.Last week, I wrote an article here about friend who ranted about the Inspector General's report which he claimed was damning against Hillary Clinton -- and which I said wasn't even remotely so, as far as I read the news stories and reports.
The wonderful investigative journalist Kurt Eichnwald has a wonderful article in Newsweek on the subject. Eichenwald is one of my favorite reporters. I’ve read three books by him, including one that was made into the movie, The Informant!, with Matt Damon. (The book was a very serious, detailed look at a executive who goes undercover to expose a major corporate scandal and how his life spins out of control. The movie turned it into a comic farce – very entertaining, but totally different from the book.) The article he just wrote for Newsweek is “The Scandal Over Clinton’s Email Scandal Still Isn’t a Scandal.” I admit to being biased to liking it because it says much of what I wrote the other day -- but it says much more, and goes into levels of detail far more substantive than anything I could come up with. Before even getting into all those details, which are pointed and basic, Eichenwald begins by asking some common-sense questions that have largely been overlooked. Like, wondering if anyone actually, truly believes that the person whose job is to oversee all foreign relations affairs for the United States will spend months upon months reading the 16-volume Foreign Affairs Manual of administrative and technical rules? Or perhaps is it more likely that perhaps the Secretary of State will rely on staff members in that area of responsibility? (Eichenwald goes further about how convoluted the encyclopdeic manual is, adding that "because of the amount of information involved, those duties are divided up among a large number of offices in the department.") In fact, one of the main focuses of Eichenwald's research is that it's the Department of State itself that for many years has gotten so deeply archaic in how it handles technology that staff has long had to work outside the long out-of-date guidelines. And that's only the preface to the piece, before he gets into the specifics of his reporting. You can read the whole thing here.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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