Why We Can’t Quit Hillary: The Comey Delusion
The hot pundit take from over the weekend was that the New York Times’ long piece examining James Comey’s role in the 2016 presidential melodrama conspicuously omitted any re-evaluation of the NYT’s own role, which in these pundits’ view was inexcusable. “But her emails,” they angrily shriek, repeating the rallying cry of dead-end Clinton backers everywhere. Such dead-enders will never forgive the reckless media for fixating on “her damn emails,” thereby gifting the election to Trump. That’s the self-exculpatory narrative they’ve constructed for themselves, anyway — the great villain Comey ‘interfered’ to prevent what would’ve been the glorious ascendance of Hillary.
At this point it’s incredibly tedious to have to continue rehashing the email server / Comey saga, but it’s necessary because otherwise the Hot Pundits will get away with the revisionism that they so desperately want to instate as accepted wisdom. This narrative-constructing has warped popular perceptions of what really happened in the 2016 campaign, and will eventually result in faulty history.
First, few voters followed the “email server” story with sufficient intensity that they could actually describe the nature of the fateful events of October 29. In practice, what the “Comey Letter” issued that day did was amplify and underscore the already existing general feeling of the Clintons being enmeshed in a complicated, ever-expanding tangle of corruption and deceit. That impression was grounded in reality, and it long predated the Comey Letter. So to isolate the “Comey Letter” as a variable in swinging the election one way or another is to miss the forest for the trees. The “Letter” would’ve never existed but for the hubris of the Clintons, and the series of events which precipitated it were the Clintons’ own doing. Further, the “Letter” wouldn’t have had the impact it purportedly did if the Clintons’ conduct hadn’t already been cause for such pervasive suspicion.
Many people, including nervous Democrats, warned that “the email story” was potentially politically-explosive enough that it could doom Hillary’s campaign. They were proven right. Go back and read Nathan Robinson’s item from March 2016, later 100% vindicated, entitled “Nominating A Presidential Candidate Under Active FBI Investigation Is An Incredibly Risky Gamble.” That nominating such a candidate represented a “gamble” should’ve been apparent to anyone with half a brain, but it was denied by the Democratic Party’s power structure and media apparatus, which had the effect of deluding voters into believing that a Hillary nomination was the “safer” of the comparative choices on offer.
In reaction to last weekend’s NYT story, indignant pundits circulated a screenshot of the New York Times’ print edition front page from October 29. This particular front page has come to be viewed as an emblem of media malpractice, given its alleged overemphasis on what is now viewed as a trivial non-story.
Consider what precipitated this headline. On October 28, a felony criminal investigation explicitly targeting the official conduct of a major party nominee was re-opened, after repeated assurances by law enforcement authorities, the nominee, and the nominee’s surrogates that the matter had been conclusively put to rest. The country thereby faced the prospect of potentially electing someone under active federal criminal investigation — a first in history. How could the New York Times, and every other major media outlet for that matter, not have led with this blockbuster story? The sudden re-opening of a felony criminal investigation just days before a presidential election really is a blockbuster story, regardless of what the investigation ultimately leads to. It would’ve been positively absurd for the NYT not to have given it major coverage the following day: but according to Yglesias and other Comey Truthers, it was indication of a biased media…or something.
It’s of course true that the FBI later deemed that none of the newly recovered emails were distinct from the emails that had already been examined in the initial phase of the investigation, which was closed on July 5. But contra Yglesias, the emails recovered were nevertheless “new,” in that the FBI had not previously been made aware of their existence. Assessing all pertinent emails was in the investigative purview of the FBI, so for agents to have come across evidence that they’d not initially had access to is certainly a “new” finding. The NYT’s headlines that day were perfectly accurate.
According to Clinton loyalists who still permeate the media, it was outrageous for Comey to have apprised Congress — in fulfillment of the pledges he’d made in sworn testimony — about the resumption of the criminal investigation that he’d previously declared closed. According to the pundits, Comey was obliged to conceal this information from Congress and thereby the voters. Therefore, the pundit demand is that extremely consequential information be withheld from the public for the sole reason that it was politically damaging to one candidate. That’s nonsensical.
Then you’ll hear the retort: “But it was all so unfair, because Trump was also under investigation at the time, and we didn’t hear anything about it. Comey ought to have also given information on Trump.”
Implicit in this demand is the fallacious assumption that in revealing information about one candidate, Comey was obliged to issue information about the other, for no reason other than to “even the playing field” politically. “Evening the playing field” is nothing even resembling a practicable legal standard. According to this retort, Comey ought to have been expected to ignore the glaring differences in the two investigations — their investigative status, chronology, and the fact that one was closed while the other was active — and made proclamations about both out of a need to attain some kind of ill-defined political parity. That really is a form of literal false equivalence: If the Clinton investigation and the Trump investigation were meaningfully equivalent, then yes, Comey would’ve been obliged to make public statements about both. But they weren’t in any way equivalent, apart from the fact that they both implicated a major party nominee.
The NYT describes those differences here:
To Mr. Comey’s allies, the two investigations were totally different. One was closed when he spoke about it. The other was continuing, highly classified and in its earliest stages. Much of the debate over Mr. Comey’s actions over the last seven months can be distilled into whether people make that same distinction.
Even now, over six months later and with recriminations still flying, the blame for the Comey Letter gets heaped on Comey, rather than the people whose actions necessitated the existence of the Comey Letter, such as Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin, and of course Hillary Clinton. Hillary and her boosters spent most of 2015 and 2016 denying that there was any criminal investigation in the first place; they obfuscated and deflected, euphemistically referring to the investigation as a “security review” — even as we later found out that it was a criminal investigation precipitated explicitly by Hillary’s conduct, and that the purpose of the investigation was in part to ascertain whether any criminal offenses had been committed by Hillary herself.
Three months after the investigation was initiated, Hillary said: “It is not a criminal investigation, it is a security review.” The most charitable interpretation of this and many other statements was that Hillary was woefully misinformed about her own legal situation. The less charitable interpretation is she was engaging in outright deceit designed to insulate her from political pressure.
Even as late as March 2016 — after the Justice Department had granted immunity to a Clinton staffer, all but confirming a criminal investigation — Hillary said of the affair: “I am not concerned about it…I am not worried about it, and no Democrat or American should be either.” It turns out that Democrats had ample reason to be “concerned about it,” given that the email investigation eventuated in the event which they now claim was the central factor in felling Hillary’s campaign. Perhaps if the Democratic Primary electorate was apprised of the true nature of the investigation — instead of propagandized by hack outlets such as Media Matters — they might have concluded that taking a risk on Hillary wasn’t anywhere close to worth it. One great irony is that the candidate with the most severe “electability” problem was far and away Hillary Clinton; if her legal troubles had been more accurately depicted, Democratic primary voters might well have selected another nominee, such as Bernie Sanders.
So when Jeet Heer instructs everyone to stop fretting about Hillary, he’s enjoining that we decline to consider how it is that a candidate with such stark legal problems was nominated in the first place. Any thoroughgoing assessment of that event would have to conclude that the candidate was nominated in part due to a campaign of deceit and obfuscation waged by elements of the Party with a faith-like commitment to the candidate, who were so deluded that they could not accurately assess the risks she posed. That the delusion became so widespread — among elected officials, operatives, and the media — is evidence of a systemic pathology of huge magnitude. If that systemic pathology is not redressed head-on, there’s little reason to believe that the party will fare any better in the future.
It should therefore be contemplated: what pathologies of the party led it to coalesce so decisively around a person with such demonstrable legal and political liabilities? There was much talk of how the GOP failed to institute sufficient “collective action” to block Trump during last year’s primary process, but the same critique could be made of Democrats and is even more pressing: the party failed collectively — through a combination of self-deception and active propaganda — to soberly assess the liabilities of the nominee they were rushing to coronate. We still do not have a comprehensive understanding of why this happened, nor have the central actors accepted blame for their harmful conduct.
Six months later, the non-culpability of Hillary with respect to “emails” has been crystallized into liberal mythology, which holds that the main villain is Comey rather than the people whose actions led to such a precarious predicament in the first place — with the country’s fortune resting on whether Hillary managed her email system properly. Evidently she did not, which is how Anthony Weiner ended up with them on his laptop. It was an absurd situation, and could’ve been avoided pretty easily: by not nominating Hillary. As it turns out, even Barack Obama was reportedly aghast at her monumental screw-up and cover-up, which means the people who petulantly shout “But Her Emails” as some kind of grievance-catchphrase are also indicting Barack Obama, who recognized the political harm this was likely to inflict.
When Heer commands everyone to “move on” from Hillary, he is commanding that one of the most insidious campaigns of deceit in American political history be dismissed as a non-issue. But the Hillary 2016 campaign hinged entirely on propagating the falsehood. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have insight into how Clinton operatives carried out this deception. In August 2015, longtime Clinton family lawyer David Kendall set forth the talking point that campaign officials would prevail on reporters that a “security inquiry” was underway and that Hillary pledged to fully cooperate.
This was two months after the FBI’s initiation of a full-fledged felony criminal investigation — not a “security inquiry” or “review,” which turned out to be weasel words devised to fool the media and Clinton supporters into thinking that she was free of legal risk. Clinton dead-enders in “progressive” media insisted that the New York Times’ story in July 2015 revealing the criminal investigation was just another attempt to maliciously undermine Hillary, even though the NYT was later 100% vindicated.
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post went so far as to say that the initial NYT report “understated” the severity of the situation. Matt Goldman, an investigative reporter now with the NYT, added that the frenzied, Clintonite-led attack campaign had a “chilling effect” on how reporters characterized what they knew to be an honest-to-god criminal investigation. The public, and Democratic primary electorate specifically, was thus deprived of the full picture and was made to cast votes under false pretenses.
For some reason, liberal pundits perceive no disjunction between their insistence during the whole of the 2016 campaign that the email server issue was a “nothing-burger,” and their present insistence now that the email server issue was of such immense importance that it cost Hillary the election. Understanding what caused this mass delusion is crucial to determining how the Democratic Party failed in such dramatic fashion. Otherwise, further failures are inevitable.
