All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing.
Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a speech before influential Iowa Democrats" is all too typical: Mrs. Clinton gets to say that all of this is "partisan games" involving "playing politics." All I see is substance-free whining. "My opponents don't like me" is not a defense. Several paragraphs from Ken's calamity follow the jump:
CLINTON OFFERS FORCEFUL DEFENSE ON BENGHAZI, EMAILS
Hillary Rodham Clinton offered a fierce defense of her handling of the 2012 Benghazi attacks and her use of a private email server as President Barack Obama's secretary of state, dismissing the controversies as "partisan games" in a speech before influential Iowa Democrats on Friday.
"They'll try to tell you it's about Benghazi, but it's not," Clinton said, pointing to Republican-led congressional inquiries that she said had "debunked all the conspiracy theories."
"It's not about emails or servers either. It's about politics," she said.
"I won't get down in the mud with them. I won't play politics with national security," Clinton said at the annual Wing Ding, a Democratic fundraiser in northern Iowa that attracted three other presidential candidates.
I strongly suspect that Christopher Stevens' family, to whom Mrs. Clinton indisputably and knowlingly lied as his body was returned to U.S. soil after he died in Benghazi, would fiercely dispute her contention that she doesn't "play politics with national security."
Of course, the word "classified" is nowhere in Thomas's report. Gosh, if he brought that word up, he might have to actually report substantive details. We can't have that.
In a long column about a specific, Benghazi-related matter — the government's attemptt to prosecute Ahmed Abu Khatallah for the Benghazi attacks in September 2012 — Andrew McCarthy at National Review succinctly summarized what has happened to Mrs. Clinton crumbling defenses in the past several weeks (bolds are mine; for the convenience of establishment press members who are having difficulty associating Mrs. Clinton with crimes, I have inserted asterisks identifying items which would ordinarily qualify):
Mrs. Clinton has spent the last few weeks learning that federal court is not the mainstream media. Because of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits brought by Judicial Watch, she and her top aides are finally being asked tough questions about conducting government business over a private communications system (*) — a system that Clinton designed in order to hide her communications from public inspections, congressional inquiries, and judicial proceedings. We’ve thus learned that Team Clinton may have concealed government records (*), stored and transmitted classified information on private e-mail systems (*), and erased tens of thousands of government files. (*)
If Mrs. Clinton thinks FOIA is a headache, wait until she sees what happens when a top government official’s reckless mass deletion of e-mails takes center stage in a terrorism prosecution of intense national interest. Federal criminal court is not the nightly news. There, mass deletion of files is not gently described as “emails a government official chose not to retain”; it is described as “destruction of evidence” (*) and “obstruction of justice.” (*)
It's painfully obvious Mrs. Clinton is getting a disgraceful preemptive pass from the AP that no other politician of either party besides Barack Obama would ever receive.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
