Despite the fact that we have no idea what is in the new batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails being reviewed by the FBI, Sean Hannity and Rudy Giuliani didn’t even bother to contain their glee over all the possible jail terms they can’t wait to see her serve.
John Ziegler, a conservative columnist at Mediaite, nicely sums up the situation following the news that the FBI has come across some new emails that appear to be pertinent to the case of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but may or may not be from it, in the completely unrelated Anthony Weiner sexting case. He writes:
Frankly, even in this short attention span era of constant rush to judgment it is difficult to recall a situation where more was made out of less information than this one. Could this be a big deal? Sure, but at this point there is no indication that it is and, if anything, it appears to more likely to be much ado about nothing (Dick Morris immediately called it a “game-changer,” so the opposite is almost certainly true). To this point all we know is that Hillary’s emails are under investigation, as is Weiner’s sexting. Other than learning that there MAY be a tenuous connection between to the two, none of that is remotely new information.
But Hannity and Giuliani don’t need any stinking facts to suggest to Fox News viewers that Clinton is about to spend decades in jail.
Frankly, I haven’t seen Hannity look so happy and chipper since the RNC convention as he posted on the screen a list of “real felonies, real crimes” that Giuliani feels should be investigated (as if the FBI hasn’t already).
“The evidence of intent is overwhelming,” Giuliani declared. As Hannity went through his list of crimes on the screen and the years in jail he eagerly anticipated, Giuliani laughed loudly and heartily.
Then Hannity came up with his conspiracy theory about the latest emails:
HANNITY: Now here’s my theory: I think they used Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner as an opportunity because the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department and the White House are scared to death because all of them colluded individually with the Clinton campaign and gave them all a heads up and they all protected the president who was emailing on that very server and lied to the American people. True or false?
GIULIANI: Looks that way. Looks that way. I mean it looks like you have a massive conspiracy here.
Oh, come on. This is worse than Hannity’s phony-baloney claims that Hillary Clinton is at death’s door. Which, by the way, he seems to have forgotten all about.
Watch these two take joy in someone else's (phantom, so far) misfortune, from the October 28, 2016 Hannity.
The republicans are better at the machinations to produce an October Surprise than we are. They are more Machiavellian. But this time it won’t work. Everyone is watching what the beer truck is gonna slam into next.
Republican Comey is part of a chain of command ending with President Obama. If the partisan hack (who some reports claim shared his letter with Republicans in Congress before Democrats) is going to leave his vague stink bomb out there hanging in defiance of his DoJ bosses, Obama should call him to the Oval Office for a briefing. Then Obama can clarify this horrible mess to the American public. Comey is too much the incompetent clown to handle any more messaging on the subject.
I agree Schultz’s comments were very interesting. I wrote about him a few days ago:
http://www.newshounds.us/former_fox_news_cohost_we_all_knew_about_sexual_harassment_102416
BTW, I nearly collided with him one day when I was on the News Corp. street in NYC. I recognized him and almost said something, then realized I didn’t know what to say, so said nothing. He looked at me oddly, as he could tell I recognized him.
Please don’t tell Newt I said that.
The more general understanding is that Hillary Clinton preferred to read hard copies of emails when she could, and she forwarded many to Abedin to print out for her. Again, there is no indication that any of this was classified material – just procedural everyday material. The only reason this is coming up is because the FBI is appropriately looking into Anthony Weiner’s criminal behavior and found emails on a shared laptop that Abedin used for printing.
It’s pretty much impossible that Clinton would have ever sent anything classified over to Abedin to print out. That stuff would have been kept secure and isolated – Clinton really did take that issue quite seriously. So what the FBI is looking at now is just to confirm that the emails on the printing laptop don’t have anything other than the usual memoranda and procedural updates. (These weren’t emails Clinton was writing herself – they were threads she was being copied on)
The only reason Comey has made Congress aware of it is that he was afraid it would leak, and thus make it look like he was covering something up. The problem is that by taking this action, he has broken other FBI rules and may be in serious trouble himself. There are already people now calling for his resignation.
I think after Monday or Tuesday, this situation will not have nearly the impact the Dems are worried about, or that the right wing is desperately hoping it will have.
From this segment, you can see the panic sweat on both Hannity and Giuliani. They have a losing candidate who has repeatedly insulted large swathes of the American voting public, who has put himself into repeated and increasingly bizarre scandals, who has lost three debates in an embarrassing manner, and who clearly has no idea how he would go about being the executive administrator of this country. So their only hope now is a few procedural memos that Huma Abedin printed out? Seriously? That’s their entire campaign now? No wonder these guys are panicking. (By the way, if you want to see REAL panic, look at Jay Sekulow’s frantic attempt to demand a full-on criminal treatment of Clinton in Hannity’s following segment)
Let’s remember what Hannity and Giuliani (and Bill O’Reilly) desperately want people to forget. James Comey did NOT lay out a case to indict Hillary Clinton in his July announcement, and he did NOT say that Hillary Clinton had committed any criminal acts, even when Trey Gowdy desperately tried to “gotcha” him in a Congressional hearing. What he said was that he thought the email handling was careless but not criminal. He in fact said that there was no prosecutor that would ever consider bringing a criminal charge for this situation – even the whole right wing focus on the “intent doesn’t matter” idea doesn’t hold up. Comey specifically addressed that and pointed out that this would only apply if you could show that there was such obvious and outrageous negligence with classified material that the defendant would either have to have intentionally leaked it (like Petraeus) or simply been hugely and catastrophically incompetent (like Alberto Gonzales). So there isn’t a case for a criminal indictment and there never was.
The right wing would like everyone to believe that Clinton is a criminal or at least someone who “can’t be trusted”. They have spent nearly 25 YEARS spreading this narrative, starting with Rush Limbaugh’s repeated lies, continuing with Matt Drudge’s operation, and then echoed ad nauseam across right wing websites and message boards since the internet went big in the 90s. The right wing is delighted at the current turn of events because there is no specificity to them – they can just keep fanning the flames of “Hey, you don’t know that Hillary isn’t about to be indicted, heh heh heh…” even if they have no substance to discuss. Obviously, the Dems want the FBI to specify what they’re talking about, which would help blow this over in a hurry. (Once everyone hears that it’s Abedin’s printer, this will disappear while everyone fusses over Weiner’s situation) And just as obviously, the right wing wants to keep their insinuations percolating for the next week – in the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, they can chip away a little more at Clinton’s numbers and flip a couple of swing states. I tend to doubt this strategy will work. I think we’re simply too close to Election Day for this kind of silliness to have that much of an impact, and Trump is too repulsive of a candidate for this to suddenly motivate that many of Clinton’s supporters to not show up.
I’m frankly looking forward to November 9th, when at least we’ll be past the election. Between the unfortunate behavior of some Sanders supporters in the first part of this year and the constant hatred of the right wing throughout the process, this has been a truly unpleasant time.
For a Hillary supporter like me, Republican Comey’s apparent attempt to save face with Republican Congressmen, is depressing. It serves no purpose but to interfere with the election since his spin leaking out is he did it out of an ‘abundance of caution’ meaning the FBI doesn’t have squat. Typically, the FBI does their investigation in private and only announces results. But, of course, Comey has played the useful Republican tool by doing stuff like releasing internal FBI investigation documents – pretty unprecedented – to feed the Republican beast.
The email situation is apparently Huma Abedin is as stupid about technology as her boss and forwarded emails from her phone to a device her husband had connected to a printer. So there are thousands of emails floating from her boss, Hillary, around the FBI has to mull over. Obviously, this will take many weeks, if not months. So Comey dropped a stink bomb long before we’ll know if there’s any stink.
I’ll leave it to the brave souls at Newshounds to watch Fox News for me for a while. I don’t think I can stand their vomit.
I don’t catch “Redeye” much because it’s unwatchable crap (only Gutfeld’s eponymous Fox show is worse). An extremely lame attempt by ancient letch Roger ‘Zipper Down’ Ailes to introduce hipsters to right-wing propaganda using personalities like dried up comic Greg Gutfeld who aren’t. That said, I did catch that steaming pile of horse manure “Redeye” enough to recognize Bill Shultz by photo, if not name. If I recall, his purpose was to be the punchline for Gutfeld’s awful attempts at humor so I figured he was the designated liberal. Worth a follow. Good recommendation.
Don’t know if he is actually gay, but his photo is as camp as a row of very tidy pink tents.
Worth a few minutes skimming back through his last month or two – @billschulz on twitter
Maybe Sean will wake up one day to find out he no longer has a show. Can’t happen soon enough.
