Republicans may love to rail against the mainstream media, but the reporting over the latest stage of the State Department email “scandal” shows that the media is just as biased if not more so against Hillary Clinton.
This should not be a surprise. Hillary Clinton is all but certain to win the Democratic nomination and the favorite to win the Presidency, according to Paddy Power and other betting sites, and no one likes a favorite. So in their attempts to create an underdog narrative, the media has been more than happy to portray Clinton as corrupt and unlikable while glossing over many of Trump’s and Sanders’s flaws.
And this has shown itself again thanks to a released State Department report on how e-mails have been handled by past Secretaries of State. CNN headlined its article on the report with “State Department report slams Clinton email use” and opens by stating that “former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to follow the rules or inform key department staff regarding her use of a private email server.” Other new sites have stressed how the report is 83 pages, creating the idea that the report is 83 pages of attacking Clinton for improper email practices.
But let us look at the actual report and see what conclusions the State Department actually made. The State Department’s conclusion is that “Longstanding, systematic weaknesses related to electronic records and communications have existed within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.”
In short, the State Department needs to do a better job on cybersecurity, and these problems go well beyond Clinton herself. In fact, the report spends a lot of time detailing Colin Powell’s mistakes as Secretary of State. Powell used a “personal email account from a commercial Internet provider” as Secretary of State, which he used to manage all of his emails.
Could Clinton have done a better job following bureaucratic policies designed to protect e-mails? Yes, she could have, and no Clinton supporter would claim that this incident was her finest hour. But it was a mistake, and a common one as a department head tries to cut through the layers of bureaucracy which have existed long before Clinton took charge.
The report pretty much admits that. CNN may claim that Clinton “failed to follow the rules”, but does not talk about what those rules are. We are not talking about criminal law here, nor even a civil statute. Clinton’s actions did break bureaucratic policies, which is a shame. And she will have to do better should she become President.
But here we see how the Republicans cannot help but overreach themselves. It is one thing to suggest that State Department email policies could have been done better. Benghazi could have been done better. But every bureaucratic mistake becomes a colossal scandal which becomes incident #4958 on how Clinton is this evil, dastardly witch.
And the unfortunate reality is that after more than 20 years of repeating these ridiculous stories, people are willing to believe anything about her. And that will continue even when she is finally in the White House.