New York Times reporter Christine Hauser reported on a very strange happening in the art world. The Biennale of Visual Arts exhibit in Venice featured an exhibit of a stack of printouts of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “emails” -- with a surprise cameo by Clinton herself reading them (while sitting at a replica of the Oval Office desk!) and dismissing their import. Hauser helped her avoid the controversy (click "expand"):
In a moment that combined political theater and performance art, Hillary Clinton was reunited with her emails at an exhibition in Italy this week.
And she wants Republicans to know it.
“Someone alert the House G.O.P.,” she wrote on Twitter on Thursday, captioning a picture of her seated with reams of paper that were part of “Hillary: The Hillary Clinton Emails,” a work on display in the Despar Teatro Italia in Venice.
On a replica of the desk in the Oval Office, which eluded her in 2016, were copies of some of the roughly 60,000 pages of emails that formed a central controversy during her presidential campaign.
During her visit, Mrs. Clinton took a seat and started to thumb through the papers, said Kenneth Goldsmith, the American poet and artist behind the exhibition....
The email controversy followed Mrs. Clinton through much of the campaign, and was seized on particularly by her opponent, Donald J. Trump, and other Republicans. It centered on how she set up a private email account while she was secretary of state under President Barack Obama, and on her decision to destroy entries that she deemed to be personal. Classified information was found in a small number of the messages from her account.
Hauser mixed apples and oranges to suggest GOP hypocrisy:
(President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both White House aides, have since faced scrutiny over their handling of private communications.)
Hauser let Clinton take advantage of the bizarre situation to clear herself without a hint of journalistic pushback:
“Anyone can go in and look at them,” she said during remarks to the Italian news media. “There is nothing there.”
“There is nothing that should have been so controversial,” she added.
Hauser ended on a note of triumph for Hillary Clinton, giving her supporters a free shot under the safe left-wing sponsorship of the European art expo:
“The pile of papers is rather unimpressive, rebutting Trump’s efforts to make them monumental,” the materials say. “In this way, Goldsmith creates the greatest poem of the 21st century, an anti-monument to the folly of Trump’s heinous smear campaign against Clinton.”
Other voices, like Investor’s Business Daily, had a less sanguine take on Clinton’s email controversy (more accurately called her "classified documents controversy"):
As the scandal unfolded, it became clear that Clinton had been misleading or dishonest about a number of claims she made to defend herself. She hadn't turned over all her work emails; she had sent and received highly classified documents; she never had approval from the State Department's IT experts for her set up.
Even FBI director James Comey harshly criticized Clinton, saying she and her staff had been "extremely careless" in the handling of highly sensitive information and that it was "possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account."
