We received confirmation yesterday of what most sane individuals had already figured out for themselves. There was nothing to the latest effort to revive the GOP Clinton email scam. Most individuals, that is, but Grand Old Partiers who are suffering from permanent anti-Clinton hangovers.
Clinton remains, as she always was, a technically unsophisticated woman who followed the precedent set by her predecessors and used her personal email to transact State Department business. She broke no rules; out of thousands of emails, three marked classified, one in the header and two within the text, were found- all, incidentally, dealing with old news already in the public domain. A little over a thousand more emails were deemed to merit classification after the fact. Her server was never hacked. That’s it. No scandal
In spite of the recent effort to revive the topic, that’s still it. No scandal. The so-called “new” emails were all either personal in nature or duplicates. The whole thing falls into the category of those events that leave future readers of history shaking their heads, wondering just how backwards and gullible their parents and grandparents really were.
Of course, the unhinged Trump doesn’t care. He just went back to talking about rigged elections and yelling “crooked Hillary” into the wind.
Other Republicans, reluctant to stop trying to club Clinton with the email wet-noodle, have also kept up the hue and cry. Missouri’s GOP Senator Roy Blunt, for example, is showing himself reluctant to disavow Trump’s hilarious denial of the obvious:
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the FBI had engaged in “rushed work, which the FBI clearly has botched.”
Blunt faces Secretary of State Jason Kander, a Democrat, in one of the nation’s closest Senate races on Tuesday. Blunt previously criticized the FBI for granting too many immunity agreements with Clinton aides and for allowing for the destruction of some computers and electronic devices.
“The investigation was a failure,” he said in a statement issued Sunday night.
Rushed work? Echoes of the Trump campaign’s claim that there’s no way folks could go through 65,000 emails in eight days – which makes anyone who remembers that we’re talking about emails, digital content that can be analysed and deduped via computer – howl with laughter. There’s software readily available that would make short work of the project.
In fact, my husband, who worked in computing research for years, observed that it shouldn’t have taken the FBI more than a day and a half at the most to have vindicated Clinton. The entire review could have been done before Comey sent his first letter to the Congress a couple of weeks ago. Because of this failure to act as expeditiously and efficiently as possible, Blunt is almost right when he dubs the investigation a failure, although not for the reasons he alleges. It was certainly handled in an unnecessarily clumsy fashion from the get-go, by, one suspects, would-be GOP partisans in the FBI.
Blunt, of course, doesn’t dare anger truculent Trump supporters. We learned in last Saturday’s (Nov. 5) edition of the St. Louis Post-dispatch that when GOP Rep. Ann Wagner disavowed Trump in the wake of his sex assault scandal, she was besieged by constituents vowing to vote for her Democratic opponent, Bill Otto, for no other reason than to punish her for disrespecting their Fearless Orange Leader. That’s how important the cult of angry personality is for the raging Republican hordes Trump has inspired.
Blunt also has other reasons to hang on to the dishonest GOP Clinton narrative. She is, after all, his only viable weapon against his election opponent, Jason Kander. In recent weeks the corruption tainted Blunt’s only real defense against Kander has been a plethora of adds and mailers trying to tie the conservative Democrat to the GOP fantasy of a corrupt and radical Hillary Clinton. Guilt by association can be effective in politics, but in this case there are many of us on the real left that wish it were just a bit truer. We’re all too aware that Blunt, in the best Trumpy style, regularly misrepresents and outright lies about Kander’s moderate positions.
Steve Benen has said about Paul Ryan’s late embrace of Trump that it is clear that he is “a man of ‘principle’ – weak, malleable principles, which he’ll forgo whenever partisan considerations get in the way, hoping no one remembers what he said before.” The same goes for Roy Blunt. And that, in a nutshell, is the story of how the GOP ended up with incompetent, racist, presidential nominee Trump.
