Clinton can’t shake off the ‘damn emails’

Although Sen. Bernie Sanders proclaimed back in November 2015 that America was “sick and tired of hearing about (Hillary Clinton’s) damn emails,” we’re going to have to continue hearing about them, I’m afraid, as the State Department inspector general has released a rather damning report today on how Clinton did not make a request to use a personal email account to conduct the government’s business and was never authorized to do so.

Credit: legalinsurrection.com

Credit: legalinsurrection.com

Although Clinton has said all along that she used the private server as a matter of “convenience,” the report also indicated that while she was willing to use a different address or phone to access state department email, she apparently wanted to maintain a certain level of privacy. According to The New York Times, Clinton told her deputy chief of staff in November 2010 that she didn’t “want any risk of the personal being accessible.”

This excerpt from the inspector general report highlights other correspondences between government officials about Clinton’s emails from August 2011:

The then-Executive Secretary informed staff of his intent to provide two devices for the Secretary to use: “one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests), and another which would just have phone and internet capability.” In another email exchange, the Director of S/ES-IRM noted that an email account and address had already been set up for the Secretary 153 and also stated that “you should be aware that any email would go through the Department’s infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches.” However, the Secretary’s Deputy Chief of Staff rejected the proposal to use two devices, stating that it “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.” OIG found no evidence that the Secretary obtained a Department address or device after this discussion.”

To her credit, although Clinton’s 30,000 emails were the main subject of the report, the inspector general’s office indicated that the State Department had “longstanding systemic weaknesses” in its handling of digital records, so, while her refusal to use the state’s email system was questionable, and potentially unethical from an open government point of view, hers was apparently not an isolated case.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but wonder how a politician with as much experience in government as Clinton had at the time when she was secretary of state could possibly have any expectation of privacy while she was conducting the public’s business. Certainly she knew, or should have known, that her correspondence, except for records pertaining to classified information, were and would be subject to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act.

Further, in any business, it’s common sense that intermingling work communication with private correspondence is a recipe for disaster. How much more so when you hold a public office funded by taxpayers? How much more so when you hold one of the most powerful public positions in the nation … in the world?

This, I think, speaks to two of the main problems with Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate in the first place.

While she certainly has a strong record on women’s rights, health care and LBGT issues and other causes that are important to liberal voters, she comes off as disconnected and insular, even when she tries to be a woman of the people, and this was never more evident when she awkwardly attempted to use a subway MetroCard that one time and when she grabbed a craft beer in Wisconsin.

Second, she gives off the impression that she is almost above the law — or that she perceives herself as above the law — and isn’t beholden to the same standards of transparency and openness as other public officials, which I think is actually related to the disconnected argument. We can also see shades of this in her apparent hostility to the press.

She has lived in “the bubble” of politics for so long that she seems to see herself as above the fray in some contexts, and although it’s certainly important for the presidents to make decisions based on a long view of history and understand the big picture, and in that way operate on a higher plain than get tangled up in the day-to-day political grist mill, no one official, no matter how powerful, can operate with impunity.

Arguably the most important function of the press is to hold public officials accountable for how they manage public resources. We already know Obama has had one of the least press-friendly administrations in recent memory. Given Clinton’s troubling record on open government and transparency in her own office as secretary of state, the prospects that this might actually improve if she wins the presidency are minimal at best; in all likelihood, information coming out of her White House will be locked down even tighter than under Obama.

[Cover image credit: Tom Stiglich/Creators Syndicate]

Trump vs. Kelly: ‘Couples therapy’

After finally getting around to watching Megyn Kelly’s interview with Donald Trump — it’s surprisingly hard to find the full video, and most copies online appear to be edited hack jobs for either supporters or haters of Trump  — I can say that, despite Kelly’s assertion that “it’s not about me” when asking Trump about his nasty retweets in which he called her a “bimbo,” that statement certainly seems like a microcosm of the entire interview: It was absolutely, 100 percent about her.

Kelly obviously has no shortage of talent. She hit the ground running at Fox News in 2004 and her celebrity has been on the rise and growing ever since, arguably reaching or eclipsing that of her long-time associates Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

To her credit, she claims to be an independent on a conservative network that doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced” anymore, and she hit Donald Trump as hard as anyone during the August 2015 debate when she questioned his character in making numerous “disparaging” comments about women:

But that Megyn Kelly — detached, steely eyed, uncowed — was far from the person who sat across from Trump earlier this week. This Megyn Kelly was soft, amicable, introspective and almost psychoanalytical in her attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to unearth the inner crust of Donald Trump. She asked him about his alcoholic and now dead brother, his perceived mistakes on the campaign trail, his regrets and his emotional wounds. Watch the interview with closed eyes and you may, for a second, forget this is a conservation between two highly privileged celebrities and imagine a psychiatry patient laying on the couch talking to his shrink.

megyn kelly donald trump

Fox

There is no psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. Donald Trump gets out of bed every morning based on the strength of three simple things: his wealth, his power and his own aura. That’s it. Yet, in this interview, Kelly, in pure Barbara Walters wannabe form and not half as probing, asked few follow-up questions and even minimized moments when Trump, seemingly unapologetic and unrepentant as ever, was at his most obnoxious.

During what was probably the most memorable part of the interview, Kelly alerted Trump to the fact that he had called her a bimbo multiple times on social media, to which Trump just donned a boyish grin, leaned in and issued an almost mocking “excuse me,” as if he had just cut her off at the checkout line. Kelly, failing to use that opportunity to reclaim some of her earlier fire and ask a tough question, just recoiled and smiled. After an awkward pause and a creepy, sustained grin from Trump, he continued, noting that he, using ethical discretion like a true gentleman, did not retweet some of the harsher comments on Twitter.

Indeed, the only time Trump revealed anything interesting about himself was when he commended Kelly for coming to him and seeking reconciliation after the imbroglio last year. “I have great respect for you that you were able to call me and say let’s get together and lets talk,” Trump said. “For me, I would not have done that. I don’t say that as a positive. I think it’s a negative for me.”

Aside from that admission, this was, as Poynter Institute’s James Warren noted, far from Frost-Nixon. Here is Warren:

Why might a cynic have wondered if Megyn Kelly’s primetime Fox network interview with Donald Trump would fall short of David Frost’s evisceration of former President Richard Nixon? Might it have been the afternoon tweet and photo from a beaming Trump himself, his arm around a grinning Kelly, her arm around his back, and the declaration, “I will be live tweeting my interview with ‪@megynkelly on the Fox Network tonight at 8! Enjoy!” (@realDonaldTrump) Or was it the night before, on the Bravo cable channel, when she conceded that she’d once not just touched his hair but “run my fingers through it” to see if he wore a wig.

So no, despite the “big fight feel” implied by advertisements leading up to the interview, this was not Kelly’s breakout moment as a long-form interviewer.

This was simply theater masquerading as a hard-hitting interview. I don’t know if Trump and Kelly went over some of the questions she was going to ask beforehand, but did anyone really think that she was going to walk into Trump Tower, recreate a working relationship with the real estate mogul just to pepper him with a relent barrage of questions a la the August 2015 debate? They both realized that to make the interview seem genuine, Kelly was going to have to ask an uncomfortable question or two, but this was never going to be a whole-cloth take-down of Trump.

It was not even about policy or Trump’s character. It was almost exclusively about Trump and Kelly, and as Trevor Noah brilliantly summarized recently, amounted to little more than high-profile “couples therapy” after a breakup. Frankly, if people Connie Chung, Katie Couric and Barbara Walters are the benchmarks, Kelly’s interview looked rather pedestrian by comparison.

Race-baiters: GOP’s descent to the bottom

The Republican Party, once a relatively progressive outfit by earlier historical standards, having played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights of 1964, was on the right side of history from the mid-1800s with the election of Abraham Lincoln up until the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and the defection of Strom Thurmond from the Democratic Party to the GOP.

For about 100 years after 1860, and even before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the de facto breeding ground for bigotry and segregationalist thought in America, but in ’64, when about 80 percent of Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, compared to 60 percent of Democrats, the political landscape changed (here’s a detailed look at how the party has changed over the years) — perhaps irreversibly sending the GOP down a path of kowtowing to religion and big business, resisting societal progress, denying LGBT people of their rights and instituting programs designed to line the pockets of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, particularly poor blacks living in inner cities.

Indeed, for more than 30 years now, the Republican Party has operated on platforms and policies that seemed to only carry the hint of racism — implied, but not explicit; by that, I mean most lawmakers have not, by and large, come right out and said that laws related to the war on drugs and criminal justice, for instance, were implemented to lock up a disproportionate number of black people or that statutes on immigration were passed to address the “problem” of Hispanics taking jobs away from white Americans. But conservative lawmakers have, knowingly or otherwise, injected a kind of institutional racism in the post Civil Rights era. For Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” the clearest example of this is in the criminal justice system.

She writes:

The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias.

According to a 2015 study from political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Jeremy Horowitz, Republican policies since 1948 have served the interests of affluent white Americans more so than any other group. Sean McElwee, with Al Jazeera America, sums up the findings:

Although they (all ethnic groups) still benefit significantly more from a Democratic president, the gap between the two parties is the smallest for whites. Hajnal and Horowitz estimate that black poverty declined by 38.6 percent under Democratic leadership, while it grew by 3 percent under Republicans. From 1948 to 2010, black unemployment fell by 7.9 percentage points under Democrats and increased by 13.7 points during Republican administrations. Black income grew by $23,281 (adjusted for inflation) under Democrats and by only $4,000 under Republicans.

“Put simply: However measured, blacks made consistent gains under Democratic presidents and suffered regular losses under Republicans,” the authors said. While there’s limited data, the findings hold true for Latinos and Asians.

It appears at first glance that Republicans actively transfer income to whites through government. Of course, there could be another explanation for this phenomenon. In a study published last July, Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that from 1947 to 2013, gross domestic product, employment, corporate profits and productivity grew faster under Democrats than Republicans. The authors also noted that unemployment and deficits shrank and the economy climbed out of recession in less time under Democrats.

The following graph shows how ethnic groups have fared economically under Democratic administrations versus Republican presidents through 2010:

income equality

In further support of these points, Robert Smith, political science professor with San Francisco State University, argued in his 2010 book, “Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same,” that while modern conservatives may not be racists outright or in general, the policies they support and enact produce “the same effect as racism”:

Racism in the United States … is systemic – a complex, interdependent, interactive series of behavioral and ideational components. This “systemic racism” is reflected in the unjustly gained economic resources and political power of whites; empirically in a complex array of anti-black practices; and in the ideology of white supremacy and the attitudes of whites that developed in order to rationalize the system.

This complex systemic phenomenon is what African American thought challenges and African American movements have sought to overthrow. Conservatives, however, have sought to maintain it, or, at best, to change it gradually, always prioritizing stability over justice. This then, historically and situationally, is what in the first instance makes conservatism and racism in America the same.

Now, this shows the effects of GOP policies and ideologies when Republican lawmakers, politicians and conservative talking heads are at their most well-behaved. Enter Donald Trump, Ann Coulter and the legion of followers who, with the bigoted winds at their sails, aren’t afraid (anymore) to tell us what they really think.

What is new with the 2016 election, then, is a return of blatant, out-in-the-open racism and bigotry reminiscent of the old Dixiecrats of the mid-20th century. What is new is that racist and xenophobic sentiments are coming, not from some obscure third party candidate, but from the GOP frontrunner in an election to determine the leader of the free world. What is new is that Trump is on pace to get more primary votes than any candidate in American history.

Where to begin with Trump? He generalized that a whole wave of Hispanic immigrants contained untold numbers of rapists and drug dealers and flippantly conceded that “some” might be good people. He declared that he was going to force a sovereign nation to pay for a wall along the border, erroneously assuming that Mexicans, presumed to be cowering in fear, were just going to bow to the will of a power white guy in America.

He said he would turn away Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the United States, has called for a “total and complete ban” of Muslims entering the United States and used his followers’ irrational fears about Muslims to support a kind of isolationism even inside our borders. Here’s what he had to say about the refugees in April:

We don’t know where they’re from, we don’t know where they’re from, they have no documentation. We all have hearts and we can build safe zones in Syria – and we’ll get the Gulf states to put up the money, we’re not putting up the money – but I’ll get that done.

Lock your doors folks, okay, lock your doors. There’s no documentation. We have our incompetent government people letting them in by the thousands, and who knows, maybe it’s ISIS. You see what happens with two people that became radicalized in California, where they shot and killed all their coworkers. Not with me, folks, it’s not happening with me.

I’m not one to cry “Islamophobia” over criticisms of Islam as a religion or set of bad ideas. I have been as critical of Islam as just about any other religion except Christianity, but here Trump is obviously not running down Islamic thought or doctrines but implying that not only could ISIS members be “embedded” in groups of refugees, but the refugees themselves are so weak intellectually and spiritually that they might, at the turn of a switch, fall under the spell of ISIS and become radicalized, rather than recognizing that the couple in California was an extremely isolated case and hundreds of thousands of American Muslims worship peacefully every day in this country. In fact, Trump’s odious remarks on Muslims may have actually backfired, as significant numbers of the 3.3 million Muslims in America have been energized to get out and vote against Trump in the election.

Then, of course, there’s this and this.

Screenshot 2016-05-13 at 11.32.42 PM

Donald Trump’s retweet of a wildly inaccurate meme.

But perhaps most damning of all was Trump’s not so inconspicuous flirtation with modern white supremacy by failing to disavow the support of former KKK grand wizard David Duke and other racist groups that pledged fealty to him. Ludicrously, he initially claimed that he needed to do “more research” before commenting on David Duke and the KKK – more research? – and only when pressed did he rebuff these hate groups, although the rebuffing seemed more obligatory than heartfelt, signaling to the rest of us that Trump will apparently take votes anywhere he can get them and from literally anyone.

To add fuel to the fire, an avowed white supremacist named William Daniel Johnson was originally signed up as a delegate for Trump’s campaign from California, but later resigned, telling reporters that Trump campaign officers “don’t need the baggage.” Moreover, Trump’s rallies have included a virtual horde of white nationalists, apparently finally feeling newly empowered to crawl out of whatever sad and bitter life they have in the hinterlands of America in order to gin up some fresh hate against black folks and other ethnic groups.

For his part, Trump has said he is not a racist and doesn’t want the support of white supremacists, but given the numerous lies and half truths emitting from his mouth nearly on a daily basis, it’s hard to say whether he is being genuine or not on that point, or frankly, on anything else, especially so, since his campaign has admitted that he has just been “playing a part” in his “brash, bigoted, bullying” persona, as described by The Washington Post.

What we know for sure, however, is that his rhetoric is acutely responsible for stoking the flames of racism and bigotry in this country and continuing the work began by the Tea Party in the late 2000s, as the GOP’s failure to neuter the intractable strain of populism in its own ranks now threatens its existence.

[Cover photo credit: John Cole, Scranton Times-Tribune]