Dear AP:
Pffft!
Please read and get back to me.
Also
Wow, so the Secretary of State meets with and corresponds with a lot of people, and some of those people donate to charitable causes that she supported? I’m shocked. Is the story that highlights something specifically inappropriate or concerning still being worked on? It’s certainly insinuated here that there’s something sketchy going on, but they oddly seem to have forgotten to actually detail that anywhere.
“For some reason, people don’t trust Hillary… let’s churn out another story that buries you under a load of irrelevant detail and insinuates that she’s up to no good, though doesn’t actually have any substance…” Indeed.
“Either personally, or through companies or groups”? Is this “Six Degrees of the Clinton Foundation?”
Isn’t it possible that the sort of people who the Secretary of State would meet with are ALSO the sort of people who would donate to one of the largest and most effective charities out there?
And the figures don’t include representatives of foreign governments? Isn’t that kind of important to include, as well?
Look, AP, we’ll make this simple. If you want to generate really sexy headlines and prove some kind of “ethical issue”, do the following:
- Prove that donors received some kind of actual tangible benefit from donating
- Prove that Clinton personally benefited in any way from the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State. In fact, prove that the Clintons benefit financially from it, period.
(Hint: you can’t, because neither are true).
As extra credit, prove, as you state in your piece, that meeting with people who WEREN’T representatives of foreign governments wasn’t part of her “official duties”.
Lacking any of this, all we have are press outlets refusing to do their jobs, and being led around by the nose by Breitbart and Judicial Watch’s innuendo machine.
The whiff of whisper of a hint of something that might look bad to someone unfamiliar with the details = SCANDAL! FEAR, FIRE, FOES, SCANDAL!!!1!1!!one!!! HEARINGS! Call Issa! Call Fox! Call everyone! We’ve got us new SCANDAL!
…Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm’s corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
What a fucking ethically-challenged Hitlermonster Clinton is.
I never knew that once SOS… you were allowed ZERO personal time —
See, now, that I didn’t get out of this story, either. Since they didn’t include meetings with people “as part of her official duties”, are they saying that meetings with non-foreign representatives weren’t part of her official duties? Or are they just saying these meetings were on her own time?
Coincidentally, The NYT published a podcast entitled “Media as Referee, Not Anymore” discussing the “post-fact culture” in America and the media’s vanishing role as an arbiter of truth. The premise is that both right and left wing entities, but mostly right wing, have polarized and conditioned their supporters to dismiss media reports from sources that appear not to represent their point of view, thus denigrating the media’s referee role.
But that is too facile an explanation. By repeatedly rejecting objectivity, in favor of “balance”; “both sides do it”, “shape of earth, views differ”; and establishing a “narrative”; “we’re just following the story”; the media has relegated objective reality, and…, yes, the truth, to the background, if not dismissing it entirely. They are as much responsible for the loss of their role as fair arbiter as those who have polarized American politics.
As someone once said about the drip, drip, drip of the Clinton Email perennial story: “If there is a drip, drip, drip, it is because the media, itself has supplied its own water.”
Edit. Just after writing this I went over to Media Matters who just published a twitter storm by Yale Political Scientist, John Stoehr who is more articulate than I am:
After the conservative activist group Judicial Watch published emails showing supposed pay-to-play behavior by then-Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, media outlets quickly repeated the story despite a lack of evidence that anything improprietous happened. Judicial Watch has a history of conning media into covering bogus Clinton-related stories, leading outlets to ignore new evidence and even undermine their own reporting in the process.
In a series of tweets, Stoehr criticized the media coverage of Judicial Watch’s allegations, saying it proves the thesis of a 1996 Atlantic piece called “Why Americans Hate the Media.” Midway into his argument, he addressed the idea that Clinton’s actions constitute pay-to-play misbehavior, saying “This is not pay-to play. There’s no evidence to suggest it, no matter how much the right-wing group Judicial Watch urges to the contrary:
Horrifying: out of the 85 visitors who connect to donations to the Clinton Foundation, the only ones who received any favorable treatment by the USG directly or indirectly were all unbelievably worthy causes designed to alleviate poverty and related hardship, and no one attendee received even a single benefit that was unmerited or that could not have been justified entirely without either or both visiting personally with SoS Clinton and donating to the Clinton Foundation.
The Clintons clearly have no idea how to grift. They ought to have consulted with or referred these contacts to their great and good personal buddy Donald Shrimp, uh, Trump, because then at least SOMEONE would have made themselves a few bucks off this scam.
Alternate lede–In her little spare time, Hillary Clinton met with many people who she wanted to join the fight against malaria and AIDS, and she was remarkably successful in getting them to donate.