Well, Hillary Clinton waded into the SignalGate mess and she knocked down a lot of bodies in a scathing OpEd on the matter. It was a scathing take down and Trump and the GOP would do well to make little, if any comment. Hillary is loaded for bear it seems and if they want to play the “Hillary’s emails” card I think she’s done sitting back and just taking it. She’s smarter and tougher than Trump and his ‘Team of Fools’ combined.
I’ll confess to for years being tired of all things Clinton. I believe Hillary Clinton would have been a good, even very good President but it was never going to happen for her. Between (thanks to Bill) ‘Clinton Fatigue’ and the relentless GOP teardown of her life and career and her lacking ‘TV presence’ (and that same charisma in front of large crowds) which is essential in the modern age she couldn’t carry critical “Blue Wall” states. I can understand her being bitter. She was driven for decades to make history to become our first woman President. And ‘glass ceiling’ became like glass shattering in my head. I cringed again during the DNC when I learned she’d speak and sure enough she just HAD to bring up the whole ‘Shatter that last glass ceiling” thing regardless of it being the last thing Harris wanted her to say. But I thought maybe both Bill and Hillary would just be quiet. At least I hoped they would, until this SignalGate issue became a big news item.
“But her emails”, the whole manufactured controversy about Clinton’s use of a private server maintained (by govt. IT types) at her home and the fact that some (not many as we will see later) contained potentially classified information was blown way the hell out of proportion. Even if a handful had paragraphs buried in them (some of them were quite lengthy) it wasn’t nearly what the GOP made it out to be. And NONE of it was beyond Confidential, the lowest of security classifications that one sees stamped in big red block letters at the top of the page(s) of classified documents.
In SignalGate we have people talking about highly classified, Top Secret and even SCI level stuff. Discussing an upcoming attack is certainly classified and operational details about when (and what type) planes would be launched, drones too and missiles (Tomahawks) would be fired hours before things were to happen is Special, Compartmented Information. SCI making that part Hegseth sent out Top Secret/SCI and don’t let ANY conservative get away with saying otherwise. You know, and every single one of them knows that if this had happened with a Democratic administration the GOP would be calling for blood. Literally. This all took place on a NON-authorized civilian chat app, one specifically designed to delete everything after a specified period of time so as to leave no record it ever happened. Team Trump pulled this same kind of ‘hide what we’re doing and DON’T use govt. devices/keep records whenever you can avoid doing so’ crap the first time around. They are even more blatant now. It’s STUPID, and worse DANGEROUSLY so.
So, I found myself actually wishing Hillary Clinton would speak up because I knew at some point her name and ‘Hillary’s emails/server’ would be invoked. Well, as Mediate tells us Hillary Clinton had plenty to say and boy does she tear Trump and his minions a new one! The opening paragraph of the linked article makes it clear Hillary is in bar fight mode. It notes her use of terms like “feeble” and “dumb” as she torches the “slash and burn” Trump administration. It then quotes some parts of Clintons New York Times OpEd (Titled This Is Just Dumb):
“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information,” Clinton opened on Signalgate. “But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy… That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”
Clinton’s essay, part policy critique and part political gut punch, takes direct aim at what she calls the “slash-and-burn” governing style of the Trump administration, accusing it of undermining U.S. military strength with “a string of self-inflicted wounds”, trashing diplomatic relations, and abandoning America’s strategic edge.
I urge you to read the entire linked article. If it wasn’t hidden behind a paywall I’d link to the actual OpEd in the NYT but Mediate tells enough so you can get the picture. I’m glad they included a particularly important item, which is that in addition to Clinton calling out the stupidity she also noted what had (and one has to assume still is happening) DANGEROUS. You know what? It’s dangerous not just in general but to troops that have to carry out military missions, and also to civilian intel people in some awfully dangerous places. Not to mention the damage to our National Security what will allies being ever more afraid to share anything with us! Again, this isn’t new and in fact goes all the way back to in his first month Trump sharing “Code Word” intel in a SECRET (we only found out when Russia bragged about it and Trump had to reluctantly confirm the meeting) Oval freaking Office meeting with the Russian Ambassador and Foreign Minister. It came from Israel which has always been famously reluctant to share anything at all!
I’ve written earlier this week that SignalGate is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s no telling what else has been done by Team Trump (and not just on Signal but other civilian communications apps) in an effort to hide what they are up to. Add in another piece I wrote about journalists from Der Spiegel finding phone numbers (which means you can track a phone and hack it), email accounts and even passwords of some of the very people in SignalGate and yeah, I can see why countries that used to trust us don’t anymore!
In the meantime I wonder how Trumpty is taking all this. For all his trashing of the ‘Failing’ New York Times as a native New Yorker it’s still his own ‘paper of record’ and like someone who can’t help themselves when passing an awful car wreck he HAS to look. So you know that while a serious piece of writing with well argued, fully-formed points is beyond his level of reading comprehension he will still get the gist of it. Which is Hillary Clinton calling HIM and his “Only the best people” people out for being dumbasses and dangerous ones to boot! I wonder how many cc’s of Thorazine it took to calm him down! But rest assured and explosion (is IS Saturday after all and after the partying at Mar a Lago dies down and the aides are sleeping off their benders) he’ll take to his social media platform.
What will we get? Another all caps screed about HILLARY’S EMAILS and probably how by god now that HE is “god” he’ll be sending in Seal Team Six to take her into custody. So, just to remind you of that whole manufactured nothing-burger of a scandal let’s take a look back before I wrap this up. A f**ton up to and including books have been written about Hillary Clinton’s emails, more specifically her use of a private server – just like predecessors Madeline Albright and then the GOP’s Colin Powell did. Clinton actually had govt. IT people set up the encryption so hers was actually much more secure, and for the record after all the investigations it was determined to have never been hacked.
Still, the debate rages over whether she shared classified information with the GOP trying to make it seem like she was sharing super-duper most classified stuff ever created on a daily basis. Well, after all that investigating it turned out not so much as we can see from an analysis by Politifact. When all was said and done then FBI Director James Comey’s investigation out of the roughly thirty thousand emails they reviewed only 113 contained classified information. GOP Senator MarkWayne Mullin claims of bunches of emails marked TOP SECRET and/or TOP SECRET/SCI is complete bullshit. Not ONE of the emails in question had a document or portion of a document with such a header. As someone who has seen classified documents I can tell you NO ONE can miss those big, inch high block red letters stating the classification level at the top of the pages.
It gets better. Some of what was actually classified was NOT so at the time it was sent. And some of what was wound up being declassified later. In the end Comey admitted in all those 30k emails THREE had any type of marking at all – a [c] at the beginning of a paragraph indicating it contained information classified as Confidential, the lowest formal classification. I’d also say that no one has time to read that volume of email. At most when you skim through your inbox you read headlines and what you open that turns out to be a lengthy email with lots of supporting stuff you focus on what’s at the beginning – what caused the person to send you the email! (Think about it and tell me I’m wrong)
A lengthy email that includes a lot of “supporting” information, NONE of which has those big red classification letters at the top of some of the pages isn’t going to be taken as classified by anyone. If in three there happened to be buried in there a paragraph that started with [c] it’s safe to assume we wouldn’t notice. Even Comey (as Politifact tells us) was forced to openly admit it, starting with saying “Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.” During testimony in July 2017 Comey explained classified documents have headers (as I’ve also noted) that state the classification levels, and more importantly admitted none of the documents in the infamous emails had any such headers. In fact he noted three, ONLY three bore any type of marker at all. The marker I’ve already described. Here’s the kicker:
When asked whether emails lacking headers would have told Clinton that the material wasn’t classified, Comey replied, “That would be a reasonable inference.”
That had to have been a painful moment for Comey. He’d gone WAY the hell out of bounds in the spring of 2016 with his ‘bigly’ press conference about his investigation into Clinton. Normally when the feds conclude an investigation without bringing charges they don’t say jack. That’s the way it should be I should add. However in this case everyone knew about it so a statement was warranted. What it SHOULD have been was a bland bit of blather along the lines of “After detailed review we have concluded there isn’t sufficient evidence to warrant bringing any criminal charges in this matter.” But noooooo, he had to “editorialize” and as much as anything that was a crippling blow to Clinton’s campaign. By the summer of 2017, having Trump having tried to play mob-boss on him at Trump Tower, and then firing him while he was on FBI business on the other side of the country and having to pull out a credit cared to buy a plane ticket back to DC I’d say Comey was feeling more than mere regret during that hearing!
Well, the week ahead could get pretty interesting if Team Trump wants to push the Hillary’s Emails thing as a defense to SignalGate. If I’m not mistaken Hillary’s bluntness in the NYT means she no longer has any “f**ks to give.” That she’s done being proper and reserved. That if Trump and the GOP want a fight she’s more than ready for a full-on BIKER Bar Fight. As I said earlier Hillary Clinton is smarter and tougher than Trump and his idiot team combined. IF she’s ready to go in with ear biting, kicks to the crotch, knocking people in the head with beer bottles or table/chair legs watch out. It will be ugly but entertaining as hell and while she’ll take some hits it will be Trump and his minions bleeding on the floor!
****** Zoomers, if you can spare a donation, it will keep us trekking through cyberspace from planet to planet and psychotic news story to psychotic news story. We just need a little green energy to keep going on our (now) nine year mission and who knows how long it will take to get rid of Trump? Thanks. Ursula ******
With the Trump administration, never see malice whennstupidity is more likely the explanation.