Megyn Kelly did her part for the Fox News effort to squeeze every bit of political hay out of the FBI’s latest review of email related to Hillary Clinton. But rather than come out and baselessly suggest Clinton may go to jail, Kelly told us that her kids did so.
Kelly knows darned well the FBI’s latest email review is quite likely to be much ado about nothing or at least very little. But while uncertainty remains, Fox News is doing its best to make viewers think there’s some kind of smoking gun that incriminates Clinton – and just happens to give some cred to Trump’s cries of “Lock her up.” Here's how Kelly began an exchange with guest Howard Kurtz:
KELLY: Howie, my kids are little – they’re seven, five and three - and I wasn’t gonna work tonight. I was gonna take a night off and be with them but this broke and I said I gotta go in. I was trying to explain to them why I have to go in, in terms a seven and a five-year-old can understand. My three-year-old was off breaking stuff. And my five-year-old daughter and my seven-year-old son looked and me and said, “So, is Hillary Clinton gonna go to jail?” And then they said, “What if she wins the presidency and then she goes to jail?” These are actual questions that people now need to ask!
You have to wonder what Kelly told her kids to prompt such questions. Because so far, there is absolutely no reason to believe Clinton is in any hot water, much less going to jail. As a matter of fact, as Newsweek reports, chances are she has nothing to do with the emails:
The disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation late on Friday, October 28 that it had discovered potential new evidence in its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s handling of her personal email when she was Secretary of State has virtually nothing to do with any actions taken by the Democratic nominee, according to government records and an official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity.
[…]
There is no indication the emails in question were withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did anything illegal. Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton, the official said. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of the case, it did not; such investigations are never actually closed, and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that needs to be examined.
Kurtz tried to thread the needle while still taking Kelly's bait and suggesting something very bad had come out about Clinton:
KURTZ: Look, this is indeed a bombshell. We don’t know whether it’s a nuclear bomb. Just in that memo from James Comey, “W’re looking into it, we don’t know what we have, we don’t know how relevant it is," but it really caps the worst week of Hillary Clinton’s general election campaign, coming after the WikiLeaks disclosure and you’ve gotta say that if it turns out to be a nothingburger, it is a gift from the political gods to Donald Trump, who will keep hammering this and it really strikes at Hillary Clinton’s Achilles heel because what’s her Achilles heel? It’s two-thirds of the public doesn’t think she’s honest and trustworthy.
Finally, at that point, Kelly thought it was time to note that why, yes, this could be a nothingburger.
KELLY: It’s true and it does bear mentioning: We don’t know whether it’s a bombshell yet. If it is all duplicates, that’s a different story.
Then she went on to ask her guests, “Does it change the election?”
You can bet Fox will do its very best to make that happen.
Watch it below, from the October 28, 2016 The Kelly File.
Sorry to burst your bubble but no comments of any sort were deleted on this thread except, maybe, duplicates.
Bill Ball? Is this really one of O’Bully’s testicles we are discussing?
I don’t share the modern preference for the sort of fast food called the sound bite, and feel that complex messages are weakened by being cut up into bits and pieces.. Kevin’s posts are (IMO) good examples of the fine arts of dialectics and patience, and he’s positively “Socratic” during exchanges with the younger but still open minded trolls. At least two of them actually admitted that he’d given them food for thought. Anyway, being paper dependent, with failing eyes to boot, I often print out his longer posts in order to read them at leisure, flipping easily back and forth to verify this or that.
That said, John McKee’s sharp wit provides an excellent counterpoint. Don’t either of you change, y’hear?
Please just write comments as you see fit. Your thoughts are always appreciated. We’ve never had a length requirement and I don’t see a need to start one now. :)
Oh happy happy joy joy. Eight days from now, the words ‘Trump’ and ‘President’ will never again need to be used in a grammatical, coherent sentence!
I’m just not good at the short answer, and most times I’m dealing with issues that are not ten words or less. Much of our political problem today comes from people getting their news from soundbites. I feel a need to reach deeper.
I also have issues with the right wing trying to rewrite our history – I’ve tried to help dispel that nonsense here.
Maybe an editor for Christmas. Or Festivus.
I DO value your opinions, but not more than Eyes On, Antoinette, Jan, David L, Erich or a dozen other posters who generally manage to get their points across in two or three paragraphs.
In the end, the one major accomplishment of the Iran/Contra hearings, aside from forcing some of them to publicly state what they had done (and many lied anyway) was to obstruct the real investigation that was supposed to have been conducted by Lawrence Walsh.
To my mind, there’s probably a solid competition between the Nixon, Reagan and W presidencies for which ones had the most corruption and graft. There was plenty to go around, and many of the most venal people were repeatedly employed in all three administrations. The George HW Bush presidency was in some ways the least corrupt, but he distinguished himself by ineptly getting us into Desert Storm and by inflicting Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court.
WRONG!!
Maybe voters are in a punish republicans frame of mind. I hope so.
Cubs up 3-1 in the fifth.
People today don’t remember this, but the presidency of Ronald Reagan was marred by a record number of indictments and convictions of cabinet officials. Iran Contra was not the only criminal mess under Reagan. Staffers like Michael Deaver and Lyn Nofziger were convicted of crimes, and there was a perpetual stench of graft emanating from that White House as regarded all the defense contract lobbying and the behavior of Edwin Meese and Wedtech, among many other things. The only president to see more of his cabinet prosecuted was Warren G. Harding.
So it’s no surprise that the right wing would go after Bill Clinton with everything they had, in the hopes that they could spread a false narrative that the Clintons were criminal and corrupt. At the least, they hoped to muddy the waters enough to confuse the next generation about what had happened in the 1980s. And lo and behold, it appears that they have partly succeeded. Ronald Reagan is perceived these days as a wonderful president who had a wonderful couple of terms, and Bill Clinton is seen through guarded political lenses – even people who loved the Clinton presidency now tend to qualify that by saying that “he had problems…” To me, it’s one thing to have issues with the Clintons over their triangulation of right wing points of view. It’s another thing to accept right wing propaganda talking points about the Clintons as historical facts.
And after 2000, the George W. Bush presidency was repeatedly rocked by scandals and criminal behavior – everything from Dick Cheney’s refusal to separate himself from Haliburton while it profiteered in Iraq to the coverup of the Plame/Wilson leak to the outrageous behavior of Alberto Gonzales which resulted in his resigning in disgrace. And that doesn’t even get into all the questionable connections between Bush’s people and the various companies like Enron that did their best to plunder and pillage the wallets of everyday Americans. So of course when Barack Obama became President in 2009, it’s no surprise again that the right wing attempted to invent any kind of scandal they could, to once again muddy the waters and paint the Democrats as dirty as the right wing had been behaving over the prior 8 years. I’ve frankly lost count of the number of failed “scandal” stories that right wing radio, Matt Drudge and Fox News have attempted to fan over President Obama’s two terms. Solyndra, Joe Sestak, Fast & Furious, the IRS, intelligence briefings, Benghazi, etc, etc etc. And for all these attempts at mud-flinging, we’re still left with the old Clara Peller line from the Wendy’s commercial: “Where’s the Beef?”
The reality is that the right wing would like everyone to forget about the very real venality and criminality demonstrated by many staffers and cabinet members of recent GOP presidencies. Not just invented stories on right wing blogs – actual, real criminal offenses that led to indictments and real convictions. I know the right wing wishes they had that kind of thing on President Obama and they certainly wish they could have found real corruption in the Clinton White House. But they don’t. The best they were able to do is show the American people that Clinton was unfaithful to his wife – something that is certainly distasteful but not the rampantly criminal behavior seen in the right wing administrations that preceded and followed his. It’s too bad that the right wing insists on going down all these rabbit holes trying to find the “magic bullet” scandal that doesn’t exist. If they were to put that kind of energy into constructively working with the Dems, we could actually have a functioning government. And wouldn’t that be a better outcome for everyone?
Don Rose, it’s not nice to insult your host. You probably learned that from the Orange Donald. Make sure you make a campaign contribution to the orange one.
Bret has been confused by a nonstop barrage of right wing pundits on Fox News and on the radio, who really, really want everyone to think that Clinton is a criminal rather than a politician. They want everyone to think that Clinton’s server is somehow a much more serious act than what was committed by David Petraeus. He’s forgotten that Petraeus was caught in the act of DELIBERATELY LEAKING classified intel to his mistress, who was writing a book about him. That’s an open and shut case, and he was properly disciplined for it. As Comey attempted to explain in July, a case against Clinton would have to show that she either was intending to leak information or was doing something so egregious that she’d have to know the information was leaking. The idea of intent not mattering has to do with a situation when it’s so blatant that the defendant can’t just say that they didn’t know. In Clinton’s case, there actually wasn’t much in the way of classified intel that was on that server, and what was there had been retroactively classified later. She handled the classified intel directly at work in a secure manner. Comey was displeased with Clinton for having this server but noted that he couldn’t see a prosecution as being appropriate. And that was the end of that.
The current situation is about non-confidential material that Huma Abedin was printing out for Clinton – since it was part of her chain of information, the FBI is looking at these emails to see if there is anything there, but even they admit, as Comey does, that they don’t know that anything here has significance. As far as we can tell, much of this is simply duplicative of what they’ve already reviewed elsewhere, and the content is the usual memoranda and general review material that Clinton would regularly see. Not highly confidential intel about bin Laden, sorry. If anything like that were to pop up in the printing laptop, that would be the shocker of the year, and the FBI examiners know that.
One has to wonder what presidential candidate Bret would prefer. It doesn’t sound like he’d support Sanders, given that he’s calling Clinton a “lying feminist snake”. Maybe he supports Ted Cruz or Gary Johnson. Maybe he’d like to see Alex Jones run for office. Either way, it doesn’t sound like he’s going to get his way here.
One doesn’t have to be a huge Hillary Clinton supporter to understand the importance for this country of repudiating Donald Trump and his supporters. When the polls close a week from Tuesday, it is necessary that the world see that the USA is not a country of bigots, racists and haters. It is necessary that the world see that we stand apart from such viciousness. It is necessary that the right wing learn a lesson about the cost of their constant obstruction over the past 8 years – that continuing to stir the oars of hatred will bear them no fruit. It is necessary that we get back to the business of having a functional government that can do things like set a budget and name judges to the various courts including the Supreme Court. It is high time that the right wing is held accountable for their refusal to honor their supposed dedication to this country rather than their own agenda.