Yesterday the MSM publicized the choice made by the Secretary of Defense not to demote David Petraeus and reduce his pension for the crime of handing eight binders full of previously and already highly classified information to his inamorata/biographer, for use in writing something intended to be published using stuff she was not authorized to read or possess, much less publish. He pleaded to a misdemeanor charge and got probation when this came out, after quitting his CIA job. And the question was whether the Defense Department should take away one or more of his stars or impose other punishment. He’s one of their boys. They didn’t.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton is being inundated with a wave of “She’s gonna be indicted! She should be in the big house, not the White House.” over what appears at this point to be an unclear number, presently in two digits I think (22?) , of material that at some point became or may have become classified, but which was sent to her on an unsecured web link to her privately owned home server, whether or not it was classified at the time it was sent. Insofar as the reporting I have seen indicates, there is no suggestion that these transmissions went anywhere but from her office to her home office and perhaps, not clear, from her home office, back to her office.
Unlike the Petraeus case, there are HUGE issues about whether the stuff in question as to Hillary and her aide Huma Abedin was even classified at the time it was so sent, or whether it or some of it acquired its protected status at some later date, but all of it is being treated as classified for purposes of this argument as if done before rather than after being transmitted. As if the transmitter and the recipient were supposed to know in advance of classification that it was not to be treated ever as unprotected information. There are also issues about what the documents, and the information they contained in fact was, with reports indicating some of it was MSM articles, and some was memos political talking points intended at some point to be voiced aloud anyway.
Most of the people asserting wrongdoing here are doing so on the basis of leaks of some sort from unidentified parties in various places, which matters have no been confirmed or denied by the agencies whose people are supposedly leaking this stuff, so that the chargers are wailing about what ‘’the FBI’ supposedly thinks or is doing, with no proof whatever that their allegations are correct.
As is usual these, days, this issue is one which has been spun and spun by Republicans including a craven bunch which keep a Congressional Investigation in which they have been made repeatedly to look like fools and which will crimp the future reputation of the Republican participant to be anything other than biased partisan hacks improperly using governmental power for political purposes.
And after a year of effort, clarity has not emerged about any of the ambiguous portions of the story from those hearings, only huge demands for and receipt of all emails HRC may have been involved in at State that might have gone by the server, including, one assumes vast numbers of notes on travel plans, dinner menus for state dinners, and other trivia through which the interested political eye may sift for campaign useful stuff, Benghazi for example
. Now that the elections are near, we are getting leaks from consistently R sources that the FBI is allegedly investigating and about to report, and she and her aide Huma Abedin are supposedly going to be !!INDICTED !! And those on Fox have progressed from saying that the security was so poor that the line may have been tapped, to saying the Russians tapped it, of course without anything even imitating proof.
HRC has conceded that she should not have used a private server, and that that was big time stupid. A kind of stupid shared with a huge number of Americans who don’t even have Windows Defender on their computers or have it but have never even run it. The kind of ignorance especially in those of a certain age (my age, and up) who were not young on the day the first commercial computer appeared, before the days of the 8086, when a computer was a glorified typewriter which didn’t have to be used with a package of White- Out to fix mistakes, and faxing was still in the future. People generally still know more about cell phones than this sort of stuff. OK.
What troubles me is the degree to which in the absence of proof of what has been sent, that she is being publicly accused of committing indictable, apparently felony, offenses in respect of documents which were transmitted between persons entitled to have them, which may not have been classified for security purposes at all when sent and which may contain unprotectible materials (because the content of none of them has been mentioned), in the same month that the guy who gave binders full of the indisputably fully classified and known to him at the time he transmitted it to his girlfriend. for purposes of general publication of whatever of that information she chose to put into her book, as being classified, gets no punishment which might affect or reduce his pension, after having an argument about a plea deal whose core was that the punishment of public shaming and losing his CIA job was sufficient.
Sauce for the gander was really cheap, when the stuff was indisputably highly classified and in bulk and deliberately handed over to someone outside of the system for purposes of publication. Sauce for the goose seems to require a whole lot less where both ends of the transmission were proper holders of that information, where the information is not known to be classified or classifiable at all as of the time sent.
Most importantly , the timing of this has been carefully arranged so that the wild showy charges can be made during the heavy combat part of the election cycle, but the actual determination of what did or did not happen won’t probably appear until after the general election.
Can you say DOUBLE STANDARD? How about PUT-UP JOB?
Yes, I am also one who does not support HRC, but this is so obnoxious that it cannot be allowed to pass by unnoted.