Friday, July 24, 2015

Let's see if Loretta Lynch pulls an Eric Holder

NY Times: "Criminal inquiry is sought in Clinton email account"
WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.”
I look forward to the affected insouciance of the NY Times editorial page over Hillary's crimes.  Yes, crimes.

12 comments:

I'm just chillin' said...

[Sigh]. When will people get tired of old news? Hillary wiped her email server months ago. What difference, at this point, does it make?

Anonymous said...

So you don't believe in holding people accountable for their behavior?

Liberal softball media said...

The leak, er, story has already eroded, and the New York Times has backtracked, as reported in the WaPost, Politico, Huffington, Salon, Breitbart, Media Matters, CNN, Daily Kos, Newsbusters, Fiscal Times, MSN, etc. etc. The Times nailed the details, except for the State Dept not requesting a criminal investigation, and the Justice Dept declaring that it's not a criminal investigation, and Hillary Clinton not being a target of the investigation. Judith Miller, come home!

Anonymous said...

I look forward to the affected insouciance of the NY Times editorial page over Hillary's crimes. Yes, crimes.

Insouciance preview from the L.A. Times: "The Department of Justice said the matter is not criminal, as did the inspector general who made the referral.
Experts say such referrals from an intelligence agency inspector general are routine and often do not lead to much."

Eric said...

I like this latest spin from the Hillary apologists: the referral was not criminal in nature.

It's the Justice department. What is the nature of the referral? Maybe it's a restaurant review.

No matter: the story will be that two separate inspector generals - appointed by Obama - said "hey Justice department, look into this" a week before Hillary's "trust" numbers already cratered. Oh but please go on about how the Times "backtracked" by changing the story lead to the passive tense. That makes a world of difference.

Brian G. said...

"Insouciance." Great word my man.

I haven't commented in a long time, I've never left and have been a reader for a long time pal.

Eric said...

Thanks Brian. I know my readership is somewhat limited except for the rare Instapundit link.

This whole thing is surreal: if it were anyone but Hillary (such as David Petreaus) who handled government information so ineptly, he/she would be in prison.

Anonymous said...

David Petraeus is a faulty example, both by actual deed and for the fantasy prison sentence.

Oh, well. We'll always have last Friday said...

Less insouciant than inept:
NY Times Public Editor: A Clinton Story Fraught With Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/a-clinton-story-fraught-with-inaccuracies-how-it-happened-and-what-next/?smid=tw-share&_r=3

The story certainly seemed like a blockbuster: A criminal investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton by the Justice Department was being sought by two federal inspectors general over her email practices while secretary of state.

But aspects of it began to unravel soon after it first went online. The first major change was this: It wasn’t really Mrs. Clinton directly who was the focus of the request for an investigation. It was more general: whether government information was handled improperly in connection with her use of a personal email account.

Much later, The Times backed off the startling characterization of a “criminal inquiry,” instead calling it something far tamer sounding: it was a “security” referral.

From Thursday night to Sunday morning – when a final correction appeared in print – the inaccuracies and changes in the story were handled as they came along, with little explanation to readers, other than routine corrections. The first change I mentioned above was written into the story for hours without a correction or any notice of the change, which was substantive. And the evolving story, which began to include a new development, simply replaced the older version.

...But you can’t put stories like this back in the bottle – they ripple through the entire news system.

So it was, to put it mildly, a mess. As a result, I’ve been spending the last couple of days asking how this could happen and how something similar can be prevented in the future.

...“We got it wrong because our very good sources had it wrong,” [Times editor] Mr. Purdy told me.

...When you add together the lack of accountability that comes with anonymous sources, along with no ability to examine the referral itself, and then mix in the ever-faster pace of competitive reporting for the web, you’ve got a mistake waiting to happen. Or, in this case, several mistakes.

Reporting a less sensational version of the story, with a headline that did not include the word “criminal,” and continuing to develop it the next day would have been a wise play. Better yet: Waiting until the next day to publish anything at all.
Losing the story to another news outlet would have been a far, far better outcome than publishing an unfair story and damaging The Times’s reputation for accuracy.

..Readers come to The Times not for a scoop, though those can be great, but for fair, authoritative and accurate information. And when things do go wrong, readers deserve a thorough, immediate explanation from the top. None of that happened here."

Save me, passive voice! said...

Yes, last week it was "Hillary is the subject of a criminal referral for mishandling classified data."

This week: "The mishandling of classified data on Hillary's server has been referred to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation."

World of difference! Get your shit together, NYT.

3 AM phone call! Pantsuit! Benghazi! said...

If nothing else, and it will be nothing else, at least one new forever complaint has been added to the tire fire that cannot be extinguished. That's got to be worth something over the next 5 to 9 years.

Passive the buck said...

The Washington Post, not writing in the passive voice:
New York Times wraps up Clinton e-mail screwup with ‘Editors’ Note’

Two corrections, a column by Public Editor Margaret Sullivan and now an editors’ note: The New York Times has done a lot of writing to remedy the problems with its account of Thursday night reporting that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the subject of a criminal inquiry referral from two federal inspectors general.

...“That article was based on multiple high-level government sources,” says the editors’ note. It’s unclear whether the reference to sourcing was designed to mitigate the newspaper’s culpability or to shame anonymous sources, or both.

...Neither the editors’ note nor the public editor’s column details just what took the correction so long, though Executive Editor Dean Baquet accepted responsibility for the slow-footedness. As for explaining it, we’ll hazard a guess: a sense of denial and a newsroom of roughly 1,300 staffers, where bad news can be slow to to break out of the bureaucracy.


Or:
The Atlantic: Why The New York Times' Clinton Error Is a Big Deal
CNN: New York Times tries to set record straight on botched Clinton email story
Newsweek: How 'The New York Times' Bungled the Hillary Clinton Emails Story
Media Matters: After Two Corrections, The NY Times' Botched Email Story Still Has An Error

Good times.