Confirmed: the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails was a partisan farce, and the media lied about it
Thanks to a rather clumsy panic move on the part of the Republican Party today, we now know that by the time the FBI sat down with Hillary Clinton at the end of its investigation of her emails, it had already confirmed that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on her part. This finally confirms what anyone paying close attention has known all along: the email probe was nothing more than a partisan farce, and the media was breathlessly misleading the public about it throughout the election.
Today’s revelation is that former FBI Director James Comey began working on a letter exonerating Hillary Clinton just before the FBI interviewed her (link). This means that after having interviewed everyone under her, and having examined every bit of available evidence for more than a year, the FBI had come up with nothing incriminating whatsoever. That meant that unless Hillary told them something new during her interview, the probe was already kaput. And that’s no surprise, because there was never anything worth investigating to begin with.
Hillary had legally and harmlessly used a private email server to bypass the notoriously insecure and wonky official email server at the State Department, after previous Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had also bypassed it in their own ways. When the Republican Party learned of this, it attempted to turn it into a phony scandal, in the hope of sabotaging Hillary’s inevitable run for President in 2016. The GOP insisted that the FBI investigate her email server, and so the FBI did precisely that, if only so it couldn’t be accused of favoring Hillary by not investigating it. But there was never anything to be found.
All along, the mainstream media knew this. Yet one day after the next, the media intentionally overhyped a “Hillary email scandal” that simply never existed. Each day the media falsely reported that Hillary’s use of a private email server was illegal, or falsely implied that the mere existence of an investigation was proof that her emails must have contained something illegal. At one point the New York Times published a story about Hillary’s emails that was so fictional, it ended up having to publish two different retractions in order to walk it all back, and even then, its public editor had to get involved (link). Cable news, on the other hand, never did retract any of its metric ton of false reporting about Hillary’s emails.
Donald Trump loves to accuse the mainstream media of being “fake news” any time it accurately reports on his numerous criminal scandals. He’s full of crap, of course. In my time in political journalism I’ve noted that major media outlets are notoriously sloppy when it comes to details, and they’re rarely made to answer for that sloppiness. But most of what you hear from the mainstream media is at least within the ballpark of accurate. However, there are times when the major media outlets are collectively guilty of overhyping an essentially imaginary “scandal” purely for the sake of ratings, and then using each other for cover. Hillary’s emails represented one of the most egregious examples of this in American history.
It’s not difficult to understand why the media did this to Hillary Clinton: they all thought she was going to win anyway. They saw no harm in spending every day of a fairly boring Democratic primary race building a mythos around her only real opponent, Bernie Sanders. Nevermind that he had been a political insider for most of his adult life, and that his lackluster legislative track record didn’t match up with his oversized campaign boasts; why not build him into some kind of outsider saint with a magic wand?
The media invented the Bernie phenomenon, and then used it to keep his newfound fans tuning in every day to hear more praise being heaped on him, even as it continued to massively overhype Hillary’s supposed email scandal for ratings as well. This was comical to those of us who had been following Bernie’s career all along, as we knew he was just a failed career backbencher who had never accomplished anything in office, and was angrily ranting and raving about issues he barely understood. But hey, the polls made clear from the start that Hillary was going to win the primary by millions of votes anyway, and she did. So the media figured it hadn’t done any harm by acting as de facto Bernie surrogates throughout the primary.
Then came the general election. Again, nevermind that Donald Trump had built his entire career in the business world on a decades-long series of shady financial deals; researching those complex scandals was too difficult, so the media largely didn’t bother. Instead it allowed Trump to write his own narratives by airing his controversial daily campaign speeches in their entirety. Most of Hillary’s speeches were heavy on policy, which doesn’t bring ratings, so the media ignored them. Instead it only aired the portions of Hillary’s speeches where she was talking about Trump, because everyone loves a mud fight.
And again, the mainstream media spent the general election pretending that Hillary Clinton had an email scandal. Even after FBI Director James Comey got up and fully exonerated her for her emails in the summer of 2016, the media ignored that part and instead only focused on his decision to publicly scold her for her perfectly legal behavior. Comey was only trying to justify having wasted a year of the FBI’s resources on what he knew from the start was a dead-end investigation. The media knew that’s why he was up there absurdly scolding her that day, but again, that part didn’t matter. This was about ratings, and the media knew Hillary would win no matter how much it falsely scandalized her.
There were two things the media didn’t count on when it collectively made the decision to spend the general election hyping Hillary’s imaginary email scandal, under the assumption that it wouldn’t alter the rightful outcome. The first was that the media underestimated the impact of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign on final vote totals. The second was that the media didn’t see James Comey’s second letter coming.
Comey, too, was assuming Hillary would win. So when the FBI investigation into Anthony Weiner happened to tangentially bump up against Hillary’s emails in meaningless fashion just before the election, he sent that second letter in order to cover himself. After Hillary won, he didn’t want the Republicans in Congress to be able to come back and accuse him of not having called attention to the Weiner issue. The wording of his letter made fairly clear that it had just about nothing to do with Hillary. But that didn’t matter. Thanks in part to the media, many among the public mistakenly interpreted the letter as Hillary being in legal jeopardy. She quickly dropped several points in the polls. Comey tried to undo his mess by sending yet another letter two days before the election, confirming Hillary was in no trouble whatsoever. But by that time the damage was done.
In hindsight there is plenty of blame to go around. Donald Trump and his campaign traitorously conspired with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the election, and without that, Hillary Clinton would rightfully be in the White House right now. James Comey also made a last minute error in judgment that almost surely put Trump over the top. But it was the mainstream media that spent every day of the election cycle pushing what it knew was a phony storyline about Hillary’s emails, just for ratings. The media willfully set the stage for this all to go horribly wrong – and almost no one in the media has taken any responsibility for handing the country over to a traitor. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.
