Patterico's Pontifications

4/25/2017

Review of Clinton Campaign Book, Part I

Filed under: General — JVW @ 7:01 am



[guest post by JVW]

Last week (or was it two weeks ago?) I blogged on excerpts from the newly-published book about the Hillary Clinton campaign fiasco, Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Now some of you failed to share my enthusiasm for this amazing read, a wounding barb that I tried not to take too personally. As of this writing I am 140 pages into this surprisingly long 400-page book (I’m reading about two chapters per evening, but I didn’t get any reading done on Friday or Saturday nights), but some of the nuggets contained within are just so good that I have to share them now, anticipating that it will take me probably through this coming weekend to finish the book.

As for general observations, my suspicions about the authors are mostly true. They appear for all purposes to be progressive Democrats who came into this project with a genuine admiration for Her Clintonic Majesty, the Once, Current, and Future Inevitable Next President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton, hdr22@clintonemail.com — jeeze, where was I? oh yeah — having covered her previously and written the book HRC on her political “rebirth” while serving as Secretary of State. They also thus far don’t make much of an attempt to hide their disdain for the current White House occupant. That said, the first third of the book makes it clear that Allen and Parnes came to question many of the assumptions they previously had made about Hillary’s competence, likability, and honesty.

Like any “behind the scenes” look, much of the juicy material in Shattered is based upon off-the-record conversations, though some key characters do go on the record to air grievances and settle scores. One general assumption that can be made about these books are that the characters who are most cooperative with the authors — and by cooperative I mean willing to really dish the dirt — are the ones who come in for the most gentle treatment. So with that in mind, here are some fun tidbits as told by Allen and Parnes:

1) A former Howard Dean follower who worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Robby Mook became Hillary’s campaign manager for 2016. He comes across, at least in the first 140 pages, as the most disliked character of all. In the campaign’s first moments, Mook immediately gets into a territorial war with Hillary’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, who was part of the Clinton inner-circle through her connection with John Podesta. Mook was also apparently distrusted by Bill Clinton, who chafed at Mook’s heavy reliance upon data when the Big Sleaze wanted more gut-level decision making. The Clinton insiders also criticized Mook for being parsimonious with funds, which is an astonishing thing to hear regarding a progressive. Clearly the John Podesta crowd ganged up on Mook when talking to the authors.

2) Virtually everyone in the Clinton Crime Family, from Palmieri to Podesta to Neera Tanden (who succeeded Podesta as president of the Center for American Progress) to unnamed major campaign donors to Bill Clinton himself, pretty much begged Hillary to come clean about her use of a private email server and to give a forthright and sincere apology for having used it. It was Hillary’s own arrogance and persecution complex that compelled her to hold out for months before finally issuing her rather dismissive apology which managed to be both incomplete and insincere at the same time. By the time the apology had come, the Hillary crew had been lying about the particulars of the imbroglio for months, and the impressive approval ratings she enjoyed when she left the State Department were irrevocably gone. Diehard Clinton loyalists still believe that an early sincere apology would have put the issue to rest immediately.

3) Joe Biden comes off looking dignified and classy in this telling. Allen and Parnes portray him as really not having the desire needed to run for President, but they relate the oft-told story of how Biden’s late son Beau implored his father from his deathbed to make one last attempt. In one of the most interesting anecdotes, the authors discuss a meeting of Biden’s very small campaign staff (Hillary had already locked up most of the establishment Democrat campaign operatives) in which a promotional video produced by Biden allies was screened. The film centered around the other great tragedy in the Vice-President’s life, the 1972 car crash that took the life of his first wife and his daughter, and used it as a backdrop to tout Biden’s resiliency and his dedication to public service (cough, cough). A number of Biden’s political allies from his generation — Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry to name but a few — would have loved the ad; Biden was appropriately horrified by it, and made it clear that this sort of melodrama would not be placed front and center of his potential campaign. Three cheers to him.

4) Unsurprisingly, the popularity of Bernard Sanders flummoxed the Clinton folks, especially the First Lady/Senator/Secretary. She had wanted to position her candidacy as a continuation of the Obama agenda, but with a very subtle promise that she would be even more progressive than he had turned out to be. Sanders blew up those plans with his “democratic socialism for all” schtick. Hillary quickly realized that no matter what she promised — free college, an increased minimum wage, the public execution of bankers — Sanders would simply promise even more. According to the authors, Hillary came to hold a great deal of disdain for her rival, believing that he was was a big-time grandstander who had absolutely no chance of implementing his bold agenda in a closely-divided Congress. I look forward to reading more about the two of them as the primary season drags on.

5) The cloyingly earnest progressive Martin O’Malley is such a nonentity that he rates only five mentions in the book’s index pages (in a 400-page book). The mismatched Jim Webb and the hapless Lincoln Chaffee rate only one, both on the same page. By contrast, Jimmy Buffett is cited twice (I know he’s a lefty, but is there any more unlikely Parrothead than Hillary Rodham Clinton?).

6) And one final observation to leave you with as I go back and read more of the book. I think I like this anecdote best of all. It’s so good, in fact, that I’ll let Allen and Parnes relay it in their own words (bolded emphasis added by me):

Because Hillary’s opponent was targeting the party’s progressive base, Bill had to suppress his instinct to hit back to avoid sparking a pro-Bernie backlash among ultra-sensitive modern Democrats. It was frustrating.

He was also learning that the laws of political thermodynamics had changed since he’d last campaigned for Hillary. Maybe it was an anomalous year, or maybe he just hadn’t kept up with the times, but Bill has surprised to hear how little voters wanted to hear a politicians’s response to attack lines. In the old days, he’d get a chance to make his case. He understood that millennials blamed his 1994 crime bill for the mass incarceration that Hillary said she would put an end to, but he struggled to accept younger voters’ reluctance to learn about the history of the law. . . .

We feel your pain, Bubba. We feel your pain.

Part II of this review will come down the road.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

– JVW

78 Responses to “Review of Clinton Campaign Book, Part I”

  1. Let Dems obsessively rehash their rejection at the polls. No candidate could have won promising to continue Pbama”s agenda

    ropelight (2715b3)

  2. DAmn Cell phone.

    ropelight (2715b3)

  3. I guess now that halperin and heileman are sidelined, this retried borscht is what is on display.

    narciso (d1f714)

  4. Hugh Hewitt did an hour long interview with the authors last week. A transcript is posted at his website. That’s a very interesting read too.

    One nugget you haven’t mentioned, but has been reported out already, is that in the aftermath of the 2008 primary loss to Obama, Hillary had her IT people download ALL the emails of all her senior campaign staffers and then she and a couple close confederates reviewed all of them to see if they could find out who was disloyal, and who might be leaking unflattering info to the press.

    Two points — quite an invasion of privacy that she seemed not a bit concerned about. Also, she certainly understood how a collection of email in a server location you don’t control could be subject to being downloaded by outside forces.

    shipwreckedcrew (56b591)

  5. Its strikingly how this ’68 generation, didnt relate this parallel to Mccarthy, or perhaps did so too well, it was Nixon’s apprentice who saw what was going on.

    narciso (d1f714)

  6. I’ve finished the book (and posted my own brief review of it). I pretty much concur with all your observations. I will note — because you haven’t gotten there yet — that Allen & Parmes pretty much buy into the “Russia hacked the election” meme uncritically and actually make a few statements that have since been proven wrong or at least have been substantially undercut. They also trot out the “white supremacists” trope, which does nothing to explain 63 million votes for Trump, given the very small number of honest-to-goodness white supremacists in the US.

    Like you, one of my favorite parlor games while reading the book was to figure out who was dishing the dirt. I have to believe that Bill Clinton His Very Self opened up a fair amount, both because I suspect he was frustrated by Mook and some of the other campaign leaders and because he just has a hard time keeping his mouth closed, considering himself (often quite correctly) the smartest person in the room.

    Looking forward to the rest of your review.

    bfwebster (c3c3ef)

  7. One nugget you haven’t mentioned, but has been reported out already, is that in the aftermath of the 2008 primary loss to Obama, Hillary had her IT people download ALL the emails of all her senior campaign staffers and then she and a couple close confederates reviewed all of them to see if they could find out who was disloyal, and who might be leaking unflattering info to the press.

    Ugh, I totally meant to include that tidbit. Maybe I’ll cover it in Part II. Yeah, that is an astounding revelation, even by the standards of the ugly paranoia in Clintonland. Why anyone works for that shrewish woman and her awful husband is beyond my comprehension, except for that the fact that I detect a sense of neediness in a lot of the Clinton operatives (I may try to address that in Part II as well).

    JVW (42615e)

  8. Ha I suspected as much, I’ve seen enough law and order, tie see the twist.

    narciso (d1f714)

  9. we’re so lucky God sent us Mr. Trump

    i can’t remember a spring this hopeful

    i can’t remember a time when the air was so full of promise

    we’ve been gorgeously blessed indeed

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  10. You are beyond parody, pikachu

    Guess the twist at the end of this season of the
    Magicians.

    Now trump is Nixon’s sorcerers apprentice, he has the spellbok but doesn’t quite have the hang of it.

    narciso (d1f714)

  11. This is what 1.2 billion dollars bought, near dominance on every media

    narciso (d1f714)

  12. So parnes and Allen were still sticking to the pony.

    narciso (d1f714)

  13. I’ve finished the book (and posted my own brief review of it).

    That’s good work, Bruce. I enjoyed your review quite a bit. I’ve been cheating some and jumping to the really fun parts, so I have already read through the election night coverage and a bit of the aftermath. I think you are right that the authors grossly overemphasize the supposed effect that Russia had on the election, but I get the sense that by the very end they would have been hard-pressed to tell you that Hillary deserved to win. Thanks for commenting here.

    JVW (42615e)

  14. left wingers are always against executions
    except when they’re bankers
    then they’re like, “hang that banker from the tallest tree!!!

    Cruz Supporter (102c9a)

  15. i’m getting an error when i click on your x-post link Mr. JVW

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  16. Thanks happyfeet. I just fixed it.

    JVW (42615e)

  17. 5 – shipwrecked:

    “One nugget you haven’t mentioned, but has been reported out already, is that in the aftermath of the 2008 primary loss to Obama, Hillary had her IT people download ALL the emails of all her senior campaign staffers and then she and a couple close confederates reviewed all of them to see if they could find out who was disloyal, and who might be leaking unflattering info to the press.

    Two points — quite an invasion of privacy that she seemed not a bit concerned about. Also, she certainly understood how a collection of email in a server location you don’t control could be subject to being downloaded by outside forces.”

    I saw that last week and was interested in the msm response, which was…….crickets.

    Her losing saved untold thousands from similar invasions of privacy, all while the news media and Hollywood cheered her on. A president for whom rules don’t apply would just be Obama’s third (and maybe fourth) term.

    Imagine if Trump had done it.

    harkin (36810b)

  18. There was an althouse review but I thought it had an entirely nsfw tag

    narciso (d1f714)

  19. Oh, teh misogyny!!!

    Colonel Haiku (ddb5f8)

  20. 5… I linked to that last week and Sammeh said that’s not what happened, so it must not be true

    /sarcasm off

    Colonel Haiku (ddb5f8)

  21. #22 colonel,

    nasty hillary could be caught on a 7-Eleven in-store camera shoplifting a snickers bar and a bag of ruffles, yet sammy would offer three possible explanations for why she put them inside her purse and walked out of the store without paying

    Cruz Supporter (102c9a)

  22. Glenn Reynolds regularly refers to mainstream media reporters as “Democratic operatives with bylines,” but that is the literal truth with respect to the book’s co-author Jonathan Allen, as Politico.com editor in chief John F. Harris explained in 2015 (italics mine):

    This story begins last fall, when Roll Call, one of our competitors, purchased Congressional Quarterly. A round of layoffs followed, and one of the reporters who got the ax — an odd and wrongheaded choice, in my view — was [Jonathan] Allen.

    POLITICO moved quickly to take advantage of available talent by hiring Allen on a three-month contract….

    After he had been here about a month, we gave Allen what we thought would be good news: We wanted him to join us as a regular staff writer, with some extra money to boot. But Allen had other ideas and told us, to our dismay, that he was thinking of leaving journalism. After some more discussion, it became clear he was dreaming not merely of an exit from journalism but of an entrance into a new career as a Capitol Hill political operative.

    Ugh. I sighed when I heard the news. I was not contemptuous of his ambitions. Most journalists, in my experience, are not particularly ideological, but a lot of them nurture Walter Mitty fantasies about what it might be like to play the game rather than cover it.

    ….

    Allen listened politely, but it became obvious he didn’t care much what we thought (see above re: ambitious, curious, contrarian and headstrong). His mind was made up. A few days after he left POLITICO, we learned that he had signed on with the political action committee of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). Oh, well. Win some, lose some.

    It was a couple of weeks ago that we heard from Allen again. After a month on the job, he decided he had made a mistake. He concluded that his talents and temperament were those of a journalist, not an operative. He wanted to come back to POLITICO, if we would have him….

    And of course, they welcomed him back as a “journalist.” Harris explained:

    … I have no doubt about Jonathan Allen’s ability, or my own ability, to separate personal or ideological views from reporting.

    But I am enough of a traditionalist to be wary of the revolving door between politics and journalism. And it seemed likely that Allen’s brief tenure with a Democrat might open us to shots at our fairness by Republicans. I viewed this as a matter of perception, not of reality….

    Talented and fair journalists like George Stephanopoulos have shown that the once hard and fast line between careers in politics and journalism is obsolete. In any event, POLITICO already employs some people who have worked in politics prior to coming to journalism, or who wrote for strongly ideological platforms before reorienting themselves to straight-news journalism.

    This is probably the most important thing to know about “Shattered,” then: It’s written by orthodox, inside-the-inner-circle hard-left progressive Democratic operatives who have been given the wink and nod to go ahead with a Night-of-the-Long-Knives hit piece on the orthodoxy’s recent nominal leader, Hillary Rodham Clinton. I tend to believe that the gossipy facts reported in the book are accurate. But do not expect anything like a correspondence to objective reality in the authors’ worldview. They insist that it was “crazy” or “inexplicable” for Hillary to have set up her private email server scheme, for example, ignoring decades worth of evidence that the Clintons routinely bury and destroy evidence, threaten, cajole, intimidate witnesses, and (especially) lie ruthlessly and reflexively and shamelessly to cover up their graft, corruption, sexual predation and related obstruction of justice. They quote the members of the Clinton campaign as uniformly believing that the idea of Hillary being prosecuted is “a joke,” and the authors appear to completely share that assumption.

    I left myself 75 notes on my Kindle as I read the book, so I may put together a review of my own, but I certainly agree with your preliminary report, JVW. I just want to warn Patterico readers, though, not to buy the book — despite the pleasure of reading all the blue-on-blue gossip and dirty tricks — unless you’re also willing to put up with the continuing aggregation of a world-view from some barely-30-something leftie journalists who were still in grade school when the rest of America was already getting an accurate view of the Clintons’ ethics and morals during Bubba’s presidency.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  23. *continuing aggravation, I meant to write.

    If you buy the book, buy it through Patterico’s Amazon link!

    Beldar (fa637a)

  24. Conservatives just won’t accept it: she lost.

    Get over it.

    And celebrate!! Strawberries and ice cream tonight in the wardroom for dessert.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  25. No, man of mystery, we’re wondering while they are continuing the ‘missile gap’ David ignatius doing his best Joe also impression

    narciso (d1f714)

  26. “I left myself 75 notes on my Kindle as I read the book, so I may put together a review of my own, but I certainly agree with your preliminary report, JVW. I just want to warn Patterico readers, though, not to buy the book — despite the pleasure of reading all the blue-on-blue gossip and dirty tricks — unless you’re also willing to put up with the continuing aggregation of a world-view from some barely-30-something leftie journalists who were still in grade school when the rest of America was already getting an accurate view of the Clintons’ ethics and morals during Bubba’s presidency.”

    That generational gap and the idiocy that accompanies it are what the Clintons thought they could rely on.

    Colonel Haiku (ddb5f8)

  27. Let me ask the crowd – isn’t Clinton exactly what everyone assumed Trump would be? Arrogant, out of touch, paranoid…etc.?

    Tenn (131b65)

  28. 12/Col. that’s the replacement of grandfathers and crazy uncles effect, particularly in the driftless region (upper Mississipi) and parts of MI/OH. the staunch new dealers up through the yellow-man-bad generation is being replaced by the Reagan-was-my-first vote and desert fatigues generation.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  29. After the election of Trump even the birds sing a little different.

    More like they mean it.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  30. Good stuff as always, Beldar. I mentioned in my post teasing this book that Allen was a Vox juiceboxer, so that’s really all any of us needed to know to understand that he’s a committed lefty. And I’ve already noticed the authors’ predilection for deciding that the email story could have been a nonissue had Hillary confronted it earlier, or that turning Bill loose in the Rust Belt might have salvaged those states for her even though it has never been demonstrated that Bill Clinton can win votes for anyone other than Bill Clinton. But I do get the sense that they both came into this project with a genuine admiration and respect for Hillary Clinton, and over the course of following her for a year had at least some of the scales removed from their eyes and came to understand just how badly she plays outside of her (and their own) urban elite bubble. I may want to come back to that later, and I do hope that you write up your thoughts on this book as I would be most interested in reading those too.

    JVW (42615e)

  31. 2 –

    Virtually everyone… … pretty much begged Hillary to come clean about her use of a private email server and to give a forthright and sincere apology for having used it. It was Hillary’s own arrogance and persecution complex that compelled her to hold out for months….
    By the time the apology had come, the Hillary crew had been lying about the particulars of the imbroglio for months….

    Somewhere in a place deep down next to the spot that settled for marrying a serial philanderer, Clinton knew she didn’t deserve to be the leader of the free world. Even she shudders at the mess a Hillary Clinton Presidency would be.
    Doesn’t trust herself, and rightly so.

    papertiger (c8116c)

  32. @ Col. H (#28): Yes, you’re right about the generational ignorance gap and the Clintons’/Dems’ reliance on it. This book is the followup to a February 2014 book by the same two authors about Hillary’s grand successes as SecState (preliminary to her 2016 presidential run), HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton, an rather ironic subtitle in lieu of the emails controversies and political last gasp they ended up writing about in “Shattered.”

    Keep in mind that Allen & Parnes were picked to be the authorized “house biographers” of the Clinton campaign as their reward for the prior book. This new book was originally intended to celebrate Hillary’s victory with her and her chums. But it morphed — mostly after the election, obviously; they probably planned something like “Shattering the Glass Ceiling” but had to cut it back to just “Shattered” given how things turned out.

    Now it’s a nasty, snarky free-for-all to trash Hillary, Bill, and selected Clintonistas. In general, those least trashed are people like John Podesta, who had close Obama ties independent of his relationship with the Clintons. Elizabeth Warren only makes cameos, but it’s obvious — particularly from the last time in the book that she’s mentioned — that Allen & Parnes are auditioning to be her 2020 campaign biographers.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  33. You will not read in this book, for example — despite all its many references to the problems with emails leaked after Podesta’s gmail account was hacked — to the fact that John Podesta’s Windows 8 password was “p@ssword” or that he fell for an obvious phishing email and dutifully gave the would-be hackers his own gmail password.

    I think those are relevant facts in evaluating John Podesta’s role in the success, or failure, of the Clinton-Kaine ticket in the general election. Any remotely ethical journalist would have mentioned those facts as part of otherwise comprehensive recounting of the drip-drip emails controversy.

    But it would make Podesta look stupid, instead of gruff and acerbic and wise and grizzled and all those other tough-sounding adjectives that people like to read about themselves when they’re deciding who they want to leak to in the future.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  34. 16.left wingers are always against executions

    Hm.

    JP (f1742c)

  35. I think those are relevant facts in evaluating John Podesta’s role in the success, or failure, of the Clinton-Kaine ticket in the general election. Any remotely ethical journalist would have mentioned those facts as part of otherwise comprehensive recounting of the drip-drip emails controversy.

    “Help, police, the Russians broke into my house and stole my jewelry.”
    “Well how did they get in to the house?”
    “I left the doors unlocked and windows open when I went on vacation for a week.”
    “Uh, ok — and where was the location of the jewelry that they took?”
    “It was displayed in my front window with a spotlight on it. Oh please do help me, officer; I’m completely without fault here and it’s just beastly that the Russians would behave like this!”

    JVW (42615e)

  36. hey appear for all purposes to be progressive Democrats who came into this project with a genuine admiration for Her Clintonic Majesty, the Once, Current, and Future Inevitable Next President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton, hdr22@clintonemail.com

    This can’t be an genuine internal feeling – it has to be because it is in their interest to be loyal. And what that, all by itself, means, is that the book is not honest.

    One general assumption that can be made about these books are that the characters who are most cooperative with the authors…

    in the case of Clinton, either don’t really know the truth, or are lying.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  37. Keep in mind that much of the substance of the reporting in that book was being done real-time during the campaign. Yes, they hurriedly put together post-election interviews on the campaign autopsy and the aftermath. But what they were preparing to write for months was a book that celebrated of the first woman to be elected President of the US.

    I think it was an interview Hugh Hewitt did of Jim Vandehei a few weeks before the election — a founder of Politico who has since moved on and founded Axios — where Hewitt asked for a guess from Vandehei about how many reporters covering the Clinton campaign were at the same time working on books that would come out in the aftermath of the election. Vandehei said his guess would be at least a dozen. He said there were a lot of political reporters who felt like they missed out on the opportunity to write a behind-the-scenes account about the election of the first Black President, and they weren’t going to miss out on Hillary.

    So this is certainly one of those books which ended much differently than the authors expected while they were gathering their material.

    shipwreckedcrew (56b591)

  38. I just don’t believe any of this inside story explanationa of what Bill Clinton and everybody else was thinking. I take it that they don’t take you inside Hillary’s mind, though. It might be harder to explain things if they had to tell you what Huillary was thinking, but that’s all right for any of the otehr charecters.

    They do portray Hillary Clinton as making all the decisions, right? Which is, I think, another lie.

    I noticed a few problems with their tales from the review.

    1. There doesn’t seem to be anything in it, according to your review, about the Clinton effort to dissuade Joe Biden from running, which happened.

    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/clinton-quietly-trying-discourage-biden-2016-bid/

    Some of that could be because some of their sources were not part of it and didn’t even know about it, but some of it could be careful omissions.

    I think Biden at first thought he had more time. The Beau Biden deathbed story also may not be true.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-no-2016-death-bed-wish-from-son-beau-biden/

    In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden knocked down reports that his son Beau Biden pleaded from his death bed that his father take one more shot at the White House.

    “Beau, from the time he was in his 30’s — or actually his late 20’s — he and Hunter were my most reliable advisers,” Biden said of his two sons to CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell.

    “Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win,” Biden said. “But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run, like, win one for the Gipper.’ It wasn’t anything like that.”

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  39. 2.

    Virtually everyone in the Clinton Crime Family, from Palmieri to Podesta to Neera Tanden (who succeeded Podesta as president of the Center for American Progress) to unnamed major campaign donors to Bill Clinton himself, pretty much begged Hillary to come clean about her use of a private email server and to give a forthright and sincere apology for having used it…

    I simply do not believe that everyone including Bill Clinton !!? pretty much begged Hillary to come clean about her use of a private email server.

    It is possible that some relative outsiders, like perhaps Jennifer Palmieri wanted that. Those who knew the true reason, of course did not.

    It may also be that Bill Clinton told a frightened, unconfident and reluctant Hillary Clinton back in March, 2015, that she had to make a public statement and could not avoid the issue. That doesn’t mean that the statement resembled the truth.

    Hillary did not hold out for months – she gave a press conference within days of the first new York Times story, and actually advanced her announcement for president because of it.

    The New York Times broke the story on March 2, 2015 and it appeared on Tuesday March 3, 2015, on Page A1:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clintons-use-of-private-email-at-state-department-raises-flags.html?_r=0

    Acording to CNN’s timeline:

    http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/28/politics/hillary-clinton-email-timeline/

    March 4, 2015 — After 48 hours of silence, Clinton tweets: “I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible….

    …March 10, 2015 — Clinton holds a 20-minute “press encounter” at the United Nations..

    I don’t know what apology you mean taht she eventually offered. The one thing I do know that Bill Clinton avoided the use of the word “apology” and try to get his opponents to use that word.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  40. narciso @4. It is not news who they released, and what they were guilty of, although White House officials tried to mispresent what they had been convicted of (it was something more than just breaking sanctions in some cases – it wasn’t just doing business but what kind of business.)

    The news is that the Justice Department dropped investigations or charges of 14 Iranians who were at the time beyond the reach of U.S. law.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  41. 24. Beldar (fa637a) — 4/25/2017 @ 11:26 am

    I tend to believe that the gossipy facts reported in the book are accurate.

    Not me.

    I tend to believe that any anecdote of that nature is a lie, intended to make Hillary Clinton and some of her top aides, appear less calculating, less cynical, less criminal, and more human, and to hide the real explanation, either of what they are explaining in the anecdite, or to lend support for an explanation for something else.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  42. Beldar:

    But do not expect anything like a correspondence to objective reality in the authors’ worldview. They insist that it was “crazy” or “inexplicable” for Hillary to have set up her private email server scheme,

    Now how could they possibly believe that?

    I bet they don’t even raise any form of dishonest motives as something they want to refute, yet surely they knew some of the public believed that. In an election campaign, this had to be avery important factor.

    They quote the members of the Clinton campaign as uniformly believing that the idea of Hillary being prosecuted is “a joke,” and the authors appear to completely share that assumption.

    A lie, because they must have been concerned.

    Even if she were completely innocent of breaking any law, they would have been concerned. So this is a LIE.

    …a world-view from some barely-30-something leftie journalists who were still in grade school

    I think it is possible that this book was written for people who are now in grade school.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  43. I don’t know what apology you mean taht she eventually offered.

    Follow my link in that very sentence, Sammy. She uttered a very arch and opaque “I’m sorry,” which could have referred to her decision to use the private server or it could have referred to the hassle it was causing her campaign. It was a typical Hillary move. But you are correct that people in the Hillary orbit might have been led to believe that Bill was their ally in terms of convincing her to apologize, but perhaps at the end of the day he refused to broach it with her. He’s good at having it both ways.

    JVW (42615e)

  44. 15(JVW): by the very end they would have been hard-pressed to tell you that Hillary deserved to win

    I agree completely, which is why the book is so damning to Clinton. It’s very clear that the authors are staunch liberals who wanted and expected (as of early 2015) Clinton to win the presidency, and who have no sympathy for Republicans at all and a great deal of disdain for Trump. Yet they lay out a very convincing, well-documented, behind-the-scenes case that Clinton was a dishonest, angry, distant candidate who had no clear idea as to why she should be President except that she someone had earned it.

    And yet she came very close to winning indeed. ..bruce..

    bfwebster (c3c3ef)

  45. These books are written for themselves, unfortunately like barnacles they end up in the public libraries.
    http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=369458

    narciso (d1f714)

  46. “I don’t know what apology you mean taht she eventually offered.”

    45 JVWL

    Follow my link in that very sentence, Sammy. She uttered a very arch and opaque “I’m sorry,” which could have referred to her decision to use the private server

    That was no apology, and she’s very specific about what she says she is sorry over. And that is not having a state.gov address.

    She says that was a mistake, that she’s sorry about it, that she takes respoonsibility (the way janet rebnno took responsibility for the Waco fire) and that she’s trying to be as transoparent as she possibly can.

    This is no apology. She only admits to it being a mistake not to use two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for State Department work.

    She also claimed it was was “aboveboard” (What a lie – it was a total secret) and was allowed under the State Department’s rules. Not quite. And if it was within the rules when she started, it wasn’t by the end of 2009. She chastised an ambassador for doing that.

    She claims everybody that she communicated in government was aware of it. That would actually seem to be a tautology, ( of course anyone that she communicated with by e-mail knew it was not a state.gov address) but actually not all people were aware that she had no other e-mail address, particularly in the White House. As for the State DepartmentBut. A lot of others knew of no address whatsover and couldn’t email her. And tghis was so unknown, that the Benghazi committee jhad to slowly discover it.

    Then she says that nothing she ever sent or received was marked classified at the time which is almost true. It was not possible to send something from the classified system to her server. A few things were marked classified when they were written like her schedule one time. It doesn’t mean she didn’t send clasified informaiton nor that she didn’t reveal anything in person in her office, or by telephone.

    Then she claims she’s being transparent, supposedly proving that by asking that all her work emails to the government be released to the public, ignoring the question if they were all her work e-mail, and if she had, let;’s say, emailed inside information to anybody outside the government. Of course taht could have bene done if she had two separate addresses, but the reason she had this server was she wasn’t sure, or Bill wasn’t sure, that nobody would ever make a mistake and send e-mail on the wrong system.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  47. Where’s Teddy White when we need him?

    I am most interested to learn how the book dealt with the incident in NYC when HRC left an event early and collapsed into the arms of helpers while waiting to board a hastily-summoned van (in sweltering 70-degree and sea breeze weather lol). Then, she had that miraculous recovery and greeted that little girl outside that home, NOT ER or clinic, a few hours later for allllll the cameras to see.

    I believe this peek into HRC reality had a very significant effect on potential Dem voters.

    Ed from SFV (3400a5)

  48. 49. It will probably have some made up story about confusion in her campaign and about a bad, but not ethically objectionable, decision by Hillary Clinton which they will “explain” in detail.

    But they may also not go into it at all.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  49. Ed from SFV, do you want a spoiler?

    Beldar (fa637a)

  50. Looks like someone snaked Patterico on the Lahren butt warmer scoop over at red state… http://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2017/04/24/legal-teams-search-for-moles-behind-leak-of-tomi-lahrens-butt-warmer-heats-up/?utm_campaign=twitchywidget

    Colonel Haiku (ddb5f8)

  51. I think it is possible that this book was written for people who are now in grade school.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42) — 4/25/2017 @ 2:27 pm

    They may be in grade school, Sammeh, but they can spell better than you usually do.

    Colonel Haiku (ddb5f8)

  52. It’s a joy watching conservatives pick over why ‘she’ lost.
    It’s a distraction from picking over why ‘he’ isn’t winning.

    But what a show!
    What ratings!
    100 episodes by Saturday.

    Syndication a certainty!

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  53. Its like Dr. Evils first campaign, which has become a textbook in what nit to do.

    narciso (d1f714)

  54. Hillary lost because nobody liked her. Not even people who voted for her. Maybe you missed this, but the last month of her campaign had people out there saying, literally (that means it happened exactly how I’m saying it happened): “She’s not coming over to your house! You don’t have to like her. Do you like this country? You better get out there and vote.”

    nk (dbc370)

  55. i like it when bad things happen to hillary

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  56. An IRS agent stops at a ranch in Texas and talks with an old rancher. He tells the rancher, “I need to inspect your ranch as part of your tax audit.”
    The rancher says, “OK , but don’t go in that field over there,” as he points out the location.
    The IRS agent verbally explodes saying, “Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me.” Reaching into his pocket, he removes his badge and pushes it into the rancher’s face. “See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish. Anywhere! On any property! No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?” The rancher nods politely, apologizes, and goes about his chores.

    A short time later, the old rancher hears loud screams and sees the IRS agent running for his life chased by the rancher’s big champion bull. With every step, the bull is gaining ground on the agent, and it seems likely that he’ll get gored before he reaches safety. The agent is terrified.

    The rancher throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs, “Your badge! Show him your BADGE!”

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  57. 56… hasn’t that conclusion been stated dozens of times on this blog?

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  58. 54.It’s a joy watching conservatives pick over why ‘she’ lost.
    It’s a distraction from picking over why ‘he’ isn’t winning.

    Conservatives don’t pick over why ‘she’ lost, we know why. She’s a despicable pig. It’s the leftists that can’t see it because they are it.

    And every day ‘he’ is in office is the definition of winning!

    Rev.Hoagie® (785e38)

  59. The biggest story so far this week was the one about the people Obama bribed Iran to free back in January of 2016 that ran in Politico. Most of these people were responsible arranging for or providing Iran with the various technologies that were supposedly outlawed by Obama’s sh1t deal with Iran. Just one more horrible thing that Obama lied about and perpetrated on America.

    If Obama had gone on record as committing himself to weakening America and putting her in a disadvantaged position vis-a-vis her enemies and her role in the world, what would he have done differently over his two terms?

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  60. Conservatives don’t pick over why ‘she’ lost, we know why. She’s a despicable pig. It’s the leftists that can’t see it because they are it.

    Yup. With all due respect to Beldar, JVW and Bruce Webster, this book does strike me as a post-morted by two lefties and Hillary fans trying to deal with Stage 3 of their grief: “Bargaining”. “If only we had gone to the doctor sooner.” “If we had ….” Etc.

    Will there be two more books for Stage 4 (Depression) and Stage 5 (Acceptance), you think? 😉

    nk (dbc370)

  61. *post-mortem*

    nk (dbc370)

  62. The Obama administration interfered with federal agents apprehension of seven of these fugitives before Iran took them into custody and then later freed.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  63. @56. Hillary lost because nobody likes her.

    That is Tedtoo’s excuse, too.

    Mawdie lost because she was an incredibly lousy candidate with the bellowing voice of a nagging fishwife who reminded every man alive of their finger-wagging first wife from 1975, clad in a double knit pantsuit, lecturing them to take out the trash in the middle of the 4th quarter of Monday Night Football as Cosell was on a rant and Meredith critiqued the jiggling pompoms of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  64. 62(nk): Oh, I don’t disagree at all. As I said (in my ‘quibbles’ section), Allen & Parnes never really explain how Trump managed to pull in 63 million votes. They do, however, note that Trump really did focus on winning the Electoral College, while Mook was trying to be too clever by half.

    On the other hand, I’m not sure we’ll ever see a book by liberal journalists ‘accepting’ Trump’s victory. ..bruce..

    bfwebster (c3c3ef)

  65. @60. Except you do. The election was over nearly half a year ago.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  66. 65 – Satan in a full figure pantsuit lost because she was a corrupt, dishonest and greedy succubus who was too incompetent to cover up her crimes and who spread terror not only among her enemies but also those most loyal to her. Incredibly the msm disqualified itself by declaring her the most qualified candidate ever

    Fixed.

    harkin (dbcc1e)

  67. 51 – Beldar – YES, please and thank you. Spoil away!

    Ed from SFV (3400a5)

  68. She’s actually a shell run by tiny aliens like the arquilliANs,?

    narciso (d1f714)

  69. nasty hillary never could articulate why she should be elected president
    on the other hand, mr donald told people that he wanted to make america great again

    Cruz Supporter (102c9a)

  70. Book review in Jared Kushner’s newspaper (now being run by other members of his family)

    http://observer.com/2017/04/hillary-clinton-shattered-book-release/

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  71. Another New York Observer article about the book:

    http://observer.com/2017/04/hillary-clinton-staffers-refute-shattered-book-release

    Even if they were the sources, what’s in the book is only for those people who want to find something at least wrong with Hillary Clinton.

    For true fans, there’s this by Christina Reynolds, who wants to argue there wasn’t infighting and they weren’t mercenaries with questionable motives who lacked a loyalty to a candidate, and also the book said she was the Research Director, which she wasn’t, but a man named Tony Carrk was.

    https://medium.com/@creynoldsnc/shattered-or-contorted-what-a-new-book-gets-wrong-about-the-clinton-campaign-7c566a4fa786

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  72. Book review from the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, Apr. 18, 2017, where it was entitled ‘Hillary The Unready.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-hillary-lost-the-white-house-1492469363

    Mrs. Clinton herself was inaccessible to almost everyone but Ms. Abedin, whose role was never clarified..

    That part of the sentence may be true.

    Shattered” offers a number of gratifying revelations. Among them: Mrs. Clinton’s tinkering with a certain computer server. Not that server—a different one. After losing to Mr. Obama in the protracted 2008 primary, she was convinced that she had lost because some staffers—she wasn’t sure who—had been disloyal. So she “instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the [email] messages sent and received by top staffers.”

    That part may be mostly true. I would like to knwo, or guess, what she thought might have been leaked. This was apaprently told to the authors as the “explanation” for her getting a private e-mail server.

    Mrs. Clinton’s “clear, dead aim was to box Biden out.”

    So the book does say Hillary made an effort to prevent Biden from running, although what they are talking about here is hiring away possible staff.

    Sammy Finkelman (6f9f42)

  73. 22. Colonel Haiku (ddb5f8) — 4/25/2017 @ 10:59 am

    5… I linked to that last week and Sammeh said that’s not what happened, so it must not be true

    /sarcasm off </blockquote, I said that's not the reason she set up her private e-mail server, also taht it wouldn't be a reason because what she did was legal, becuse she owned it, but just anybody going through her state.gov email (if she had one) would be illegal.

    And she doesn't need to have done what she did with the email of her staff in 2008 to know that it would be subject to subpoeas nd Freedom of Information Act requests.

    Sammy Finkelman (54fd00)

  74. If you recall her last research director, judd legum, out of Georgetown law( I’ve dubbed him dadgum) is now at think regress.

    She diesnt actually counter any of the claims.

    narciso (d1f714)


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