"Emails! The crime!"
by digby
Matt Yglesias examines the Clinton Rules, which are in full-effect:
The latest Hillary Clinton email revelations arose out of an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting.
The best way to understand this odd hopscotch is through the Prime Directive of Clinton investigations: We know the Clintons are guilty, the only question is what are they guilty of and when will we find the evidence?
So somehow an investigation that once upon a time was about a terrorist attack on an American consulate becomes an inquiry into FOIA compliance which shifts into a question about handling of classified material. A probe of sexting by the husband of a woman who works for Clinton morphs into a quest for new emails, and if the emails turn out not to be new at all (which seems likely) it will morph into some new questions about Huma Abedin’s choice of which computers to use to check her email.
Clinton has been very thoroughly investigated, and none of the earlier investigations came up with any crimes. So now the Prime Directive compels her adversaries to look under a new rock and likewise compels cable television and many major newspapers to treat the barest hint of the possibility of new evidence that might be damning as a major development.
It’s the same drive that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial on the grounds that he had perjured himself to try to cover up an affair that was uncovered in an investigation that was originally supposed to be looking into a years-old Arkansas land deal on which the Clintons had lost money. The Whitewater investigation did not reveal any crimes. So rather than wrap things up and consider the Clintons exonerated, the investigators went looking under other rocks and came up with Monica Lewinsky.
There are several rules that govern media coverage of the Clintons, but this year the Prime Directive has dominated them all. Network news has devoted more minutes of coverage to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined even as email investigations have not uncovered any wrongdoing. It’s inexplicable news judgment, unless you simply assume there’s a crime out there.
I don't understand why someone who has been investigated for years by a runaway prosecutor and a relentless media machine and found to have committed no crime continues to be the holy grail to these people but she does. There's a hive-mind mentality about all this that comes into play when the media decides to "like" or "not like" a politician. It's really that simple. And they do not like Hillary Clinton.
But the assumption that Clinton is guilty of crimes based upon her use of emails in the state department is just ... nonsense. There is simply no there, there. And yet it's taken on a life of its own, as these things do, and the original "crime" is no longer the issue. And we have no idea what the issue actually is. The idea that this has anything to do with the substance of "the case" is ludicrous. There is no case.
There's more on this at Vox. It's a good piece.
.
