Indications that New York Times was deliberately misleading in Hillary e-mail article

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-email-scandal-not-so-fast.html

Michael Tomasky
Mar. 3, 2015

A NYT report says Clinton may have violated federal regulations by using private email for government business. But those rules weren’t in place when she’s alleged to have broken them.

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But let’s hold on a second. A close reading of the Times piece reveals one potential big hole in the case. I’m not saying the Times is wrong here. It’s still a foggy situation. I am, however, saying this: You have to know how to read these things, and if you do know how to read them, there’s a big question here that could—potentially—exonerate Clinton to some or maybe even a considerable extent.

The article says that there were “new” regulations that Clinton was supposed to abide by. It notes that one past secretary of state, Colin Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, sometimes used his personal email account “before the new regulations went into effect.”

So, a key question would seem to be this: When did the new regulations go into effect? If 2007 or 2008, then Clinton would appear to be in direct violation of them, depending on what precisely they said. If later, it gets a little murkier.

Oddly, the Times article doesn’t say. It doesn’t pin the new regs down to a specific date or even year.

Now, I know enough about reporting to know how this works. If you’ve got an airtight case, then you lay it all out there. You include the date. Indeed you emphasize the date, you put it high up in your story. The fact that it’s not in there is a little fishy.

Well, this might be the explanation: The new regs apparently weren’t fully implemented by State until a year and half after Clinton left State.

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So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly? And, if this is true, why did the Times not share this rather crucial piece of information with its readers? No one could possibly argue that this fact isn’t germane to the story. It’s absolutely central to it. Why would the Times leave it out?

Here are a few other specifics surrounding this matter that the Times article doesn’t make clear. These facts are already making the rounds on the Internet:

1. Clinton was not the first Secretary to use a private email account. In fact, John Kerry is the first Secretary to use “a standard government email address,” according to The Washington Post.

2. Clinton turned over her emails to the State Department. It’s not clear whether her predecessors did the same.

3. The Times article says the “existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi.” This is incorrect. Gawker reported this first, in March 2013.

4. At the time Clinton was Secretary, the Federal Records Act didn’t require federal employees to use government accounts, only to preserve records of their communications. This, Clinton seems to have done.

So what, exactly, did she do wrong here?

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