Republicans have seized on another event that never happened.
A former F.B.I. official at the center of the latest controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private emails acknowledged on Tuesday that an offer to swap favors with a State Department counterpart on an email classification issue had originated with him — until he realized the deal involved Mrs. Clinton and the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.
The email that first turned up months ago and resurfaced over the last two days doesn’t actually indicate any sort of deal whatsoever. There’s a mention of requesting that an email be reclassified, and then several paragraphs later there’s a reminder about the FBI’s desire to snag a couple of additional postings, but there’s no effort to connect these requests.
However, former FBI official Brian McCauley now says that the idea actually came from him, and not from the State Department. He also says that when he learned the email was one of those involved in the investigation of Clinton’s server, he withdrew the offer. So rather than an issue of the State Department offering to do something for the FBI in order to help Hillary Clinton, it’s a story of an FBI official wanting a favor and putting on the brakes when he learned it might help in any way.
Republicans have seized on the episode to accuse the State Department of trying to protect Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. McCauley’s account could undercut those attempts because he said he, not the State Department, had suggested the “quid pro quo.”
So does that make it a quo pro quid? No, it makes it a big bite of nothing. Nothing at all happened.
But that’s not stopping Trump and Republican legislators from trying to make it into the worst thing ever.
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Even so, Republicans continued to focus on Mr. Kennedy’s handling of the emails. Donald J. Trump, for a second day, said on Tuesday that Mrs. Clinton’s email server was a scandal “worse than Watergate.” Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Kennedy and his role in the purported quid pro quo.
“Under Secretary Kennedy’s attempt to barter away American national security interests for plainly political purposes is appalling and may rise to the level of a federal crime,” Mr. Goodlatte wrote in the letter.
There was no bartering, no dealing, and no deal. But of course Donald Trump is never bothered by finding the truth, and Rep. Goodlatte is perfectly happy to investigate nothing. Investigating nothing? It’s what Republicans do.
Republicans are completely unaware that you gotta have something if you want to make a case.