Some newsrooms are questioning whether it’s really all that remarkable that Hillary Clinton’s personal email server contained classified government data that went beyond top secret.
NBC News reported this week that anonymous government officials had characterized the information contained in the emails as “innocuous,” and ABC News suggested in a headline that the story was more of the same partisan ho-hum.
Federal investigators are looking to see whether Clinton sent or received classified information from her unsecured and unauthorized “homebrew” server when she served as secretary of state.
Though investigators have already uncovered a number of emails showing Clinton and her team did use the server to handle classified information when she worked at the State Department, Fox News obtained a copy of a letter from the desk of the Inspector General tasked with reviewing the matter that said some of the information on her emails was above “top secret.”
Some of the information contained on unauthorized and unsecured server was so highly classified, Fox reported Wednesday, that McCullough and his team reportedly had to seek special permission just to look at it.
However, according to anonymous government officials cited by NBC News, those new emails are probably “innocuous.”
“The officials say the emails included relatively ‘innocuous’ conversations by State Department officials about the CIA drone program,” NBC reported, adding elsewhere these same officials said that drone strikes are “among the worst kept secrets in Washington.”
These same anonymous government officials also told NBC News that the IG has it in for Clinton, citing a $1,000 donation that the once made to former President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election efforts.
McCullough, who NBC refers to as a “career intelligence official,” was appointed to his current role as IG in 2011 by President Obama.
ABC News took a somewhat different route, and soft-pedaled the fact that the IG himself told lawmakers that Clinton’s server was holding extremely sensitive materials, and suggested instead that the story was just another round of the same old same old.
“Hillary Clinton Accused Again of Handling Top Secret Info Through Private Email,” read a headline that appeared Jan. 20 on ABC News’ webpage.
ABC reported that the news originated with McCullough, but the IG is never mentioned by name.
The broadcast arm of ABC News didn’t even mention the email story during its evening program Tuesday. NBC and CBS News didn’t mention the story either.
“[T]he networks reserved a whopping five segments (one on ABC, one on CBS and three on NBC) for the Iowa rally in which the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee endorsed the billionaire frontrunner,” Newsbusters reported. “[A]ll three networks spent a separate three minutes and 46 seconds across two reports and one news brief on the Democratic race, but did not use that opportunity to even once allude to the cloud surrounding the former secretary of state.”
Like ABC News, the New York Times also covered the story, but the newspaper mostly downplayed its implications.
They buried the story in the bottom right corner of A16 in its Wednesday print edition, rather than place it prominently on its front page. The front page of the Times’ Thursday print edition also made zero mention of the latest turn in the Clinton email scandal.
