What You Should Know About the Hillary Clinton Situation

If you’ve been watching a lot of FOX News or Morning Joe and are an independent or moderate, you might be convinced that Hillary Clinton is mired in corruption and controversy. The reality of the situation is that the so-called scandal is being blown horribly out of proportion. The 24 hour right wing media establishment is hard at work trying to keep Hillary’s emails on the airwaves until the general election, but there are a couple of things you should know before you buy into their narrative.

FBI Screenings are standard protocol when something is subject to a freedom of information act request, as is the case here. Those on the right would have you believe that the mere act of a screening by the FBI (pursuant to a freedom of information act request) is enough for a guilty plea. Far from it, anything requested under the freedom of information act goes through an FBI screening. Secretary Clinton’s emails being screened is not the smoking gun those on the right would like you to believe it is. Furthermore, using non government emails is not unusual, Colin Powell used personal emails in his capacity as Secretary of State and he hasn’t been accused of any misdoings. People are seeing what they want to see.

If you lean left and want to see Hillary as weak relative to another Democratic candidate, then this email “scandal” will seem much more serious than it actually is. If you lean right or independent and want to see Hillary as a corrupt bureaucrat, your mind will spin all kinds of fanciful conspiracies into existence based solely on her use of personal emails. If you want to see weakness or corruption, everything looks weak or corrupt. This whole situation is less a case of scandal or the result of investigative journalism than it is a case of individuals merely confirming their own personally held biases against the Clintons by grasping at straws. Y’all, the right started with a conclusion: “Hillary Clinton is corrupt (because we, the right, don’t like her - she, therefore, must be corrupt).” They, the right, then worked their way backwards from that conclusion (from their preconceived notions of the Clintons) and endeavored to find anything that will stick and vindicate their worldview. There’s nothing there. This drama changes no one’s mind. Those on the right aren’t going to support Secretary Clinton and neither are those on the left supporting Bernie Sanders (yet). All this drama does is serve as fuel for their biases, that’s it. Even if we take the new noise about classified information or the comparisons to General Petraeus into consideration, it still isn’t a real scandal.

The emails people are now saying were classified were not actually classified while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. They are classified now but at the time of their passage through her personal email they were not. She did not send information that was classified in her capacity of Secretary of State, not like General Petraeus. The American Right seems to have a convenient case of amnesia. They like to compare Secretary Clinton to Petraeus but they omit the fact that Petraeus deliberately sent classified information to his mistress so she could write a book. At worst, Hillary’s use of a personal email is negligent but it is most certainly not duplicitous. This so-called scandal is just more of the same mudslinging the American right has been using to attack the Clintons for years. Don’t buy into their narrative.