Nor am I a fan of just about any news personality you could name this morning. The TV morning shows were particularly annoying this today. I ended up watching fluff news at GMA while getting ready for work.
If you haven’t read through the entire James Comey statement it does have some noteworthy pieces of illogical, contortionist posturing. You may hear complaints from various GOP pundits, but this statement was a gift to them. As I listened to Comey’s statement yesterday; delivered in deliberate, measured tones, I realized what he was doing. He doesn’t have enough to bring criminal charges, but he has more than enough to do political damage. He was being the good Republican that he is. He said HRC was extremely careless with classified information, but he can’t prove it. He couldn’t find enough proof to recommend charging HRC because he didn’t see how they would win a conviction in a court of law, but he certainly could slander her and sow seeds of doubt. And, because it is regarding “classified” information, there is no way for HRC to refute anything in Comey’s statement. I may be a Berner, but this garbage pisses me off.
Not a single media outlet is going over a single real problem facing our nation today. Nothing about jobs (that will glossed over Friday), nothing about health care, nothing on assisting working families. Nothing really about the substance about the email controversy. If the media was honest (and most are, but that doesn’t make for good click bait), they would at least try and educate us about the classified system.
Over thirty years ago I worked for TRW, a major DOD supplier. Although I worked for a division that had nothing to do with DOD contracts, I was subject to DOD classified information standards. I was in my early twenties and ended up with the job of keeping information secure in my department. What a thankless job that was! Half my days were filled with fending off demanding sales reps seeking information they were not cleared to have. I was the one who signed the paper stating I’d keep the data safe, secure and away from those unauthorized to view it under penalty of job loss and/or civil litigation or criminal prosecution. I remember thinking it was ridiculous to be required to keep to the level of security demanded of me, but I did it. (I might have made a screw up here and there, but I tried to comply to the best of my ability; but that isn’t how “classification works. Screw ups, at least according to Comey, are just as bad as intent.) Most of what I had to keep secure was names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, contracts and details of any deal negotiated by my branch. I don’t think that was as important to keep secure as it was for me to be very careful when accessing the entire TRW intranet in pre-internet days when everything was still character based computing and maintaining a connection to the net was difficult.
One of the more memorable moments I had working with TRW was going to a rubber chicken dinner and the evening’s entertainment came from a Department of State Speaker. I don’t know if this speaker program works like it did thirty years ago, but everyone attending that dinner had to sign a non-disclosure statement under threat of criminal charges in order to hear what the speaker had to say. I thought the paper was a BS ploy, but one of the suits (an FBI agent — he showed me his badge) there assured me that the paper I signed was a serious document and I would be in trouble if I talked about the details of what I was about to hear outside of the ballroom. The speaker regaled us with all sorts of absurd anecdotes of potentially embarrassing, but hilarious situations that occurred as they conducted diplomacy for the U.S. That was the state of some “classified” information circa 1980. I enjoyed that speaker, but I really don’t know why any of it was “classified”, but that was the point. The speaker was there to entertain, but technically couldn’t disclose any of it to people not bound by non-disclosure, because it was “classified”.
I still think of it as a ruse, but I have family who work for the DOD and they tell me that no, that’s what dealing with confidential, secret, classified, top secret and beyond top secret information is. You don’t have to make sense of it, you just have to comply. One of them writes a newsletter for a DOD contractor, but her entire publication is labeled “confidential” and cannot be shared with anyone outside her company. They told me they by law, and by the agreements they signed, are unable to view any article published on The Intercept, the publication Glenn Greenwald currently writes for. (They used Thomas Drake as an example.) If they do, they could be fired or charged under the Espionage Act. Now, that’s just nuts. My family can’t read a publicly available periodical because it may contain information they aren’t cleared to know, but I, someone who doesn’t work for the government, can read it without consequence. You will not hear MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC let alone FOX, educate their viewers on how absurd information classification is.
When you parse Comey’s statement there are 7 chains and 110 emails that were indeed classified information at the time they were sent. What is missing from the statement is context and I smell bullshit. We aren’t going to get any context. These emails could be information that wasn’t marked classified in the HRC email chain, but some dweeb on the other side of the Earth was doing a CYA wipe and decided that the same information was classified and marked it so — making the Comey statement “accurate” but misleading. No way, will you see anyone on MSNBC speculate about this as a possibility. An email could have said something as innocuous as “Alice has just left Wonderland”, which could be a reference to a drone strike; but unless you knew that, plus the what, who and when — that “information” would be nonsensical — but because it pertains to a drone strike, it is “top secret”. Ok, I’m just speculating here, but that’s all the media is doing, too — speculating. I strongly suspect these 110 emails are more smoke than fire. I bet half of them contain a personal cell phone number for a dignitary which is why Comey said they were indeed, classified information and we’ll never know for sure; because we don’t have the clearance to know for sure. The media doesn’t have the clearance to know either, but ….. speculating that there really isn’t anything there, there; isn’t going to increase their ratings.
The media is uninterested in giving us context. They just want to concern troll and go over the same statements over and over and over and over and (one more time) over again. We aren’t cleared to hear context and the cynical media is uninterested in context — they have a ready made, manufactured reason to misconstrue and obsess.
It bothers me that the media lasers in on Hillary Clinton, but gives the Bush/Cheney admin’s deletion of 22 MILLION emails stored inappropriately on an RNC server a pass. It bothers me that these 110 emails out of 30,000 emails are a focus but a real time crime recorded on C-CPAN gets a pass. Technically, Darrell Issa is a criminal, because he released highly classified information In the October 2012 Benghazi hearing when he allowed the lid to be blown off the secret presence of the OGA (Other Government Agency) installation (read that as CIA installation) in Benghazi. Darrel Issa inappropriately allowed the disclosure of highly classified information. ….WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE! There are two standards. One for Darrell Issa and any other GOP operative, pundit, player or official and then the tougher standard applied to Hillary Clinton.
When it comes down to it, James Comey’s statement isn’t going to change anything. It’s not going to change the polls. If you like Hillary Clinton, you’ll still like her. If you like Trump, you’ll use this self-serving statement as the prop that it is.