If Books Could Kill - The Clinton E-Mail Scandal [TEASER]

00:00:00.000 Oh shit, fuck. I forgot I needed a zinger. 1.00

00:00:02.300 Do something problematic. Let's start off on a good foot.

00:00:04.460 Okay. 1.00

00:00:05.020 More like shrillery, Clinton.

00:00:08.080 Am I right? 0.96

00:00:09.300 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.

00:00:18.820 We are out to a good start, Peter. Holy shit. 1.00

00:00:23.460 I've been a little bit worried about this one. 0.98

00:00:25.180 Same. Same.

00:00:26.620 We may not get to the email scandal.

00:00:28.300 We may just talk about Hillary Clinton the entire time as like a social construction.

00:00:32.880 Maybe the zinger is just me being like, Mike, this is the episode where I get canceled.

00:00:37.380 Oh, OK.

00:00:38.040 Do you want to do that?

00:00:39.740 Emails?

00:00:40.720 All right.

00:00:41.280 Let's do it.

00:00:41.760 Let's do it.

00:00:42.020 All right.

00:00:42.800 Peter.

00:00:43.500 Michael.

00:00:43.740 What do you know about the Hillary Clinton email scandal of 2016?

00:00:48.520 Yeah, you know, this isn't like when she suggested that we rig Palestinian elections, Michael.

00:00:53.940 This is serious.

00:00:58.300 so the genesis of this episode is that when we were recording the liberal fascism episode

00:01:13.320 we had like that chapter about how like hillary clinton is fascist and then we ended up talking

00:01:18.720 for like 45 minutes about the social construction of hillary clinton and like doing a bunch of other

00:01:25.140 sort of side topics. And then we eventually decided that we need to either talk about Hillary Clinton

00:01:29.760 for like two seconds or two hours. Yeah. And so this is the two hours. Yeah. And we discussed

00:01:35.700 this episode a little bit in advance. And you said that you don't want to spend the entire episode

00:01:41.080 re-litigating the 2016 election. And I said, I made it quite clear, I think. And you said no.

00:01:48.220 That I do want to spend the entire episode re-litigating the 2016 election. 1.00

00:01:53.440 Fuck. 1.00

00:01:54.380 Fuck. 1.00

00:01:55.300 I was going to do a bunch of scoping. 1.00

00:01:57.060 I'm like, I'm going to keep Peter on topic.

00:01:59.080 How do I trick Peter into staying on the emails?

00:02:01.940 This might not work.

00:02:03.220 This will be a polarizing episode for both us as individuals and our listeners, because

00:02:10.300 Michael, moderate centrist king, has a rich appreciation for Hillary Clinton.

00:02:16.420 centrist swine michael hobbs i get this all the time yeah i've heard the term reactionary

00:02:22.820 centrist floated we finally have a person to apply it to michael hobbs uh so okay i i did

00:02:29.200 sort of carve out some space at the beginning to talk about hillary clinton in general simply

00:02:34.680 because whenever she comes up in like any context with other people i'm sort of like clenched yeah

00:02:40.460 i'm like are they like a reasonable person who dislikes hillary clinton for like kind of

00:02:45.260 justifiable reasons? Or are they someone who dislikes her for like the crazy reasons? And so

00:02:51.060 I have a feeling that many of our listeners are probably feeling some similar beclenchment. I have

00:02:57.920 many notes. I've spent weeks reading about her. I have bullet points under the non-disingenuous

00:03:04.740 case against Hillary Clinton and the disingenuous case against Hillary Clinton.

00:03:09.320 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. 0.90

00:03:24.700 deranged. And also one of the things, one of the, I mean, there are many grand tragedies of the 0.88

00:03:28.940 2016 election, but one of the tragedies, especially of this email scandal and this 0.88

00:03:34.080 bullshit, like the Clinton Foundation stuff and all the sort of fake criticism is that it totally 0.66

00:03:38.200 overshadowed any legitimate criticism. Right. Like the Clinton kill list. 1.00

00:03:43.720 Here we go. Here we go. Clench over, Peter. Now I know what category. 0.86

00:03:47.940 My own prep also took me weeks and I will now be walking person by person through the

00:03:54.680 Clinton kill list. I did actually want to start with like the the non disingenuous case against

00:04:02.320 Hillary Clinton. I think that maybe this is a spicy take. Ultimately, she's like a fairly

00:04:07.260 standard center left politician with all of the good and all of the bad that comes along with 1.00

00:04:14.240 that. I agree with that, except I would say center right. OK, well, but I hear by American

00:04:18.380 standards, American standards here. Not conceding. So in the 90s, she supports the crime bill. She

00:04:23.820 voted for the patriot act she supported the war in iraq she votes for no child left behind she

00:04:29.580 opposed gay marriage for much of her career in public life she does a bunch of like violence 0.99

00:04:34.460 and video games shit after columbine she supported nafta she continues to support 0.99

00:04:39.780 charter schools and the death penalty even now it appears she doesn't favor legalizing weed 0.99

00:04:46.000 she wants to like legalize medical marijuana but like leave it up to the states which i think is 0.99

00:04:50.320 like the biggest fucking slam dunk to just like legalize fucking weed nationally like it's 1.00

00:04:54.620 ridiculous as recently as 2007 she's against giving driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants 1.00

00:05:01.920 when she's running for senate she does a bunch like ugly like anti-immigrant rhetoric her you 1.00

00:05:07.040 know centrist plans for her presidency were all this like baroque systems of like tax credits and 0.91

00:05:15.420 shit like this the thing that drives us nuts about democrats it's always like really complicated

00:05:20.100 like means testing levers and pulleys and shit rather than just like giving everybody money and 1.00

00:05:25.320 then like taxing the rich people back if it's that fucking important to you. I believe she still says 0.97

00:05:29.900 this now, but she definitely said it in 2016 that like single payer health care would never work.

00:05:34.580 She has deep ties to the financial sector, as we all know from these like talks that she gave at

00:05:39.240 Goldman Sachs. I feel like all of these are like perfectly reasonable reasons. Just be like, I would

00:05:44.440 rather vote for somebody who doesn't have these positions. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean,

00:05:49.000 And, you know, to put a lot of my criticism of her in perspective, so you sort of understand

00:05:55.020 my basic position, I consider her to be a neoconservative in the sort of traditional

00:06:00.080 sense when it comes to foreign policy, right?

00:06:02.320 And her positions towards the Middle East have always been hawkish, lacked regard for

00:06:09.940 sovereignty in the Middle East.

00:06:12.500 Her and Obama's approach in Libya was brutal. 0.93

00:06:17.140 Again, while 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? 0.92

00:06:36.880 Like maybe one or two went too far. 0.98

00:06:38.660 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.

00:06:50.880 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. 0.98

00:07:09.540 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. There's like a sickness among journalists where they think that just because something is secret, it's important. And I think that, you know, there are cases of this happening, right? Like Watergate and shit. But like, in general, most politicians are fairly easy to judge by like what they are or are not doing for the public as far as like their votes and their speeches and shit.

00:07:36.740 We have this thing where in public, Hillary Clinton is like a centrist politician and like has gotten a lot of stuff wrong and like cringely extremely wrong over the years.

00:07:45.900 But then according to the right and to like weirdly to like the left wing media, they think that there's like this iceberg of like corruption and murder and graft underneath it.

00:07:58.100 And like there has never been any evidence of that. 0.72

00:08:01.020 She's also a politician who is the subject of more completely ludicrous smears and lies than maybe maybe any other politician.

00:08:12.260 Yeah. And also the recipient of more misogynistic political analysis than any other politician. 1.00

00:08:21.040 And I think that one is probably unquestionably true. Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:24.400 What's weird about discussing her as someone who's like a critic of hers from the left is that you can't possibly disentangle all of this.

00:08:31.020 Yeah, of course. If you go back and look at like the the media coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign so clearly, just like, should women be allowed to talk? 0.74

00:08:42.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, totally.

00:08:42.900 You know, what we talked about in the liberal fascism episode was her like writings about children's rights 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. 1.00

00:09:00.580 She was pushing for expanded health care coverage. 1.00

00:09:06.200 Meanwhile, Nancy Reagan was doing war on drugs shit, which didn't clock as political. 1.00

00:09:11.940 I mean, this kind of leads us to the disingenuous case against Hillary Clinton. 0.98

00:09:15.820 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.

00:09:27.420 And then they use them as a metaphor for much worse things of which there is no evidence.

00:09:32.860 So I found a Christopher Hitchens article from 2008, which was called The Case Against Hillary Clinton.

00:09:39.960 And he's like really going to like lay it out.

00:09:41.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:42.120 I remember this.

00:09:42.760 And his opening anecdote was about this thing from 1995 when she was first lady and she was in London for something.

00:09:49.680 And she met Sir Edmund Hillary, who was one of the two first people to climb Mount Everest.

00:09:55.620 The other person was Tenzing Norgay.

00:09:57.420 and she's, like, making small talk with Edmund Hillary, and she's like, hey, did you know you're

00:10:01.860 the reason I have two L's in my name? My mom was a big fan of yours, and she named me Hillary

00:10:06.860 after you, Sir Edmund Hillary, right? This somehow was, like, on tape or whatever ended up in press

00:10:11.860 reports. People look into it, and it turns out Hillary was born in 1947, and Edmund Hillary

00:10:17.840 didn't climb Mount Everest until 1953. She would have been six years old, and so there's no way

00:10:22.680 that she could have been named after Hillary, whatever. Christopher Hitchens like uses this

00:10:27.600 as like, look at, look at what she'll do to gain power. Look at the way she manipulates people 0.78

00:10:33.040 around her. And then of course, if you actually look into it, Hillary Clinton had never used this 0.99

00:10:38.140 anecdote anywhere else. It didn't show up in like her biographies. It appears that her mom like told

00:10:43.080 her this at some point. Which by the way, is what immediately came to my mind when you told me the

00:10:47.880 timeline i was like oh i bet her mom just said it a benign explanation is available for this kind 1.00

00:10:53.100 of thing but it's like people immediately leap to the like look how fucking bad she is right 0.57

00:10:57.820 i listened to a a right-wing podcast about this and they were like they found this long tirade 0.99

00:11:02.580 they were like she's fucking sick she's a fucking psychopath it was like so brutal and what they 0.99

00:11:07.760 were talking about was registering a web domain not in her name one of her aides registered a url 1.00

00:11:14.760 and like used his own name on the registration papers it's very funny to go full bitch eating 0.54

00:11:19.020 crackers on hillary clinton it's like i i i do think that like an anecdote can be a symbol of

00:11:27.500 something much larger yeah but you have to have evidence of the much larger thing you can't just

00:11:32.520 constantly point to symbols like with trump you can tell these little anecdotes but like he lies 0.99

00:11:38.000 about his like golf score or something and it's like symbolic of the way that he fucking lies 0.98

00:11:41.620 about everything but we have evidence that he fucking lies about everything right with clinton 0.97

00:11:45.360 it's like there's this deep corruption but like we never actually get the deep corruption we just 0.98

00:11:50.840 get these surface level little symbols of it also like if a little white lie and conversation

00:11:55.520 is enough to declare a politician a psychopath then then they all are right i mean is there a

00:12:01.920 single politician you couldn't find an anecdote like this about i also want to go out of my way

00:12:05.820 to say that like she would have been way better than donald trump like it's not close

00:12:11.120 Yeah. Center left politicians are, in fact, preferable to far right politicians. Right.

00:12:16.060 Her platform on health care. Did I love it? No, it was way better than the status quo.

00:12:20.720 She wanted to raise the minimum wage of 12 bucks. Do I wish that was higher? Yes. 1.00

00:12:24.320 Is 12 bucks better than 750? Also, yes. The argument that Trump wouldn't have been that

00:12:29.620 bad was ludicrous at the time. And it's more ludicrous in retrospect. Yes. It's a ludicrous 0.88

00:12:34.380 argument. So, Peter, what is your understanding of like the actual facts of the email scandal?

00:12:40.460 Yeah. Hillary Clinton had private email. Well, I'm going to I'm going to use terms like servers, which I don't I never I don't.

00:12:48.540 Yeah, I still don't. I've been reading this for two weeks. I don't know what the fuck a server is. It's fine.

00:12:52.180 Hillary Clinton had like private email servers. She used her BlackBerry to communicate with her aides and colleagues, etc.

00:13:00.480 That's how she did emails. Yes. And then she gets to the State Department and the State Department, generally speaking,

00:13:09.180 would require or have guidelines that you use their servers right but she does not transition

00:13:17.240 to their servers she maintains her own blackberry she doesn't want to use their computers

00:13:21.080 and there is a question about uh confidential information classified information right because 0.70

00:13:28.060 at least theoretically there could have been classified information being shared in these

00:13:32.960 emails on unprotected or less protected servers yes that is that is my memory okay off the dome

00:13:40.560 that was pretty good the way that clinton describes it in her book she says it was a 0.68

00:13:44.500 dumb mistake but an even dumber scandal which i kind of agree with i agree with that too but it

00:13:49.320 also annoys me that she would put it that way we'll see if this episode like makes you like 0.58

00:13:55.340 her more or less i i do think that like this is a very understandable story like when you hear it

00:14:02.880 in chronological order if we just go over like what actually happened the the striking thing

00:14:08.080 about clinton's book comey's book and there's various investigations of this over the years

00:14:14.080 is that they really don't disagree on the facts so i think the first thing to know if we like

00:14:19.100 rewind all the way back is that like a lot of politicians don't use email very much you know 1.00

00:14:25.140 part of this is like to avoid fucking records requests because they're like all corrupt fucking 1.00

00:14:28.320 dingbats. And some of it is like they're just all old as fuck. So like John McCain did not 1.00

00:14:33.040 send or receive an email his entire life. Yeah. And especially when you think about

00:14:36.740 like 2008. Yeah. I honestly think the fact that Clinton is 62 when she becomes Secretary of State

00:14:42.820 is like very important to this story and like really reminds me of like all of the boomers

00:14:48.160 in my life and like how they use technology. She says in her book, she says, I didn't send a single

00:14:53.800 email when I was in the White House as First Lady or during most of my first term in the U.S.

00:14:57.980 send it. I've never used a computer at home or at work. It was not until 2006 that I began sending

00:15:04.620 and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone. I had a plain old AT&T account like millions of other

00:15:09.780 people and used it both for work and personal email. That was my system and it worked for me.

00:15:14.600 So this is what she's used to. All of her emails, professional, personal, everything comes and goes

00:15:18.300 out of the BlackBerry, right? She's never used a computer. I mean, she's never had one anyway.

00:15:22.880 Yeah. I think it's very hard for people like us who don't have teams. You don't have a team?

00:15:27.380 To understand like what it is like the daily reality of these people.

00:15:31.380 Most of us just assume that she's like sending and receiving emails all the time when now 0.96

00:15:35.440 that we've seen all the fucking emails, the vast majority of emails are like one sentence 0.98

00:15:39.140 or they're like forwarding it and be like FYI. 0.99

00:15:41.460 They're not substantive.

00:15:43.280 They're not thoughtful.

00:15:44.400 It's like everything takes place in like in-person meetings or phone calls.

00:15:49.120 Like she says her and Bill do not like they've never sent an email to each other.

00:15:52.260 They call because they're boomers. 0.96

00:15:53.560 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:15:54.100 So, in 2007, Bill Clinton has a server installed in his house.

00:16:00.420 It's not clear, like, whether either of these boomers sort of, like, knew what that meant or whatever.

00:16:03.900 They're just like, okay, this is going to make it easier, like, more secure, it's encrypted, whatever. 0.95

00:16:07.700 Clinton starts using hrl5 at mysingular.blackberry.net as an email address, which is the most boomer fucking email address I've ever heard in my life. 0.92

00:16:17.880 So, that's the situation when on January 21st, she is sworn in as Secretary of State.

00:16:23.740 Man, this could have all been avoided if Obama wasn't the type to just want to be liked by everyone.

00:16:29.060 So he was like, look, Hillary just ran a really weirdly racist primary campaign against me. 0.95

00:16:33.880 I will make her secretary of state.

00:16:37.380 Yet another election I refuse to relitigate. 0.99

00:16:40.440 We're not touching 2008 in this fucking episode. 0.99

00:16:43.420 Well, guess what? 0.99

00:16:44.640 I'm bringing up the Somali garb picture that her team circulated.

00:16:48.520 Jesus Christ.

00:16:49.480 this is all stored within a very specific compartment of my brain yeah on your servers 0.96

00:16:56.020 on your little brain your little contempt brain servers so she starts the secretary of state

00:17:01.500 she has this blackberry email account that she's using that i think everybody sort of knows is like 0.99

00:17:07.300 super fucking janky and dealing with classified information is just a giant fucking hassle like 0.86

00:17:11.700 she has to lock up her blackberry in some like weird safe when she goes into work because they're 1.00

00:17:16.200 afraid that like the Russians or whoever is going to hack it and turn it into a microphone.

00:17:20.300 And it's like, OK, so I just don't have my device with me at work all day. 0.96

00:17:23.060 And like, I don't really know how to use a computer like it's just this giant fucking 0.93

00:17:26.220 hassle. 0.81

00:17:26.680 By the way, whenever I hear about the like machinations of our intelligence operations,

00:17:31.520 it always makes me a little bit anxious.

00:17:33.580 Like, do we have technology that can sense whether the Russians are hacking the secretary

00:17:38.520 of state's phone?

00:17:39.220 It's like, no, just put it in the no hack box.

00:17:41.380 and then they're one of the one of the dark ironies of this is that this entire thing is

00:17:47.740 about email security right like whether it's being stored on like private servers or government

00:17:51.160 servers or whatever the state department servers were hacked her personal server was not hacked 0.60

00:17:56.320 the pentagon was also hacked during this time so it's like the entire thing just fucking dissolves 0.73

00:18:00.920 into smoke where it's like what are we actually talking about here like she put them on a more

00:18:04.880 secure server or like at least a server that was less of a target right although it was also a

00:18:09.820 target at that time but yes yeah fair enough so on january 23rd 2009 two days into her tenure as

00:18:14.940 secretary of state actually i'm going to email this to you or i'll text this to you this is from

00:18:20.460 the fbi report um okay on january 23rd 2009 clinton contacted former secretary of state

00:18:28.220 colon powell via email to inquire about his use of a blackberry while he was secretary of state

00:18:33.640 in his email reply powell warned clinton that if it became public that clinton had a blackberry

00:18:38.860 and she used it to do business, her emails could become, quote, official records and subject to the

00:18:44.820 law. Powell further advised Clinton, be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much

00:18:50.360 and not using systems that captured the data. Clinton indicated to the FBI that she understood

00:18:55.440 Powell's comments to mean any work-related communications would be government records.

00:19:00.060 This is fascinating to me. At the heart of this entire thing, we have Colin Powell,

00:19:05.240 the previous Secretary of State, admitting that he used a fucking AOL.com address the entire time 0.99

00:19:12.220 that he was Secretary of State. And he says, I got around it by not saying much and not using 0.98

00:19:18.100 systems that captured the data. This guy did what Hillary Clinton is accused of. He specifically

00:19:24.760 skirted the rules so that he would not be subject to FOIA requests and shit. To this day, we still 0.96

00:19:31.620 do not have emails from like the early 2003 period which like i would kind of like to see hey uh

00:19:37.780 going to lie to the un lol what's interesting is he tells her he's like yeah just use use an

00:19:43.780 external email like just you know here's how to get around it whatever clinton does not take his

00:19:48.000 advice she starts using this email address hdr22 at clinton email.com clinton email.com

00:19:55.640 it's kind of amazing it didn't get hacked because it's so fucking obvious right because i feel like 0.55

00:20:01.040 if you found that domain, you would assume it was like a troll who was sitting on the domain

00:20:06.140 rather than the actual one. So she starts using this personal account, the sort of the kludge

00:20:12.820 that she comes up with to comply with eventual records requests and to only have one device with

00:20:21.400 her is she basically moves all of her correspondence, personal and professional,

00:20:27.460 onto this one email address so for her entire time as secretary of state she does not use a

00:20:34.940 state.gov email address and all of her emails so like she's her her mother dies while she's in

00:20:41.960 office and like her dealings with like the estate emailing chelsea like how's life all of her

00:20:47.500 personal emails and all of her like the the president of this country just got assassinated 0.99

00:20:52.860 emails are all on the same fucking account. So to me, the best argument that like she didn't do 0.98

00:20:59.180 this to avoid scrutiny or for like any like corrupt, deep, evil reason is that this is such 1.00

00:21:05.040 a fucking stupid solution to the problem. She is ensuring that there is going to be a conflict 1.00

00:21:12.640 between her professional and her personal emails because they're all in one fucking inbox. 0.99

00:21:17.640 Right. I think when people like process the email scandal, what they think happened is it like she had her like Hillary at state dot gov email. 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. 0.98

00:21:39.940 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.

00:21:54.420 I would say medium to low, but yeah.

00:21:55.900 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.

00:22:05.920 You know what I mean?

00:22:06.580 Whereas like the worst case scenario here is relatively bad.

00:22:09.940 I guess. Well, also, I mean, one thing that has like genuinely given me nightmares about this is

00:22:13.540 that it's very clear that like no one on her team thought about this or like thought it was a

00:22:18.200 remotely big deal at the time, which, you know, looking back obviously is like very silly. But

00:22:22.540 at the time people were basically like, okay, it's not actually against the rules. There's

00:22:27.220 like a sort of recommendation, like we'd prefer if state department employees didn't use personal

00:22:31.480 emails, but like it happens. And like, if you end up using, you know, your Gmail or whatever,

00:22:35.840 Make sure you retain all the documents for FOIA requests, whatever.

00:22:41.220 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.

00:22:47.840 But they were advised, right?

00:22:49.820 They were advised by state.

00:22:52.700 Isn't that right?

00:22:53.560 Am I misremembering that?

00:22:54.620 There's actually some debate about whether people at state knew that this was happening.

00:22:59.140 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.

00:23:08.220 They didn't like say H at anything.

00:23:11.940 And we later find out she only emailed with 13 people her entire time at the State Department. 0.96

00:23:19.120 Imagine the panic within state if some security folks got an email that was from like Hillary at Clinton email dot com. 0.99

00:23:27.740 They'd be like, what the fuck is this? 0.99

00:23:29.460 I know. 0.99

00:23:30.220 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.

00:23:43.340 She's like, how do I do this?

00:23:44.880 How do I prove that I'm me?

00:23:46.220 Well, ironically, the best way would have been to start leaking classified information about people she's assassinated.

00:23:51.600 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.

00:24:06.260 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 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 it's about information security procedures.

00:24:28.140 I was trying to think of a metaphor. It's like you come downstairs in the morning and you realize your roommate has left the door unlocked overnight. And you're like, okay, well, nothing got stolen. There's no effect of this. But also, yeah, we'd prefer it if you locked the door, right? You might want to talk to your roommate about that.

00:24:45.620 But it's not even that bad because the emails were on an encrypted server that didn't get

00:24:51.960 hacked.

00:24:52.640 So it's like you come downstairs and your roommate has like deadbolted the door, but

00:24:56.940 like the deadbolt he used was not like an approved deadbolt.

00:25:01.000 Right.

00:25:01.200 Okay.

00:25:01.500 Well, ultimately the door was locked.

00:25:03.120 It just wasn't the sort of like official technical lock that we were supposed to use.

00:25:07.600 Like, I really cannot stress like how long it took me to like truly accept that like

00:25:12.820 this is what the entire scandal was about.

00:25:15.620 was literally just the storage of information on non-government servers yeah that's it i mean

00:25:23.340 this is a lens into how the media can get manipulated yeah it pretty plainly doesn't

00:25:32.900 matter that much whether hillary was using the department of states approved encrypted server 0.97

00:25:39.360 or her own. But the way that this sort of like resonates in our political and cultural memory

00:25:46.540 is indicative of a whole lot of weird neuroses that our media maintains and sort of projects

00:25:56.980 onto the general public. I mean, one of the things I do think is like worth stressing is that like

00:26:01.920 other people who have been busted for this over the years, it's been like a very minor issue.

00:26:10.160 So in his book, Comey says, in 2011, David Petraeus had given multiple notebooks containing

00:26:18.080 troves of highly sensitive top secret information to an author with whom he was having an affair.

00:26:23.140 In contrast to those Hillary Clinton corresponded with, the author did not have the appropriate

00:26:27.640 clearance or a legitimate need to know the information, which included notes of discussions

00:26:32.260 with President Obama about very sensitive programs. He even allowed the woman to photograph

00:26:36.760 key pages from classified documents. Yeah, but this is different because he's trying to get laid.

00:26:42.260 That's an affirmative defense under the law. And then, as if to underscore that he knew he

00:26:47.360 shouldn't do what he did, he lied to FBI agents about what he had done. Despite all of this clear

00:26:53.180 and powerful evidence on facts far worse for him than for secretary of clinton and after he

00:26:57.960 demonstrably lied to the fbi the doj charged him only with a misdemeanor after he reached a plea

00:27:04.200 bargain agreement in 2015 he admitted guilt and agreed to a 40 000 fine and probation for two

00:27:09.660 years i love that he was the director of the cia but still felt like he had to prove that he has

00:27:15.740 access to confidential stuff look how cool my stuff is yeah check it out you want to see it

00:27:20.260 You want to see it?

00:27:20.840 It's like, dude, you're the like she knows that you have it.

00:27:23.800 Relax.

00:27:24.760 You don't have to keep doing this.

00:27:26.500 I know you work at Cinnabon.

00:27:27.460 You don't have to bring me another one.

00:27:28.780 I get it.

00:27:29.220 I trust you.

00:27:30.120 It's like my friends in high school.

00:27:32.400 So I do think, I mean, it's like sort of at the most it's like an administrative violation. 0.98

00:27:39.420 And like this fucking guy who like lied to the FBI and like obstructed justice got nothing. 0.97

00:27:45.380 You have to keep criminal history in mind, too. 1.00

00:27:47.260 And when you have a spotless record like Petraeus, you get off like.

00:27:52.220 Whereas with Clinton, you got Seth Rich, you got Vince Foster, you got the Clinton Foundation.

00:27:55.880 Look, you can't do this and Benghazi in like a two year span.

If Books Could Kill - September 14, 2023

The Clinton E-Mail Scandal [TEASER]

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