‘Criminal’ Mischief: Did A Government Official Anonymously Smear Hillary Clinton?

In the aftermath of that famously discredited New York Times story about a “criminal referral” regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails, a few important questions stand out, among many that remain unanswered.

Exactly who told Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo that the referral to the Justice Department – concerning whether information in her emails that wasn’t classified should have been – was a matter for criminal investigation? And when will the Justice Department track down, reveal, and discipline those who made these false statements to the Times and later to other news outlets?

These unpleasant questions arise from the Times editors’ explanation of an error that is enormously troubling (and the most consequential of several substantive mistakes littered throughout Schmidt and Apuzzo’s article, as catalogued superbly by Kurt Eichenwald in Newsweek). Never was there any criminal referral, only a “security referral” prompted by the appearance of retroactively classified material in a sample of Clinton emails released by the State Department.

In short, Clinton did nothing wrong, and the ensuing journalistic firestorm was, in reality, no more than a boring bureaucratic dispute over what should or should not be kept secret.

Yet determining who did this is important because – if we accept the editors’ version that the reporters’ sources misled them – one or more federal officials evidently tried to smear a presidential contender with a falsified leak, under cover of anonymity. That may or may not be a federal crime, but it should be a firing offense at the very least. And the public has a right to know if officials in the nation’s top law enforcement agency tried illicitly to influence a national election.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/criminal-mischief-did-a-government-official-smear-hillary-clinton/