White House Reporters Focusing On The Wrong Email Scandal

As winter’s last gasp blankets much of the country in snow, this week’s news cycle continues to be dominated by a blizzard of news about former Secretary of State and future Madame President Hillary Clinton’s email account. While the story is not nothing, closer examination of the details shows it to be less than the attention being paid to it would suggest.

While there are other ways to illustrate this, the White House reporter points to the 231 references to “email” in the last two White House daily briefings, versus the zero references in the prior week, at least. That means someone mentioned “email” an average of once per minute during the last two briefings. That collective feeding frenzy is perhaps best summed up by this absurd exchange between Press Secretary Josh Earnest and New York Times White House Correspondent Michael Shear, who, I swear to God, actually says “I won’t belabor it” about halfway through his third set of nerd hypotheticals (also, if you watch until the end, Shear also does a hilariously inadvertent Jay-Z “dirt off your shoulder” gesture):

“One of your employees, one of the people in the lower press came to you and said, I love technology. I’ve got an old PC sitting at my apartment in Dupont and I’d like to run a mail server using Linux on it and plug it into my Cox or FiOS wireless, and I’d like to use that full-time instead of my who email address to conduct all of the business that I conduct with reporters and other people in the White House and the government, that would be okay with you. You would offer them guidance against it, but at the end of the day, if they wanted to do that, that would be okay?”

“…But let’s set that aside for a minute because the Federal Records Act is a question of preserving documents and that’s relatively interesting — maybe not interesting, but it’s relevant. But there’s also security questions, right? There’s questions about — regardless of whether or not something is kept for posterity, there’s questions of I’m sending you an email, you’re sending me an email, I’m emailing Schultz, is somebody hacking? Is the contents of that information getting out? Maybe Schultz is emailing somebody inside the government that’s got a classified document or it’s got a secure document that should be secure. That has nothing to do with the Records Act. That has to do with security issues. And would it be okay for Schultz to have his little server on his Linux box?”

Maybe not interesting? In an MIT dorm after several hits off of a dusted joint, that’s still definitely not interesting, but especially so in a White House briefing room where every other reporter has already wasted the better part of two hours drawing what little blood there is to be had from the stone that is this extremely disciplined press secretary.

All of this for a story that, as Bob Cesca has ably pointed out, will only matter to the degree it tarnishes the reputations of the reporters who have reported it so shoddily. Was Hillary Clinton unwise to handle her email this way? Definitely. Will any amount of dredging turn up anything consequential in those emails? Probably not. Is Hillary going to end up cellies with Bob McDonnell? Definitely not.

There was one reporter who not only bothered to ask about an email scandal that really does matter, but asked the right questions. His name is…READ MORE

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