these emails to “help alleviate tensions” (no, she was dragged kicking and screaming into doing this, fighting it like a wildcat every step of the way) and sifted through the new release to find the “silliest” emails for a top-five list of comedy “gems.”
Somehow Newsweek missed the knee-slapper where Hillary compromised classified satellite intelligence on North Korean nuclear weapons.
As the Washington Times reported (while our mighty Mainstream Media was busy tittering over what Sid Blumenthal said about John Boehner), this is one of those emails that caught the inspector general’s eye, was stripped of its classification markings manually by someone at the State Department, and somehow flew across the “air gap” that’s supposed to make it impossible to compromise classified material by emailing it directly to an unsecured system like Clinton’s.
The individual who carried it across the “air gap” knew it was classified with 100 percent certainty, and willfully removed the designations and codes marking it as such. That individual is a criminal under federal law, and should do hard time when his or her identity is discovered by the FBI.
The Washington Times details two reasons why intelligence sources are deeply concerned about the North Korean nuclear email:
First, spy satellite information is frequently classified at the top-secret level and handled within a special compartment called Talent-Keyhole. This means it is one of the most sensitive forms of intelligence gathered by the U.S.
Second, the North Koreans have assembled a massive cyberhacking army under an elite military spy program known as Bureau 121, which is increasingly aggressive in targeting systems for hacking, especially vulnerable private systems. The North Koreans, for instance, have been blamed by the U.S. for the hack of Sony movie studios.
Allowing sensitive U.S. intelligence about North Korea to seep into a more insecure private email server has upset the intelligence community because it threatens to expose its methods and assets for gathering intelligence on the secretive communist nation.
One of these intelligence community sources complained to the Washington Times about “a certain nonchalance at Mrs. Clinton’s State Department” with regard to electronic security, even as the government deals with one spectacular hacker raid after another.
Some of the other “hilarious” emails exposed in the new dump have Clinton not only encouraging her staff to partake of that “nonchalance” and send sensitive material to her personal address, but actively berating at least one of them for his reluctance to do so. There are exchanges where her aides try to explain the importance of keeping classified information secure to Her Regal Majesty, who finds the whole subject annoying.
And while Big Media’s army of fact-checkers was busy searching for comedy gems in the 7,000 emails that dropped this week, Sean Davis at The Federalist noticed that many of the messages contained information that was “born classified” – indisputably classified at the time Hillary sent or received them, under a 2009 executive order signed by President Obama, contrary to Clinton’s repeated false claims that none of her emails included information that was marked classified at the time she handled it. Some of these emails had to be redacted in their entirety before they could be released to the public.
And yes, Hillary Clinton originated at least six emails containing classified information, contrary to her spin that she was just a helpless unwitting recipient of material others should be blamed for compromising.
Not only did Clinton ignore Obama’s executive order, she also ignored the President’s specific instructions not to bring her henchman Sidney Blumenthal into the State Department. The Wall Street Journal notes that the new emails show that Blumenthal had a “large role” and “outsize position” in the Secretary of State’s operation… which makes a liar of Hillary Clinton yet again, because back when a panicked Blumenthal gave the House Benghazi Committee some emails they were never supposed to see, Clinton ran around telling everyone he was just an old pal that sent her crazy stuff from time to time, and she didn’t pay much attention to his unsolicited advice. Some of the new emails show Clinton was sending classified information to Blumenthal and other private citizens.
But please, Clinton media, tell us some more about how these emails are funny and charming, how they illustrate the difficulty of a being a working mom and Having it All with only an eight-figure fortune and a vast army of taxpayer-funded aides to help the poor lady get by. While we’re on that subject, how come so many of these funny little irrelevant personal messages are among the emails she decided to save, when she supposedly deleted half of her subpoenaed email trove because it contained only irrelevant personal messages?
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