Scandal? What Scandal?

What makes this email remarkable, observes National Review‘s Jim Geraghty, is the date. It was three days after news had broken that Hillary Clinton improperly used a private email server during her time at the State Department and one day after Clinton had been served with a congressional subpoena for emails on that server. Podesta may have tried to spin his own daughter with his seeming insouciance, but about three weeks later, with the scandal of the private server rapidly metastasizing, Clinton’s IT guy had his infamous “oh sh—” moment. He realized he had forgotten to wipe her server clean, as he had promised to do. He promptly used the computer program BleachBit to delete all the emails even though, as the FBI later concluded, “at the time he made the deletions in March 2015, he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s e-mail data.” (The FBI investigators, as it turned out, gave him immunity, but this sort of data-destruction-despite-a-subpoena is not something you should try at home.)

The reason we’re privy to Podesta’s cavalier attitude about Clinton’s email scandal is that he now has email headaches of his own. Over a period of weeks, the shadowy WikiLeaks organization has been releasing hacked copies of Podesta’s emails dating back years. WikiLeaks almost certainly has ties to Russian intelligence and is obviously up to no good. The requisite caveat lector thus applies. But so far, every email under scrutiny appears to be genuine.

And what a story they tell. America’s greatest novelists could not have concocted a tale that so perfectly confirms dark suspicions about how the liberal elites running America really operate. Taken in total, the picture Podesta’s emails present is of a man whose tentacles are adroitly moving all the levers of power. In retrospect, Podesta’s casual attitude toward Clinton’s email problems doesn’t look oblivious—it looks prescient. Why should he worry about disgrace for Hillary Clinton when he and his friends in politics, business, and the media dictate what becomes a scandal?

In this respect, Podesta’s emails help explain why the FBI ignored basic procedure, destroyed the computers of Clinton aides in “side agreements” to their immunity deals, and then refused to charge Clinton for egregious violations of laws governing classified information. On March 4 of last year—again, right after the Clinton email scandal broke—Podesta sent the following email to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills (who also received an immunity deal from the FBI): “Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but [it] seems like they will.”

President Obama first claimed, as with all allegedly unexpected calamities that have befallen his White House, that he didn’t learn about Clinton’s email scandal until he read about it in the papers. However, an item from Podesta’s inbox makes that denial seem less plausible. After the New York Times reported on March 7, 2015, “Obama Says He Didn’t Know Hillary Clinton Was Using Private Email Address,” Clinton aide Philippe Reines wrote to Podesta, “One of us should connect with the WH just so they know that the email will show his statement to not make sense.” That’s because, as was subsequently revealed, the president had been emailing Clinton at her private email server address.

According to FBI files released in late September, Obama was emailing Clinton using a pseudonym. “Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, [Clinton aide Huma] Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?’ ” the FBI report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.” Abedin was also granted immunity by the FBI.

Had the Department of Justice charged Hillary Clinton, the nature of the president’s correspondence with her might have quickly emerged as an issue. Pretty soon all of America would have been asking: What did Obama know about Clinton’s illegal email server and when did he know it?

Public and Private Positions

Most of the Podesta emails stop short of blockbuster revelations of corruption. There are intimations that sources inside the State Department and Department of Justice were giving the Clintons advance notice of developments in the email investigation, and while it’s unseemly, there’s no compelling evidence this was illegal. Podesta’s emails contain evidence of possible illegal coordination between the Clinton campaign and pro-Hillary political action committees, but that’s still being unpacked. Even the emails about Obama and Clinton’s correspondence have to be taken in broader context to be properly understood.

What the Podesta emails mainly highlight is how disingenuous the Democratic political agenda has become. In one email, dated April 28, 2015, Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress—the influential liberal think tank founded by Podesta—warns the Clinton campaign against backing a $15 minimum wage. “Substantively, we have not supported $15—you will get a fair number of liberal economists who will say it will lose jobs,” writes Tanden.

Despite this apparent belief the policy would do more harm than good, you will find no shortage of instances on the Center for American Progress’s website and in its in-house publication, Think Progress, endorsing a $15 minimum wage. This includes a statement Tanden herself issued in April of this year praising “progress initiated by Fight for $15” that culminated in a “$15 per hour wage, which will apply in parts of New York state.”

While Tanden was right to warn against embracing the sort of populist socialism that Bernie Sanders’s campaign would promote, the Podesta emails suggest that Sanders’s critique of Democratic elites’ being in thrall to Wall Street is on target. According to the New Republic, the most damning of the lot is an October 6, 2008, email from Michael Froman, currently the U.S. Trade Representative. He formerly served as chief of staff for Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin in the Clinton White House and worked with Barack Obama at the Harvard Law Review. At the time he emailed Podesta, Froman was an executive at Citigroup and Podesta was co-chair of Obama’s presidential transition team. The email had the subject “Lists.” Attached to the email were three lists of people who could fill 31 Obama cabinet positions, organized by sex and ethnicity.

“[The lists] correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more,” notes David Dayen in the New Republic. “For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.” In other words, a month before the 2008 election, an executive at Citigroup, which would soon receive the largest federal bailout of any bank during the financial crisis, was basically dictating the makeup of the Obama cabinet.

If that weren’t enough to give the Bernie Bros an aneurysm, WikiLeaks released what they dubbed “an American journalism ‘holy grail.’ ” In Podesta’s emails were three transcripts of speeches Hillary Clinton was paid $675,000 to deliver to Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful investment bank and a favorite punching bag for liberal activists demanding more financial regulation.

In the speeches, Clinton lamented that Wall Street had been demonized unfairly. “I think there’s a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on all sides,” Clinton says. While that seems like a benign enough sentiment, we learn from a previous Podesta email that Clinton’s other comments on Wall Street transparency were duplicitous and worrisome to her campaign. “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least,” she said at a Goldman Sachs event. “So, you need both a public and a private position.”

She also disparaged the Dodd-Frank financial reforms as being the result of political panic, contradicting not just the Democratic narrative that reforms were being put in place to prevent another financial meltdown but her own New York Times op-ed, in which she praised Dodd-Frank for “curb[ing] recklessness on Wall Street.” Given what a flashpoint Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street were in the Democratic primary, NBC’s Chuck Todd speculated on the Today Show that had her remarks to Goldman Sachs been released earlier, it could have “possibly cost her the nomination.”

Contempt and Backstabbing

There’s another batch of Podesta emails that bear mentioning simply because it’s astounding to see in black and white the cattiness and pettiness of the people running the Clinton campaign. “Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts),” wrote Center for American Progress fellow John Halpin. “It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.” Responded Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for the Clinton campaign: “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.” If Catholic conservatives are “an amazing bastardization of the faith,” one wonders what that makes liberal Catholics who support the Democratic party’s abortion platform. As for Jewish Democrats, they might be alarmed to learn that campaign manager Robby Mook advises Hillary Clinton not to discuss Israel in speeches with Democratic activists. Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin, however, does chime in to say it’s okay to discuss Israel at fundraisers.

Podesta, for his part, is loath to discuss anything that could negatively reflect on Muslims. After the San Bernardino terror attack, MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted out the name of the killer, who had just been identified. Podesta responded to the Hillary campaign press team on email, “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.” This attentiveness to the political ramifications of the killer’s religion and ethnicity says volumes about the sway identity politics holds over the Democratic party.

Indeed, when it comes to racial issues, politics are always the uppermost concern in Clintonworld. There is worry that Clinton’s record on race relations will haunt her in the era of Black Lives Matter, specifically that she will be asked about the design of the Arkansas state flag, which honors the Confederacy, and the fact that her husband, as governor, signed into law a bill creating an Arkansas state holiday for Robert E. Lee. (Elsewhere in the emails, Podesta notes that most of “the finalists in Miss America” came from “the CSA [Confederate States of America]”; Tanden sniffs, “I would imagine the only people who watch it are from the confederacy and by now they know that so they’ve rigged the thing in their honor.”)

Aside from the frequent contempt for their supporters specifically and vast swaths of America generally, it’s also worth marveling at the petty infighting in Clintonworld. David Brock spent the nineties digging up Clinton dirt before undergoing a political conversion, founding Media Matters, and becoming one of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent and controversial defenders. But when Podesta solicited advice on how the campaign should deal with Brock, Tanden called him “a menace” and an “unhinged soulless narcissist.”

For Sidney Blumenthal, the former New Yorker journalist turned Clinton lackey, Podesta has little love. “It always amazes me that people like Sid either completely lack self awareness or self respect. Maybe both,” Podesta writes to Tanden. “Will you promise to shoot me if I ever end up like that?”

In another email, Podesta tells liberal columnist, former Democratic aide, and confidant Brent Budowsky, “Sid is lost in his own web of conspiracies.” It was just a few weeks ago that the Clinton campaign was pretending it was absurd to believe, in the face of credible accusations from the McClatchy news organization, that Blumenthal, a “senior adviser” to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, started the “birther” rumor Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be president. Now we know even those at the highest levels of the Clinton campaign think Blumenthal is a conspiracist.

Another spate of emails is notable for how contemptuous members of Clinton’s inner circle are of Chelsea Clinton. The younger Clinton started taking an active interest in the Clinton Foundation in 2011, and it didn’t take long for Bill Clinton’s longtime personal aide Doug Band to start complaining. “I don’t deserve this from her and deserve a tad more respect or at least a direct dialogue for me to explain these things,” Band emails Podesta on November 13, 2011. “She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing because she, as she has said, hasn’t found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.” Chelsea was apparently concerned that Band might be using Clinton Foundation connections to drum up business for his consulting firm Teneo.

It’s hard to tell whether Band is right that Chelsea Clinton has nothing better to do than harass people or whether Chelsea was justly concerned that Band was violating the unspoken rule that the only people allowed to use the Clinton Foundation for grifting purposes are the ones with their name above the door. There’s a possibility they’re both right.

In the following months, Chelsea Clinton tried to make nice, but Band wasn’t having any of it. On January 27, 2012, he forwarded a flattering note he received from Chelsea to Podesta and Cheryl Mills, who was then Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department. Band appended the following note: “She sends me one of these types of emails every few days/week. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far. A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking a knife in the back, and front.”

This Media

The Podesta emails, it’s fair to say, have had trouble elbowing their way onto the front page. It’s of course an extraordinarily strange season for politics. In any normal year, such revelations might have swamped Clinton’s candidacy. But this year she benefits from the media’s hopeless addiction to Donald Trump’s antics.

Another reason for the relative lack of attention has to do with the reprehensible nature of WikiLeaks. There’s something unseemly about poring over hacked emails, even when they are of demonstrable public interest. Few among us would see our personal and professional relationships emerge intact and undamaged if years of our emails were exposed to public scrutiny. When WikiLeaks’s initial revelations centered on the Bush administration’s efforts in the war on terror, the media largely characterized the organization as a white-knight whistleblower. As the years went on, there was little scrutiny of the organization’s methods or ties to foreign intelligence services—even when WikiLeaks indiscriminately released information that provoked riots and protests in multiple African countries, in which hundreds were killed.

Only this year, now that WikiLeaks has attacked the Democratic party, is the organization being reevaluated. After years of tolerating WikiLeaks’s founder Julian Assange’s hiding out in Ecuador’s embassy in London, it was the release of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speech transcripts that finally prompted enough international pressure to get the Ecuadorian government to cut off Assange’s Internet access.

But the most obvious reason Podesta’s emails are being downplayed is that they are embarrassing to the media. A recent NBC poll found that only 19 percent of Americans approve of the media, a rating well below that of Clinton or even Trump. And the missives in Podesta’s inbox reveal good reasons for the media’s reputation to be in the dumpster.

One email shows Donna Brazile, then working as a CNN commentator, emailing Podesta and Palmieri the day before a March 13 Democratic primary debate hosted by CNN with the subject heading: “From time to time, I get the questions in advance.” Brazile writes, “Here’s one that worries me about HRC,” and proceeds to lay out a detailed question Clinton will be asked about the death penalty. The next day at the debate, Clinton was asked that question, virtually word for word, by CNN’s Roland Martin. Brazile flatly denied a leak: “I never had access to questions and would never have shared them with the candidates if I did,” she said. But CNN media reporter Brian Stelter contacted Roland Martin, and he did not exactly back up Brazile’s denial. Martin admitted sharing debate questions with others at CNN and his staff. “When asked in a followup question if he would explicitly rule out any sharing of questions with Brazile, Martin did not respond,” reports Stelter.

Then there’s the abject and unseemly willingness of reporters to ingratiate themselves with Clintonworld. Take this email from Politico‘s chief political correspondent, Glenn Thrush, to Podesta: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this. Tell me if I f—ed up or anything.” (WikiLeaks emails released in July revealed Politico‘s chief investigative reporter Ken Vogel sharing a full draft of a pending story with the DNC’s press secretary; an embarrassed Politico made it clear that it was against their editorial policy to share stories with sources before publication.) As a reporter, Thrush has routinely come under fire for laughably over-the-top pronouncements, such as this one: “As Obama talks up legacy on campaign trail important to note he’s had best/least scandal-scarred 2nd term since FDR.” His defensiveness on Twitter about the Podesta email didn’t much help his case. “Little unnerving—but fascinating to be in the middle of a ginned-up, self-serving sh—storm pushed by fake, in-the-bag partisan media,” Thrush wrote.

The New York Times‘s Mark Leibovich, best known for writing This Town, a gossipy tome about Washington’s venal culture, also figures prominently in the Podesta emails. He is described by Clinton staffer Milia Fisher in the emails as “sympathetic,” though “accommodating” might be more accurate. Leibovich wrote a lengthy profile of Clinton for the New York Times Magazine, and before it was published reached out to Palmieri to vet the quotes he wanted to use. The Clinton campaign nixed two, a lame aside about Sarah Palin “cooking up some moose stew” and another where Hillary Clinton notes that “gay rights has moved much faster than women’s rights or civil rights, which is an interesting phenomenon somebody in the future will unpack.”

After the Podesta emails were released, Leibovich wrote “Anatomy of a Media Conspiracy,” a flippant, tongue-in-cheek response to the criticism. “Look, Mom, there I am in WikiLeaks,” Leibovich writes. “Right there among the rest of the media sellouts, Clinton shills and biased tools of the MSM who are apparently bent on destroying Donald J. Trump.” If Leibovich isn’t accountable to Trump voters, he should at least have to heed his editors. In 2012, the New York Times adopted a policy of forbidding sources from approving quotations after the fact. “We want to draw a clear line on this,” reads the Times‘s memorandum. “Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit.”

Media sycophancy is sprinkled throughout the emails. See, for instance, the email from MSNBC producer Sheara Braun in April of last year, begging for a guest to appear on All In with Chris Hayes: “The point isn’t to dwell on the past”—the past presumably being the email scandal that had just broken—”but the point is to talk about this amazing, intelligent woman who probably faced more nonsense back in the day because she is a woman .  .  . and she continues to have to face it. She is smarter than most men and more qualified than most men to be president,” she says. What’s truly remarkable is that this groveling wasn’t aimed at securing an appearance by Hillary—it was a request to get Clinton friend and former flack Lisa Caputo on the show to blather about (in this case) millennial support for Clinton’s candidacy.

But at least Braun’s flattery was aimed at getting something in return. The Podesta emails also show John Harwood, of the New York Times and CNBC, sending Podesta all manner of complimentary emails—well, just because. In July of last year, Harwood sent out a Tweet that read, “if there’s any specific/plausible suggestion of nefarious email @HillaryClinton was trying to hide, I haven’t heard it.” He then emailed that tweet to Podesta to make sure the campaign saw it. Later that month, when the Clinton campaign wrote a letter to the editor attacking the New York Times‘s coverage of the email scandal, Harwood sent Podesta a note that simply said, “good letter.” He wrote to praise Clinton’s TV appearances. Harwood bragged to Podesta that the GOP was “veering off the rails. I certainly am feeling that way with respect to how I questioned Trump at our debate.” This, of course, was the same CNBC debate where Harwood asked Trump, among other terrible questions, “Let’s be honest. Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?” Harwood’s performance as a debate moderator was such a disaster that the irate RNC pulled the plug on a future debate that was to be moderated by NBC.

And this only scratches the surface—there are lots of emails that raise all manner of questions about how the Beltway media operate. It’s undeniable that the Clinton campaign views reporters as pawns to be used (and who want to be used). While there’s no actual suggestion the New York Times‘s Maggie Haberman has done anything wrong, one wonders why the Clinton campaign says, “we have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed.”

Only CNN’s Jake Tapper—who coincidentally was the only reporter to ask Clinton about the Arkansas state flag—comes off looking good. “Why is Jake Tapper such a d—?” asks Palmieri. Tapper posted a copy of the email on Twitter and replied, “It’s a question that has confounded millions of people for hundreds of years.”

Unaware and Compliant

The final absurdity in an election that has surpassed all others for absurdity might be this: None of this will matter. While it’s not a new development to have a presidential campaign staffed by amoral operators who loathe voters, in the Clinton campaign such behavior has been taken to dizzying new heights. In one exchange with Podesta, Bill Ivey, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under Bill Clinton, frets that “we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry.” If you want proof of what a problem this has become, consider the fact that Hillary Clinton is poised to enter the White House in January—and she’s presumably going to take Podesta, Palmieri, Blumenthal, and the rest of the sordid gang along with her.

Even Clinton’s boosters can’t believe she made it this far. Budowsky sent Podesta an email in March, and right after noting that Clinton “says things that are untrue, which candidly she often does,” he sounded the alarm: “Right now I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on Republicans nominating Trump. .  .  . [E]ven a clown like Ted Cruz would be an even money bet to beat and this scares the hell of out of me.”

Hillary Clinton needed a miracle, and the American media did their part to deliver. In addition to at least $2 billion in free airtime during Trump’s nascent candidacy, a study done at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government earlier this year concluded that coverage of Trump in the Republican primary by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post was overwhelmingly positive. Of course, that was then.

Meanwhile, if you’re concerned about the impending presidency of Hillary Clinton, you’re at the mercy of Russian hackers to apply scrutiny. Otherwise, you have to trust CNN, Politico, the New York Times, and NBC to report damning Clinton revelations that also suggest CNN, Politico, the New York Times, and NBC can’t be trusted to report on Clinton fairly.

If the media were always dogged and thorough in their reporting on Trump, Clinton, and Obama, American politics would have a lot less sensational information to offer WikiLeaks. But don’t expect the media to contemplate what the emergence of WikiLeaks might say about their shortcomings. It’s not that they haven’t mentioned Podesta’s emails at all—they’ve just done so with a certain bloodlessness. They’ve made precious little effort to connect the dots, follow the leads, or otherwise do the kind of big-picture analysis that stories like this typically receive. Reading between the lines, it’s not hard to detect a common thread. Every one of the stories on the Podesta email leaks seems to be saying the same thing: What scandal?

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.