Hillary will Say Anything, Shamelessly

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Sept 2016

Hillary Clinton will say anything shamelessly, without batting an eye, with that same bland look in her face.

This is old news to most, but here are a couple of examples from yesterday.

Donald Trump made some remarks concerning interest rates and the state of the economy.  Specifically, he said that interest rates that had been kept low practically for the entire duration of the Obama Administration was creating a bubble in the stock market.  He said they were propping up an economy that was pretty lousy anyhow, and that interest rates have to be raised sooner or later and when they rise there will be hell to pay.

All of this is pretty boilerplate analysis that you would hear on CNBC practically every day.  For the last several years, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and especially lately by current Chair Janet Yellen, has spoken of the need to raise rates and have actually raised rates a quarter point to its current level of 0.5 %.  Each time the market took seriously the likelihood of a rate hike, the stock market as a whole plunged, and bank stocks rose.  What the Fed is looking for is a strong enough economy that the stock market will ignore a small rate hike.  The stock market’s reaction proves that the underlying economy is weak, and the market floats on something of a bubble.

So, Trump is in good company and on pretty strong ground to say what he did.  It also proves that he is somewhat well informed about the economy, the stock market, and interest rates, boosting his credibility as someone who might know how to revive the economy.

Hillary can’t stand for this.  In her castigating way she said that Trump’s remarks prove that he is unfit to be president because “words have consequences.”  She thought that Trump ought not to disclose what he thought because it could lead to a recession or a stock market melt-down.  In other words, Hillary accepted Trump’s analysis that the underlying economy is poor, and the stock market is in a bubble and that low interest rates are hiding both, but that it was unpresidential to say what he thought candidly in the middle of an election campaign.  Hillary condemned Trump’s lack of deception.

Some might recall that John McCain, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2008, said that the economy was strong.  That was August, and beginning on September 15, the stock market melted down due to the financial crisis brought on by mortgage bond melt-down of 2007.  The melt-down didn’t stop until March 2008, after TARP, bailouts everywhere and a loss in value of 50 %.  McCain looked foolish for trying to be reassuring.  Hillary wants Trump to cheerlead the economy like McCain did.

The second episode occurred last night on NBC’s Commander-in-Chief presentation led by Matt Lauer.  In the course of Hillary’s presentation, she was questioned by a fellow who had held a very high security clearance at one time, Top Secret, Special Compartmented Information.  After describing what would happen to him had he done what Hillary did, he asked her how he could trust her as commander in chief with all the classified information at her disposal.  Hillary replied with her classic, ‘nothing was marked classified.’  She laboriously described how documents are supposed to be marked, and implied for the ignorant and the uninformed that if they weren’t marked then there was no way of knowing whether the material needed to be kept secret and secure, or not.

I’m surprised the guy didn’t interrupt Hillary’s patronizing reply and say, “that’s not true, Hillary.”  Because it isn’t.  Hillary’s deception is so old and rehearsed now, that I wonder if people clued into the lie as they were hearing it from her.  What she was saying was deceptive in the first place on the grounds that she claimed not to know what marginal classification markings meant, so how could she claim to be knowledgeable about how a classified document ought to look like?

If your aides take classified information from a secure server and copy type the information into an email on a non-secure server and leave off the security markings, then the email you receive is classified, just without the inconvenient markings.

A document Hillary swore to takes this into account.  The “Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement” that Hillary signed on January 22, 2009, states in paragraph 1, “As used in this Agreement, classified information is marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications..”  It goes further, saying that Hillary agreed to keep secure, “unclassified information that meets the standards for classification and in the process of classification determination….”

It is the information that Hillary agreed to keep secure, whether or not the document that contained the classified information was marked in some way or not, and also classified information transmitted orally.  The reason documents are treated in a certain way, with markings and storage, is because of the information they contain, not because they are composed of a special paper.  And orally communicated classified information cannot be “marked” at all.

None of this works if the consumer and generator of classified information doesn’t understand what ought to be classified, and Hillary demonstrated such understanding to the FBI during her interview with them.

Hence, Hillary’s long talk about markings was a big, deceptive handwave, that should have been contradicted and wasn’t.

I will be looking for fact-checkers and commentators to decry another public episode of Hillary’s deception, but I’m not holding my breath.

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