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Thread: Trump’s bizarre claim that the Clinton email controversy is ‘bigger than Watergate’

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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Trump’s bizarre claim that the Clinton email controversy is ‘bigger than Watergate’

    Trump’s bizarre claim that the Clinton email controversy is ‘bigger than Watergate’

    By Michelle Ye Hee Lee October 30 at 3:00 AM

    “This is bigger than Watergate. This is bigger than Watergate. In my opinion. This is bigger than Watergate.”
    — Donald Trump, campaign rally, Oct. 28

    Trump has claimed that the Hillary Clinton email controversy is the biggest political scandal “since” Watergate, but now he flatly says it is “bigger” than Watergate. His campaign is now using this line:

    There are a lot of unknowns about the Clinton investigation (see our Q&A here) right now, but we know a lot about the Watergate scandal. And the basic facts of both cases right now just don’t compare. Let’s take a look.
    The Facts

    FBI Director James B. Comey announced Friday that new emails had been found that might be relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation. He wrote a cryptic letter to Congress that contained few details.

    Law enforcement sources have told reporters that the emails were found on a computer that belonged to former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, who had been Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department. The emails surfaced during an underage sexting investigation into Weiner.

    There is not enough information right now to know whether the new emails will lead to any other developments. It does not appear as if the FBI has yet examined them in depth, and Comey had said in the letter that the FBI “cannot yet assess whether the material may or may not be significant” or whether the emails contained classified information.

    We don’t know if they were addressed to and from Clinton, or if they are emails that the FBI already had reviewed in the earlier investigation into her use of a private server.

    No charges ever have been filed in the Clinton email case; Comey has said the FBI could not find evidence of “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information.” There is no way to know whether the new emails would change that. (For more, see all of our fact-checks on the Clinton email scandal.)

    On the other hand, we know a lot about the Watergate scandal from the 1970s, thanks to the dogged, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The scandal began with a burglary of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate complex and led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, and the criminal convictions and guilty pleas of dozens of people involved in the massive campaign of sabotage and espionage on behalf of Nixon’s reelection effort and the ensuing coverup.
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    The key here is that there were clear violations of law that led to criminal convictions of aides and co-conspirators. In total, 69 people were charged with crimes, and 48 people pleaded guilty.

    Here’s a list of some of the major figures who were implicated in the Watergate scandal, including the 1972 burglary and the following coverup. All were found guilty except for Nixon, who was pardoned.

    President Richard M. Nixon (Nixon resigned in disgrace while facing impeachment. A Watergate grand jury named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. One month after being sworn in as president, Gerald Ford granted a “full, free and absolute pardon” for all crimes that Nixon “committed or may have committed” when he was in the White House.)
    John N. Mitchell, former attorney general and Nixon reelection campaign manager
    H.R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff
    John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs
    Charles W. Colson, White House counsel
    John Dean, White House counsel
    Kenneth Wells Parkinson, Nixon reelection committee
    Gordon Creighton Strachan, White House aide
    Fred C. LaRue, Nixon reelection committee
    Jeb S. Magruder, Nixon reelection committee
    Robert C. Mardian, Nixon reelection committee attorney (Mardian’s conviction of conspiracy to obstruct justice was overturned on appeal.)
    Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James W. McCord Jr., Frank Sturgis; the burglars of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters
    G. Gordon Liddy, Nixon aide
    E. Howard Hunt, Jr., CIA agent and former White House aide

    In response to Trump’s comments, Bernstein (who authored a biography of Hillary Clinton) tweeted that there is “no way” the Clinton emails are “bigger than Watergate” or close to it:

    Nick Akerman, one of the prosecutors in the Watergate case, rejected Trump’s statement that the emails case is “bigger than Watergate,” according to mic.com political reporter Celeste Katz: “Donald Trump’s statement that this is bigger than Watergate is totally absurd. There is no evidence of any violation of law. For Trump to reach that conclusion based on a total lack of evidence is reminiscent of the innuendo spread by Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.”

    The Trump campaign did not provide evidence of how the Clinton emails are “bigger than Watergate,” but issued this statement in response to our inquiry: “Hillary Clinton is one of the most corrupt candidates ever to run for president and she has enlisted the biased media to act as her campaign’s propaganda arm. Americans know that Clinton’s email scandal disqualifies her for the presidency and her candidacy will go down as one of the most unethical moments in political history.”
    The Pinocchio Test

    Trump says the Clinton email scandal is “bigger than Watergate,” given Comey’s letter to Congress about new emails that might be relevant to the Clinton email scandal. But there is not enough information available right now to know whether these emails will make a difference in the case. Comey’s letter said the FBI “cannot yet assess whether the material may or may not be significant.”

    So far, there have been no criminal charges, and therefore no convictions or guilty pleas in the Clinton email scandal. That makes the Clinton emails fundamentally different from Watergate, where 48 people were found guilty. Trump earns Four more Pinocchios for this absurd comparison.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...han-watergate/
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    LOL!!! Poor Washington Post, fighting to defend it's big Watergate "story". They were so busy this time trying to destroy Donald Trump, they totally dropped the ball on the biggest political scandal in US History. Private email server. Pay to Play. Clinton Foundation.

    Your once great newspaper just isn't what it used to be. You don't have Woodward and Bersteins any more. You've got Jennifer Ruben and Chris Cilazzas. How pathetic is that??!! I mean Chris and Phil Bump call ther section they write for in the WaPo, "The Fix". How frigging freudian is that??

    Your reporters should have been following the news on public officials like Obama, Kerry, Clinton, and former President Bill Clinton, instead of hounding, harassing and trying to destroy a private citizen whose only goal in politics is to help US fix our country.

    So yeah, the Clinton Private Email, Pay to Play and Clinton Foundation scandal already is the biggest political story in US History and you all not only missed it, you actually tried to DISMISS IT and COVER IT UP!!

    Shame on you, Shame, Shame, Shame on you all.

    GRRRRR.
    Last edited by Judy; 10-30-2016 at 05:25 AM.
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    Senior Member patbrunz's Avatar
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    Had Nixon had everyone in the media and government covering up for him like Killery does, no one would have even heard of Watergate.
    All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. -Edmund Burke

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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    When you look back over what happened to this country after Watergate, I think most Americans are wishing we hadn't ever heard of Watergate. It's Back To The Future. If Nixon had stayed in office, we wouldn't have many of the problems we have today.

    So thanks for nothing Woodward and Berstein.
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    So far, this doesn't quite measure up to Watergate. Where Nixon got into trouble with Watergate was a connection between the burglers and the White House.

    The critical part of this is how she got the server connected to the government email servers. Having mail forwarded from one email server to another is routine. I can do the same thing between my ISP email and gmail, for example. Nobody cares.

    Also routine is keeping your own email server. Anyone with a computer connected to the internet can do the same thing and is not violating any law.

    But the government email servers should have network administrators who are able to prevent forwarding email to other servers, especially if government servers existed that carried classified information.

    Somehow, Clinton was able to bypass these security measures, which would be automated, part of the settings on the server handled by the administrators. Was she able to make the administrators change the settings? Were the administrators violating policy? Did they think they were not violating policy? What have the administrators got to say?

    What would be truly damning way beyond Watergate would be if she had hacked her way in to the government servers. If she bleached her hard drives, she would certainly have had access to people and resources that would have enabled her to hack her way into government servers.

    That would be serious trouble. Impeachment territory, for sure, even before she got in.
    Last edited by pkskyali; 10-31-2016 at 12:56 PM. Reason: Changed "What would by ... " to "What would be ... "
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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    The problem with the private email server is it's illegal under federal law to use a private server for government business.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Judy View Post
    The problem with the private email server is it's illegal under federal law to use a private server for government business.
    Well, OK. If it is illegal, then it should not be possible to connect a private email server to the government servers. The question here is how did she do it? She could still plausibly have not known it was illegal and furthermore been enabled by an idiot administrator who rolled over after a little arm twisting from some heavy weight government official. This is still pretty complicated technology for a lot of people deep in the system. Does Trump himself even know how to type? He doesn't sound like somebody familiar with running a computer.

    If Clinton was given permission to connect the private server with a government one, it would be hard to hold her to the same account as if she had actually hacked her way in.

    That's the question I'd like to see answered. "Did Clinton hack her way into the government servers?" That's a crime, like breaking and entering, Watergate territory.
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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    What makes you think her private email server was connected to the government server??!!!!

    It's my understanding that she had her own private separate email with its own private separate server and she conducted government business on that server instead of the government server.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Judy View Post
    What makes you think her private email server was connected to the government server??!!!!

    It's my understanding that she had her own private separate email with its own private separate server and she conducted government business on that server instead of the government server.
    I heard there were emails -- communications -- that were classified found on her server. In other words actual emails that were being sent as classified were found on her server. It wasn't just a matter of her communicating government business or classified communications on an email service outside of the government networks.

    Discussion seems to claim that she just wasn't alert to the flags on the email indicating they were classified.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillar...il_controversy

    After allegations were raised that some of the emails in question contained classified information, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated an investigation regarding the origin and handling of classified emails on Clinton’s server. The FBI Report found that some of the emails originated in five other intelligence agencies. The FBI found that all classified emails on Clinton’s server were drafted on “unclassified systems,” meaning that they were stored and sent from unclassified servers, violating the same policies as those on Clinton’s personal server.
    If the email originated in other intelligence agencies, how did it get there? Her server must have been communicating with government servers. How was she able to do that?

    If she did that by accident, then we have more problems with our security establishment than just Clinton. And if she broke in deliberately, she is in serious, serious trouble.
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