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US 2016: E-Mail, The Ultimate Devil

US 2016: E-Mail, The Ultimate Devil

J. BROOKS SPECTOR was just about to sit back and wait for the actual voting to begin before staying up all night yet again to watch the results roll in all across America. But, no, the fates had other plans. There is an entirely new e-mail controversy roiling the final days of this election campaign.

By the time you read this, if you come to The Daily Maverick first thing in the morning on Monday, there will be just eight days left – 192 hours or 4,608 minutes – before the American presidential election winds down to its eventual and final denouement. Or perhaps readers might wish to say, “Thank God that is all that is left of this before we can be free to contemplate important events from somewhere else besides the world of American pollsters.”

By contrast, the show-opening song in the hit musical, Rent, Seasons of Love speaks of 525,600 minutes – the number of minutes in a year – and as the story’s action unfolds, one finds it easy to think these minutes represent but a brief moment in time. The minutes left before the US election is finally over will probably feel like a nonagenarian’s lifetime by comparison by the time the campaign comes to a halt.

Up until nearly the end of last week, the prevailing narrative (damn, but journalists and post-modernist historians have fallen in love this word) was that the odds of Hillary Clinton’s election were at around a 90%+ level of probability, if you follow Nate Silver’s widely read pronouncements. Going forward, the real question, now, was how well Democrats would do “down ballot”.

This meant: whether or not the Democrats would gain control of the Senate where they only needed to gain a handful of seats now held by Republicans (increasingly likely); how close might they come in seizing control of the House of Representatives (relatively unlikely, but just barely possible); and how terrible the bloodletting among Republicans would be (including the defenestration of Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House – even if his party maintained diminished but numerical control of the House), once the debacle came round on the morning of November 9, and the finger pointing over whose fault it was among the GOP began in deadly earnest.

Elections specialists have said that, historically, no candidate since the advent of publicly reported scientifically taken polling has ever made up the ground that equalled the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at this late point in the campaign. The Trump campaign itself seemed to have taken this prediction on board as well, even as the candidate continued to thunder on about the riggedness of the election, of the media, of the courts, and of the federal government.

It seemed his heart was no longer in it as Trump’s folks had largely stopped trying to raise money (or advance any of his own stash of cash) and the presidential campaign was no longer even going all out to raise money for all those other GOP-labelled candidates – although other GOP-related committees were working hard at that. Maybe it was time to reconsider things and start building their organisation for future races on the part of the GOP insiders. Or, in the case of Trump, to start the planning for an investment in a new cable/satellite/online television channel that would broadcast from the alt.right parallel universe. In fact, this was something Trump’s son-in-law had begun to intimate in some supposedly off-the-record musings.

Among Democrats, the visible insertion of First Lady Michelle Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vice-President Joe Biden into active campaigning for the candidate seemed to be energising their voting base at last – if not fully for the top tier candidate, at least for the idea of demolishing the Trumpster and supporting all those down ballot hopefuls. Biden’s promise to take Trump behind the barn and moer him brought a smile to many faces (and to a few minds the half-asked question as to why he wasn’t the candidate). And Michelle Obama – the most popular of the Democratic surrogates – gave a deeply emotional, even moving, campaign speech in North Carolina on behalf of Hillary Clinton that also washed away any hint of a lingering animosity between the two, left over from 2008.

And then, suddenly there was a whole new element to the campaign, just as it seemed the groove in the path had settled firmly in place. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey, without warning, issued a letter to Congress that had the hallmarks of something that might have been cranked out by NPA head Shaun Abrahams’ office, working after a rather heavy-duty “phuza Thursday”. The Comey letter essentially said that the FBI, carrying out an entirely different investigation, had bumped into e-mail messages that might, perhaps, could be, peut-etre, who knows really, ???, siapa tahu, have some sort of impact on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s earlier e-mail fiasco.

Commenting just as this latest event broke into the news, The Economist reported:

“Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump had started to look so assured that perhaps only some unforeseen calamity could prevent her becoming president. Then on October 28th, eleven days before the election, the FBI director James Comey announced that he was, in effect, considering reopening an investigation into Mrs Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server as Secretary of State. Perhaps no other issue is so obviously loaded with calamitous potential for her candidacy.

“The FBI concluded its investigation into Mrs Clinton’s e-mail arrangements in July, having ruled that she and her aides had been ‘extremely careless’ in exposing classified information to her inexpertly-secured server, but that they had done nothing criminal. In a letter to Congress, however, Mr Comey said that ‘in connection with an unrelated case’ new e-mails had emerged which ‘appear to be pertinent to the investigation’.

“To that bombshell he attached what he presumably intended as a caveat. Mr Comey said the FBI was still trying to ‘determine whether they included classified information’ and otherwise ‘assess their importance to our investigation’. But in the feverish last stage of an epically ill-tempered presidential cycle, that equivocation was for the birds: this is truly terribly news for Mrs Clinton.”

And just how did Comey and his e-mail parsers know to go back over this ground? It turns out the FBI had accidentally bumped into those e-mails while they were investigating something else entirely – sexting by former Congressman Anthony Weiner to an unnamed under-age girl in North Carolina. The connection to Hillary Clinton was that Weiner was the-now-estranged spouse of Huma Abedin, her close aide. And, as a result of his repeated, very embarrassing behaviour with his e-mails, his body parts, his photographs and women, including those under the age of consent, the presumed contents of e-mails linked to Clinton came to light.

Abedin has been an essential part of Clinton’s public career when she was Secretary of State as well as when Clinton was a senator, and it seems some e-mails connected to Clinton had found their way onto an electronic device containing Weiner’s amateur anatomical studies. Oh ugh. Abedin had been understood to be a logical candidate for an important part of a Clinton administration Mark II, assuming the Democrats won. This newest embarrassment might yet put paid to that particular idea, even assuming Clinton wins.

However, there was no information in Comey’s letter that indicated the Clinton-connected e-mails contained any startling information that formed existential threats to the republic. In fact, the investigation, so far, had not even determined whether or not the e-mails in question had already been handed over to investigators in the last phishing cruise for wild e-mails. Or, in this particular new case, was there any clarity that any of the e-mails in question had come from Clinton herself, or even, how they had happened to end up on an electronic device used by the disgraced congressman – but very occasionally, apparently, also by Huma Abedin as well.

And, in fact, it appears that given the origins and purposes of this latest investigation, there actually was no court-issued search warrant to allow a look into these Clinton e-mails. There was also no sense that, assuming the FBI received an appropriate search warrant to do so, they could complete their review of these e-mails before the presidential campaign clanged to an end in a week and a day. That meant that the cloud would hover over Hillary Clinton’s head from these newest e-mails, despite the lack of any actual facts in the matter. Very odd, that. In instant polling about this latest event, 71% of those surveyed said this latest news would have no impact on their vote. Of course, one could interpret that several ways, not least that over a quarter of potential voters might choose to weigh this information as important as they made their final decision.

James Comey had, until that moment, earned a reputation for probity and rectitude as a political appointee, earlier in the Bush administration as a Deputy Attorney-General, and before that as a federal prosecutor. In 2013, Barack Obama, in a gesture of bipartisanship, had appointed Comey as the newest director of the FBI. Comey had famously (unless you have partaken liberally of the Trumpian Kool-Aid) signed off an that earlier report on the Clinton e-mails, saying that while she had operated “extremely carelessly” with her private server, no prosecutor would have moved forward on a criminal indictment over this behaviour. (Along the way, it should be noted that despite all the screaming and grimacing among Republicans, not one of those earlier e-mails has ever been shown to have caused the slightest impact on the nation’s safety or security.)

Accordingly, with this latest event, cue the howling, biting and frothing from the Republican side of the aisle. Concurrently you could just about hear those Clinton supporters whisper among themselves, “Wow, we dodged that earlier round in that great, never-ending ‘let’s get Hillary’ war, and now, here it comes at us again.”

As the day wore on, it became much clearer that while the FBI had not actually examined any of that new cache of Clinton-connected e-mails, the FBI had also violated Justice Department (under which the FBI is positioned) policy that they should not take any actions during the last 60 days of a presidential campaign that could be reasonably seen as politically motivated or partisan. Oops. In spite of the total lack of details about any of these e-mails (since they haven’t been read, published, vetted or dismissed as inconsequential), the Republican candidate had instantly seized on this latest news as proof Clinton’s behaviour was worse than Watergate and then mouthed those inevitable chants about “Corrupt Hillary” and the need to send her to prison or worse.

Both parties are now calling for some real transparency and detail on what all this means – or doesn’t mean. The Clinton candidacy has clearly been caught way, way off guard as they had been given no advance knowledge of Comey’s public announcement and they have been scrambling ever since to diminish any potential charges even as they don’t know what the e-mail cache contains.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have been pointing to this latest announcement as vindication the FBI has finally come to its senses and focused on Clinton’s misdeeds, even as they are also insisting on fuller disclosure of all those presumed smoking guns just waiting for public scrutiny. Along the way, Comey’s reputation is now being battered, both for the way he grandstanded with this announcement (the one without any details) and the fact that he violated his department’s protocol, after he had been waved off by Justice Department senior officials.

Veteran journalist Michael Isikoff reported on Yahoo, the “FBI still does not have warrant to review new Clinton e-mails. [B]efore agents were able to review any of the material because the bureau had not yet gotten a search warrant to read them … As of Saturday night, the FBI had still not gotten approval from the Justice Department for a warrant that would allow them to read any of the newly discovered Abedin e-mails, and therefore are still in the dark about whether they include any classified material that the bureau has not already seen. Top Justice Department officials were described by a government source as ‘apoplectic’ over the letter.”

And an unnamed Clinton campaign official told reporters over the weekend, “If the FBI has not even obtained permission to look at these e-mails, that means that Director Comey sent his letter without at all knowing what’s in them. It proves that he has little idea of the relevance of these e-mails, let alone their significance. For all he knows, they could be personal in nature, or be duplicative of e-mails that have already been reviewed. This makes Director Comey’s actions all the more questionable, and perhaps explains why his superiors at the Justice Department urged against him sending this letter to Congress.”

One can safely assume that if Clinton ultimately wins this election, Comey will have achieved a rather awkward relationship with the White House, going forward. He probably will never be nominated for one of those fancy Presidential Medal of Freedom gongs that look so nice with a tuxedo at formal events.

Of course, if Trump should win, Comey would become their hero. He would be the man who had turned back the cataclysmic flood, held off the barbarians before they finally sacked the capital of civilisation, and who had righted the axis of the Earth, ending a new ice age. Oh, and Comey would be the man who sent the Clintons back to their mansion on Long Island – or on to the big house, once the Trumpian forces pushed forward with their promise of a grand jury and a hanging judge to investigate and then try the missus. Accordingly, there will be lots and lots of attention on the last round of polling that is taken early this week in order to see just how much impact this latest e-mail imbroglio has on the race.

Some evidence already points to the tightening of the race to just a couple of points nationally between the two candidates among the popular vote. Of course, by now we should all understand the real game is to win 270 out of 538 electoral votes – those votes that are distributed by population among the 50 states that actually make the selection of a president. The national election is actually 50 separate elections and so, now, almost all attention is focusing on some all-important battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, and just maybe Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Maine, where opposing forces are assumed to be relatively evenly matched.

Oh, and there is even that fascinating contest in Utah where it is possible independent candidate Evan McMullin has a chance to gain that state’s electoral votes, breaking a long-standing history of Utah as one of the deepest of the red Republican safe states. McMullin is a Mormon, and, while he is also really a conservative Republican, he is running as an independent candidate in response to Trump’s numerous moral flaws that have been widely reported upon – and that collectively represent something of an anathema to many of the state’s Mormon Republicans.

One more errant thought. In the midst of all this merry chaos, there still looms the unclear role of Russia in the election. Not primarily as an issue as in how America must best respond to Russian actions and positions in international crises such as Syria, but for the Russians’ increasingly unsavoury involvement in the US election. The US intelligence establishment has already taken the position that those earlier hacked e-mails published by Wikileaks and other sites had ultimately come from Russian sources and that this represented a shocking and unprecedented intervention in American political processes.

Although there is no sense yet that these Russian hackers had anything to do with the Weiner electronic device and this latest e-mail cache, nevertheless, the current issue of The Economist posed the larger question:

“What is going on? A popular view is that Mr Putin, whose aversion to Mrs Clinton is plain, is trying to lever Mr Trump into the White House, just as he supports isolationists in Europe. Witness the strategically timed publication of hacked e-mails by WikiLeaks and others. That may overstate the Kremlin’s ambition, assigning it greater clout than it wields: ‘We’re making them ten feet tall’, worries Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution. Rather than altering the election’s outcome, reckons an American administration official, the aim may be to spread uncertainty about the process. That would avenge American criticism of Russian elections, discredit future admonishments and sully democracy itself. This race, Dmitry Kiselev, Mr Putin’s chief propagandist, recently assured his TV audience, ‘can’t be called free and democratic’.”

And as for Trump’s own motives for his bromance and cuddling up to the Russian president, the magazine concluded,

“In the past, however, the Trumps longed to break into the Moscow property market. And, for all their unfamiliarity with geopolitics, they have grasped the rudiments of Russian capitalism. ‘It is a question of who knows who,’ Donald junior noted, adding that ‘what it is they want to happen is ultimately what happens.’ Mr Trump’s campaign did not respond to questions about his business plans, so whether that insight might inform his Russian stance is unclear. So is where – on a scale from seismic scandal to venality to naive narcissism – it belongs. Still, as Mr Trump said of someone else, his stubborn, illogical devotion to Mr Putin has made it seem as if ‘there is something going on with him that we don’t know about.’ ”

Now let’s sit back and with all this to stew on, take a few deep, cleansing breaths, do some speed yoga, clear our minds, and steel ourselves for these final 192 hours. Then we can stay up very late or get up very early in order to find out what all those millions of American voters actually decide to do with the future of their nation – and the world. (Note: The author swallowed hard here.) DM

Photo: Hillary Clinton campaign vice chair Huma Abedin (L) and Democrat Hillary Clinton (R) at the end of the second Presidential Debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 09 October 2016. The third and final debate will be held 19 October in Nevada. EPA)

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