The Clinton E-Mail Scandal [TEASER]
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Oh, shit. Fuck. I forgot I needed a zinger. Do something problematic. Let's start off on a good foot. Okay. More like shrillery Clinton. Am I right? I can't tell if I want to do a pure joke or something that touches on actual commentary to make it clear that I hate Hillary Clinton. We are out to a good start, Peter. Holy shit.

I've been a little bit worried about this one. Same. Same. We may not get to the email scandal. We may just talk about Hillary Clinton the entire time as like a social construction. Maybe the zinger is just me being like, Mike, this is the episode where I get canceled. Oh, okay. Do you want to do that? Emails? All right. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right.

Peter. Michael. What do you know about the Hillary Clinton email scandal of 2016? Yeah, you know, this isn't like when she suggested that we rig Palestinian elections, Michael. This is serious. So the genesis of this episode is that when we were recording the liberal fascism episode, we had like that chapter about how like Hillary Clinton is fascist. And then we ended up talking for like 45 minutes about the social construction of Hillary Clinton and like...

doing a bunch of other sort of side topics. And then we eventually decided that we need to either talk about Hillary Clinton for like two seconds or two hours. Yeah. And so this is the two hours. Yeah. And we discussed this episode a little bit in advance. And you said that you don't want to spend the entire episode

re-litigating the 2016 election and i said i made it quite clear i think you said no that i do want to spend the entire episode re-litigating the 2016 election fuck fuck

I was going to do a bunch of scoping. I'm like, I'm going to keep Peter on topic. How do I trick Peter into staying on the emails? But this might not work. This will be a polarizing episode for both us as individuals and our listeners, because Michael, moderate centrist king, has a rich appreciation for Hillary Clinton. Yeah.

Centrist swine, Michael Hobbs. I get this all the time. Yeah, I've heard the term reactionary centrist floated. We finally have a person to apply it to, Michael Hobbs. So, okay, I did sort of carve out some space at the beginning to talk about Hillary Clinton in general, simply because I

Whenever she comes up in like any context with other people, I'm sort of like clenched. Yeah. I'm like, are they like a reasonable person who dislikes Hillary Clinton for like kind of justifiable reasons? Or are they someone who dislikes her for like the crazy reasons? And so I have a feeling that many of our listeners are probably feeling some similar declenchment. I have –

Many notes. I've spent weeks reading about her. I have bullet points under the non disingenuous case against Hillary Clinton and the disingenuous case against Hillary Clinton. Yeah. You know, I feel that tug of war in my soul. Right. Where part of me really does hate Hillary Clinton. And part of me is defensive of her because so many of her critics are.

Absolutely ludicrous people. Deranged. And also one of the things – I mean there are many grand tragedies of the 2016 election. But one of the tragedies especially of this email scandal and this bullshit like the Clinton Foundation stuff and all the sort of fake criticism is that it totally overshadowed any legitimate criticism. Right. Like the Clinton kill list. Yeah.

Here we go. Here we go. Clench over, Peter. Now I know what category you're in. My own prep also took me weeks, and I will now be walking person by person through the Clinton kill list. I did actually want to start with like the—

the non-disingenuous case against Hillary Clinton, I think that maybe this is a spicy take. Ultimately, she's like a fairly standard center-left politician with all of the good and all of the bad that comes along with that. I agree with that, except I would say center-right. Okay, well,

by American standards, by American standards here. Not conceding. So in the 90s, she supports the crime bill. She voted for the Patriot Act. She supported the war in Iraq. She votes for No Child Left Behind. She opposed gay marriage for much of her career in public life. She does a bunch of like

violence in video games shit after Columbine. She supported NAFTA. She continues to support charter schools and the death penalty. Even now, it appears she doesn't favor legalizing weed. She wants to like legalize medical marijuana, but like leave it up to the states, which I think is like the biggest fucking slam dunk to just like legalize fucking weed nationally. Like it's ridiculous.

As recently as 2007, she's against giving driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. When she's running for Senate, she does a bunch of like ugly, like anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Her, you know, centrist plans for her presidency were all this like baroque systems of like tax credits and shit. Like this, the thing that drives us nuts about Democrats, it's always like really complicated, like means testing levers and pulleys and shit rather than just like giving everybody money and then like taxing the rich people back if it's that fucking important to you. I believe she still says this now, but she definitely said it in 2016 that like single payer health care would never work.

She has deep ties to the financial sector, as we all know from these like talks that she gave at Goldman Sachs. I feel like all of these are like perfectly reasonable reasons to just be like, I would rather vote for somebody who doesn't have these positions. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and...

You know, to put a lot of my criticism of her in perspective, so you sort of understand my basic position. I consider her to be a neoconservative in the sort of traditional sense when it comes to foreign policy. Right. And her positions towards the Middle East have always been hawkish, lacked regard for sovereignty in the Middle East. Yeah.

Her and Obama's approach in Libya was brutal. Again, wild that we talked about her fucking emails for a year and a half and did not talk about like her record as secretary of state.

When like we were like disastrously bungling the war in Afghanistan and when like there are now emails that we know about where it's like they knew about the CIA drone strikes and they were like, should we object to these? Like maybe one or two went too far. Right. I don't know that she's like any worse than a lot of other centrist Democrats, honestly, but it's like this entire generation.

Of Democrats, you look back on their record from like the 90s, the early 2000s, and like it looks really fucking bad. She's an avatar for that third way bullshit, you know, an avatar for a Democratic establishment that tried to hedge right on nearly every single issue from domestic economic issues to foreign policy. Right. Yeah.

And, you know, we have seen where that got us. I think we're roughly on the same page as far as like, I think it is great to judge public figures by their record in public life. Yeah. There's like a sickness among journalists where they think that just because something is secret, it's important.

And I think that there are cases of this happening, right? Like Watergate and shit. But in general, most politicians are fairly easy to judge by what they are or are not doing for the public as far as their votes and their speeches and shit. We have this thing where in public, Hillary Clinton is a centrist politician and has gotten a lot of stuff wrong and cringely, extremely wrong over the years. But then according to the right and weirdly to the left-wing media...

They think that there's like this iceberg of like corruption and murder and graft underneath it. And like there has never been any evidence of that. She's also a politician who is the subject of more complex.

Yeah, absolutely.

As someone who's like a critic of hers from the left is that you can't possibly disentangle all of this. Yeah, of course. If you go back and look at like the media coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign, so clearly just like should women be allowed to talk? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, totally. You know, what we talked about in the liberal fascism episode was her like.

writings about children's rights. Yeah. And a ton of the criticism that was levied at her in the early 90s was just like, should first ladies be able to talk about substantive policy? Right. Yeah. She was pushing for...

Expanded health care coverage. Meanwhile, Nancy Reagan was doing war on drugs shit, which didn't clock as political. I mean, this kind of leads us to the disingenuous case against Hillary Clinton. What really fascinated me is the pattern with Hillary Clinton is the same pattern that I've seen in moral panics.

over and over again where it's like people take these examples of fairly benign behavior and they use them as a metaphor for much worse things of which there is no evidence. So I found a Christopher Hitchens article from 2008 where

Which was called The Case Against Hillary Clinton. And he's like really going to like lay it out. Yeah, yeah. I remember this. And his opening anecdote was about this thing from 1995 when she was first lady and she was in London for something. And she met Sir Edmund Hillary who was one of the two first people to climb Mount Everest. The other person was Tenzing Norgay.

And she's like making small talk with Edmund Hillary. And she's like, hey, did you know you're the reason I have two L's in my name? My mom was a big fan of yours and she named me Hillary after you, Sir Edmund Hillary, right? This somehow was like on tape or whatever, ended up in press reports. People look into it and it turns out Hillary was born in 1947 and Edmund Hillary didn't climb Mount Everest until 1953. She would have been six years old. And so there's no way that she could have been named after Hillary, whatever, right?

Christopher Hitchens uses this as like, look at what she'll do to gain power. Look at the way she manipulates people around her. And then of course, if you actually look into it,

Hillary Clinton had never used this anecdote anywhere else. It didn't show up in like her biographies. It appears that her mom like told her this at some point. Which, by the way, is what immediately came to my mind when you told me the timeline. I was like, oh, I bet her mom just said it. A benign explanation is available for this kind of thing. But it's like people immediately leap to the like, look how fucking bad she is. Right. I listen to a right wing podcast about this. And they were like, they want this long tirade. They were like, she's fucking sick.

She's a fucking psychopath. It was like so brutal. And what they were talking about was registering a web domain not in her name. One of her aides registered a URL and like used his own name on the registration papers. It's very funny to go full bitch eating crackers on Hillary Clinton. I know. I know. I know.

It's like I do think that like an anecdote can be a symbol of something much larger. Yeah. But you have to have evidence of the much larger thing. You can't just constantly point to symbols. Like with Trump, you can tell these little anecdotes about like he lies about his like golf score or something. And it's like symbolic of the way that he fucking lies about everything. But we have evidence that he fucking lies about everything.

Right. With Clinton, it's like there's this deep corruption, but like we never actually get the deep corruption. We just get these surface level little symbols of it. Also, like if a little white lie in conversation is...

is enough to declare a politician a psychopath, then they all are. Yeah, exactly. I mean, is there a single politician you couldn't find an anecdote like this about? I also want to go out of my way to say that, like, she would have been way better than Donald Trump. Like, it's not close. Center left politicians are, in fact, preferable to far right politicians. Right. Like, her platform on health care, did I love it? No, it was way better than the status quo.

She wanted to raise the minimum wage to 12 bucks. Do I wish that was higher? Yes. Is 12 bucks better than 750? Also, yes. The argument that Trump wouldn't have been that bad was ludicrous at the time. And it's more ludicrous in retrospect. Yes. It's a ludicrous argument. So, Peter, what is your understanding of like the actual facts of the email scandal? Yeah. Hillary Clinton had...

private email. Well, I'm going to use terms like servers, which I don't actually really know. Yeah, I still don't know. I've been reading about this for two weeks. I don't know what the fuck a server is. It's fine. Hillary Clinton had like private email servers. She used her Blackberry to communicate with her aides and colleagues, etc. That's how she did emails. Yes. And then she gets to the State Department and the State Department, generally speaking...

would require or have guidelines that you use their servers, right? But she does not transition to their servers. She maintains her own BlackBerry. She doesn't want to use their computers.

And there is a question about confidential information, classified information, right? Because at least theoretically, there could have been classified information being shared in these emails on unprotected or less protected servers. Yes. That is my memory of this off the dome. That was pretty good.

The way that Clinton describes it in her book, she says, it was a dumb mistake, but an even dumber scandal, which I kind of agree with. I agree with that, too. But it also annoys me that she would put it that way.

We'll see if this episode makes you like her more or less. I do think that this is a very understandable story when you hear it in chronological order. If we just go over what actually happened, the striking thing about Clinton's book, Comey's book, and there's various investigations of this over the years is that they really don't disagree on the facts. So I think

The first thing to know if we like rewind all the way back is that like a lot of politicians don't use email very much. Yeah. Part of this is like to avoid fucking records requests because they're like all corrupt fucking dingbats. And some of it is like they're just all old as fuck. So like John McCain did not send or receive an email his entire life. Yeah. And especially when you think about like 2008. Yeah. I honestly think the fact that Clinton is 62 when she becomes president.

Secretary of State is like very important to the story and like really reminds me of like all of the boomers in my life and like how they use technology. She says in her book, she says, I didn't send a single email when I was in the White House as first lady or during most of my first term in the U.S. Senate. I've never used a computer at home or at work.

It was not until 2006 that I began sending and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone. I had a plain old AT&T account like millions of other people and used it both for work and personal email. That was my system and it worked for me. So this is what she's used to. All of her emails, professional, personal, everything comes and goes out of the BlackBerry.

right? She's never used a computer. I mean, she's never had one anyway. Yeah. I think it's very like hard for like people like us who don't have like teams. You don't have a team? To understand like what it is like the daily reality of these people. Most of us just assume that she's like sending and receiving emails all the time when now that we've seen all the fucking emails, the

vast majority of emails are like one sentence or they're like forwarding it and be like, FYI. Yeah. They're not substantive. They're not thoughtful. It's like everything takes place in like in-person meetings or phone calls. Like she says her and Bill do not, like they've never sent an email to each other. They call because they're boomers. Yeah, that makes sense. So in 2007, Bill Clinton has a server installed in his house that

It's not clear whether either of these boomers knew what that meant or whatever. They're just like, okay, this is going to make it easier, more secure, it's encrypted, whatever.

Clinton starts using HRL5 at my singular dot blackberry dot net as an email address, which is the most boomer fucking email address I've ever heard in my life. So that's the situation when on January 21st, she is sworn in as secretary of state. Man, this could have all been avoided if Obama wasn't the type to just want to be liked by everyone. So he was like, look, Hillary just ran a really weirdly racist primary campaign against me. I will make her secretary of state.

Yet another election I refuse to relitigate. We're not touching 2008 in this fucking episode. Well, guess what? I'm bringing up the Somali garb picture that her team circulated. Jesus Christ. This is all stored within a very specific compartment of my brain. Yeah, on your servers, on your little brain, your little contempt brain servers.

So she starts the Secretary of State. She has this BlackBerry email account that she's using that I think everybody sort of knows is like super fucking janky. And dealing with classified information is just a giant fucking hassle. Like she has to lock up her BlackBerry in some like weird safe when she goes into work because they're afraid that like the Russians or whoever is going to hack it and turn it into a microphone thing.

And it's like, OK, so I just don't have my device with me at work all day. And like, I don't really know how to use a computer. Like, it's just this giant fucking hassle. By the way, whenever I hear about the like machinations of our intelligence operations, it always makes me a little bit anxious. Like, do we have technology that can sense whether the Russians are hacking the secretary of state's phone? It's like, no, just put it in the no hack box. Yeah.

And then one of the dark ironies of this is that this entire thing is about email security, right? Like whether it's being stored on like private servers or government servers or whatever. The State Department servers were hacked. Her personal server was not hacked. The Pentagon was also hacked during this time. So it's like the entire thing just fucking dissolves into smoke where it's like, what are we actually talking about here? Like she put them on a more secure server. Or like at least a server that was less of a target, right? Although it was also a target at that time.

But yes. Yeah, fair enough. So on January 23rd, 2009, two days into her tenure as secretary of state. I'm going to email this to you or I'll text this to you. This is from the FBI report. OK.

On January 23rd, 2009, Clinton contacted former Secretary of State Colin Powell via email to inquire about his use of a BlackBerry while he was Secretary of State. In his email reply, Powell warned Clinton that if it became public that Clinton had a BlackBerry and she used it to do business...

Clinton indicated to the FBI that she understood Powell's comments to mean any work-related communications would be government records.

This is fascinating to me. At the heart of this entire thing, we have Colin Powell, the previous Secretary of State, admitting that he used a fucking AOL.com address the entire time that he was Secretary of State. And he says, I got around it by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data. Yeah.

This guy did what Hillary Clinton is accused of. Right. He specifically skirted the rules so that he would not be subject to FOIA requests and shit. To this day, we still do not have emails from like the early 2003 period, which like I would kind of like to see. Hey, going to lie to the UN, LOL. What's interesting is he tells her he's like, yeah, just use use an external email. Like just, you know, here's how to get around it, whatever. Clinton does not take his advice. Mm hmm.

She starts using this email address, hdr22 at clintonemail.com. Clintonemail.com? I know. Is that? I know. It's kind of amazing it didn't get hacked because it's so fucking obvious. Right. I feel like if you found that domain, you would assume it was like a troll who was sitting on the domain rather than the actual one. So she starts using this email.

personal account, the sort of the kludge that she comes up with to comply with eventual records requests and to only have one device with her is she basically moves all of her correspondence, personal and professional, onto this one email address.

So for her entire time as secretary of state, she does not use a state.gov email address and all of her emails. So like she's – her mother dies while she's in office and like her dealings with like the estate, emailing Chelsea like how's life, all of her personal emails and all of her like the president of this country just got assassinated emails are all on the same fucking account.

So to me, the best argument that like she didn't do this to avoid scrutiny or for like any like corrupt, deep, evil reason is that this is such a fucking stupid solution to the problem. She is ensuring that.

Right.

And then she was like shunting people to this like secret personal address. She's like, OK, this is spicy shit. Like email me the kill list to like Hillary at Clinton email dot com. Right. That's not what she was doing. It was all in one place. It seems to me like what we're building toward. And this is sort of how I've always viewed it, as that this was essentially just an act of medium negligence, maybe medium to high, depending on how much you care about national security. I would say medium to high.

Yeah. I guess what I say by medium, what I mean by like medium to high is like if I were to combine my work and personal emails, the stakes are quite low. You know what I mean? Whereas like the worst case scenario here is relatively –

That, I guess. Well, also, I mean, one thing that has like genuinely given me nightmares about this is that it's very clear that like no one on her team thought about this or like thought it was a remotely big deal at the time, which, you know, looking back, obviously, is like very silly. But at the time, people were basically like,

Okay, it's not actually against the rules. There's like a sort of recommendation. Like we'd prefer if State Department employees didn't use personal emails, but like it happens. And like if you end up using, you know, your Gmail or whatever, like make sure you retain all the documents for, you know, FOIA requests, whatever. Yeah.

So they thought that this was above board as long as they retained all of the emails and they knew that her servers were encrypted. But they were advised, right? They were advised by state. Isn't that right? Am I misremembering that? There's actually some debate about whether people at state knew that this was happening. It seems like...

Most people sort of didn't know that this was on an external server because when emails came in from Hillary, they just said H. They didn't like say H at anything. And we later find out she only emailed with 13 people her entire time at the State Department. Imagine the panic within state if some security folks got an email that was from like Hillary

Hillary at Clinton email dot com. They'd be like, what the fuck is this? I know. There is actually a pretty funny section in her book where she, one of the emails that eventually comes out is her complaining that she's trying to talk to Obama, but nobody on the White House operator line will believe that she's Hillary Clinton and she can't get through. She's like, how do I do this? How do I prove that I'm me? Well, ironically, the best way would have been to start leaking classified information about people she's assassinated. Yeah.

I also, I mean, we're going to get into the sort of like mechanics of how all this becomes public in a second. But like before we do, I think it's also important to stress this is all about the storage of digital information. Yeah. At no point in this entire scandal does anybody accuse Hillary Clinton of like sharing classified information with foreign governments. Right. Or leaking it. Right.

To the press or like blurting something out to someone who shouldn't know it. Every single one of the people that she was emailing had top secret clearance. Right. It's about information security procedures. I was trying to think of like a metaphor. It's like-

You know, you come downstairs in the morning and you realize your roommate has like left the door unlocked overnight. And you're like, okay, well, nothing got stolen. Like there's no effect of this. But also like, yeah, we'd prefer it if you locked the door, right? Like you might want to talk to your roommate about that. But it's not even that bad because the emails were on an encrypted server that didn't get hacked.

So it's like you come downstairs and your roommate has like deadbolted the door, but like the deadbolt he used was not like an approved deadbolt. Right. Okay. Well, ultimately the door was locked. It just wasn't the sort of like official technical lock that we were supposed to use. Like, I really cannot stress like how long it took me to like truly accept that like this is what the entire scandal was about was literally just the storage of

Yeah. That's it. I mean, this is a lens into how the media can get manipulated. Yeah. It pretty plainly doesn't matter that much whether Hillary was using.

the Department of State's approved encrypted server or her own. But the way that this sort of like resonates in our political and cultural memory is indicative of a whole lot of weird neuroses that our media maintains and sort of projects onto the general public. I mean, one of the things I do think is like worth stressing is that like

Other people who have been busted for this over the years, it's been like a very minor issue. So in his book, Comey says, In 2011, David Petraeus had given multiple notebooks containing troves of highly sensitive top secret information to an author with whom he was having an affair. In contrast to those Hillary Clinton corresponded with,

Yeah, but this is different because he's trying to get laid. Yeah.

That's an affirmative defense under the law. And then, as if to underscore that he knew he shouldn't do what he did, he lied to FBI agents about what he had done. Despite all of this clear and powerful evidence on facts far worse for him than for Secretary of Clinton and Abbasid.

I love that he was the director of the CIA, but still felt like he had to prove that he has access to confidential stuff. He's like, look how cool my stuff is. Yeah, check it out. You want to see it? You want to see it? It's like, dude, you're the, like, she knows that you have it. Relax. Yeah.

You don't have to keep doing I know you work at Cinnabon. You don't have to bring me another one. I get it. I trust you My friends in high school

So I do think, I mean, to me, it's like sort of at the most, it's like an administrative violation. And like this fucking guy who like lied to the FBI and like obstructed justice got nothing. You have to keep criminal history in mind, too. And when you have a spotless record like Petraeus, you get off light. Whereas with Clinton, you got Seth Rich, you got Vince Foster, you got the Clinton Foundation. Look, you can't do this and Benghazi in like a two year span.