Planting Story Lines

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Sept 2016

Hillary Clinton broke – sort of - with established tradition on the weekend and for the first time in 275 days held a press conference, of sorts.  What she held was a “gaggle” as it is called in the press, an informal meeting with reporters where she answers a few questions from reporters who happen to by physically close to her.  The gaggle ended when she broke into a coughing fit.

In the course of the gaggle, Clinton was a pains to plant the Russian story, the story that Russia is trying to guide the election in the favor of Donald Trump.  She referred to the story as “intriguing,” that she was “really concerned” about it, and then spoke of all the things that allegedly confer credibility to the story.  Such as Trump’s having said allegedly complementary things about Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Trump’s alleged call to pull out of NATO, as well as the alleged Russian hack of the DNC computers, which showed that the DNC was internally rigging the nomination process to favor Hillary Clinton and disfavor her opponent, Bernie Sanders.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new to Hillary Clinton, since she was, after all, the originator of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and more recently the “vast alt-right conspiracy” that was taking over the Republican Party and whose front-man was Donald Trump, her electoral opponent.

In her speeches over the Labor Day weekend, Hillary Clinton offered the boilerplate lines that Donald Trump was “temperamentally unfit” and “totally unqualified” to be president.  Then a speech ended abruptly with a coughing fit.

In the course of the press gaggle aboard her aircraft, Hillary Clinton was asked about the more than three dozen times she could not recall things at her FBI interview.  She replied, “The fact that I couldn’t remember certain meetings doesn’t affect the commitment I had to the treatment of classified material.”  When asked how she could not recall the specifics of State Department briefings about the handling of classified material, Hillary deflected, saying “I went into the State Department understanding classification.  I take classification seriously.”

Hillary Clinton was first described as a congenital liar by New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996 after her testimony to the Starr commission investigating Whitewater.  Whenever it is in her personal interest that something be believed, she will say that thing.

Consequently, her references to Russian intervention into the US election to favor Donald Trump are hardly to be believed on her account.  Likewise her statement that Donald Trump is “temperamentally unfit” and “totally unqualified” to be president is said in the face of the evidence seen with our lyin’ eyes in Mexico last Wednesday and in a black church in Detroit on Saturday.

Yet there is a strange truth in her saying that her commitment to the treatment of classified material was not affected by her failure to recall training sessions in the identification and the proper handling of classified material.

The truth of the matter is that Hillary wanted to keep classified her ongoing relationship with the Clinton Foundation in violation of her agreement with President Obama.  She wanted to keep classified the fact that she was selling the prestige and the favors of the United States government in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation, for massive speaking fees for husband Bill Clinton, and his $16 million in compensation as chancellor of Laurate International University paid for from $55 million in donations from the State Department.  She wanted to keep classified that Sid Blumenthal was still working for her.

Those are the things Hillary Clinton wanted to keep classified, and she tried to do so by doing all her “public” business on a private email server that was not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.  She was not concerned that the server might be hacked by foreign powers who would gain the secrets of the U.S. government.  Her treatment of the secrets of the U.S. government went unchanged by her alleged understanding of classification, or any training sessions she had or didn’t have.  Because her concern was with keeping her secrets a secret.

Her statement that she went into the State Department understanding classification flies in the face of the statements to the FBI, when she said that future drone strikes need not be classified when they are presently classified so high that even members of Congress can’t read them.  That she “takes classification seriously” is a throw-away line.  And it is quite irrelevant.  Husband Bill says he takes the Ten Commandments seriously, and then boards the Lolita Express and proceeds to violate several of them.

Hillary Clinton tested the waters on the weekend by holding a press gaggle.  The polls are tightening, and questions are being raised that only she can answer.  Since she cannot hold a full press conference at this time, she held a gaggle aboard her aircraft, and ended it with a coughing fit.

Her coughing fits are adding to the rumor that her health may not be up to the task of being president.  Now, there’s a story to plant!

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