Yet More Hillary Email News: “Breathtaking… Reprehensible… Outrageous” Blah Blah Blah

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Once again, Andrew McCarthy is about ready to implode:

It has now come to light that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy about 30 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi massacre….clearly trying to shield them from discovery by defense lawyers in the prosecution of the lone terrorist the Obama administration has thus far charged….The depth of Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct [] is breathtaking….ought to be impeached….Nearly as reprehensible….Just as astounding….This is a political case, and the most politicized administration in history has just essentially asked a judge to play ball….Does anybody care how outrageous this is?

Goodness. What is this all about? McCarthy is right that this isn’t getting much media attention, but it’s not quite being ignored. Let’s hear from someone still in possession of their faculties:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton may have sent or received as many as 30 previously undisclosed emails while secretary of state about the 2012 Benghazi attack, government lawyers said Tuesday….It is not yet known how many of those documents may be duplicates of 343 emails already made public by the State Department or contain stray references to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Libya that killed ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others, government attorneys said. The emails were recovered by the FBI in its year-long investigation of Clinton’s private email setup as secretary from 2009 to 2013.

We already know the FBI recovered about 15,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s email server, so this is hardly a bombshell. So far, though, we know nothing about those emails. Are they duplicates of emails that have already been disclosed? Are they personal emails? Are they just stray bits and bytes on a hard drive that hadn’t been defragged recently? We have no idea. The only thing we do know is that FBI director James Comey explicitly said that he didn’t think Clinton or her lawyers intentionally deleted any emails in order to conceal them. In fact, the recovery of the emails, he said, was “not surprising.” That seems like a rather nonchalant attitude if there was really anything scandalous in these exchanges, wouldn’t you say?

As usual, then, I think I’ll just wait and see how this all turns out. My guess: it’s the usual nothingburger, exactly the way virtually every other bit of Benghazi-related hysteria has become once we learn all the facts. For now, it’s not worth the gray cells it would take to worry about. We’ll know soon enough if I’m wrong.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate