Mediaboss Marketing

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are two of creative leaders honored for Varietys 2022 Power of Women presented by Lifetime. For more, click here.

Hillary Clinton is in an ebullient mood, and for good reason.

Clinton, though she remains an avid observer of political trends, is out of the crucible of hunting for votes. And at this latest stop on a tour that has included visits to the Venice and Toronto film festivals, she and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, are seeking something new: your eyeballs.

Ramona Rosalesfor Variety

HiddenLight Prods., which the pair launched with Sam Branson (son of Richard Branson, of the Virgin brand), has launched its first series, Gutsy. The Apple TV+ documentary series is based on the Clintons 2019 Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, and in it, the former secretary of state and the Oxford Ph.D. kibitz with Kim Kardashian and Megan Thee Stallion, as well as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and labor activist Dolores Huerta.

Its an intriguing merger of the stoic, scholarly nature of the famous mother-daughter pair and the high-level glitz of the world of entertainment they enter as newbies; despite being one of the most accomplished figures in American politics, Secretary Clinton is a neophyte producer and on-camera personality. (Both Clintons initially hoped not to be on-camera at all. Perhaps thats why, in the first episode, they attend clown school in order to loosen up.)

In this conversation, which takes place in New York City, Hillary Clinton addresses the aftermath of the 2016 election, the threats against women in politics, and whether she believes a woman could ever become president. Chelsea Clinton speaks out about what it felt like to be the subject of relentless scrutiny on the campaign trail and to see her family covered on Fox News. Together, they share their vision for what they hope to accomplish with Gutsy in this new and unexpected pivot into entertainment.

Gutsy deals with figures from outside the world of politics you profile artists and entertainers as well as activists. Has there been a learning curve as you engage with the world of entertainment?

Hillary Clinton: There certainly was a learning curve doing the series, because weve never done anything like that. Wed been interviewed a lot of times, as you might guess, but to be the one leading the conversation and asking follow-up questions that was all new to us.

Chelsea Clinton: Having women from entertainment was important to us, because we think there are a lot of gutsy women in entertainment. But we also hoped that people might come to learn more about women they already feel drawn to and know something about, and that would enable them to learn about women whose stories we think we all should know.

What youre describing is a kind of Trojan-horse phenomenon.

Hillary: Thats absolutely fair. When we interviewed the really well-known women, like Kim Kardashian, we didnt want to focus on just her amazing success in business and everything else that goes with it, but on her efforts to help people caught up in the criminal justice system. Thats what was meaningful to us.

The name HiddenLight recalls the saying of light being hidden under a bushel.

Hillary: You nailed it. When I was in sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth King, had many aphorisms that she shared with her students. One was Dont hide your light under a bushel basket, which was a biblical phrase. When we were forming the production company, I just kept thinking about Mrs. King.

Chelsea: Its certainly an admonition that I grew up with, and sometimes I really needed to hear it. Sometimes I really wanted to fade into the background because I didnt want as many people looking at me, or as many bright lights glaring at me.

Chelsea, in Gutsy, you describe the experience of being the child of a president and mocked in the media. Is there fear when you step in front of a camera now?

Chelsea: I thankfully dont feel that residual fear. I didnt feel fear as a child, because otherwise I would have just been afraid all the time. As I think about raising brave, resilient kids, I try to think more about what I want to learn from my experience as a child instead of being reactionary to it.

Hillary: One thing that Chelsea has done repeatedly is to tell people to back off from kids. Shes been so consistent, and I really respect that.

Chelsea: I feel such a palpable sense of responsibility because I wish more people had been standing up publicly for me.

Hillary: And they really werent back then.

Chelsea, your children are out of public view. Does that take effort?

Hillary: Its being conscious all the time.

Chelsea: And having them be conscious and not paranoid.

How does working together creatively change a parent-child relationship?

Chelsea: I think because we wrote the book together, thats where we got out all the kinks. Or at least many of the kinks. Some of it was generational my mom still writes longhand, and I am in the 21st century and use a computer. She has a very old iPhone, so sometimes her iPhone wasnt compatible with the apps I wanted to use. It was having work conversations and then, OK, now its time to talk about the grandkids.

Hillary: The book was initially an idea that came out of a conversation that weve had ever since she was a little kid about women that inspired us. When I was a little girl, there really werent a lot of women role models. Maybe Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, but not very many. I had to seek that out. But when Chelsea was a little girl, her pediatrician was a woman, the mayor of Little Rock was a woman, a lot of my friends were active in their careers.

Ramona Rosalesfor Variety

Did you anticipate, in working on the book, that itd end up as a TV vehicle featuring you?

Hillary: When people approached us in the fall of 2019 to ask to option it, we thought, this is so personal to us because of the experience we went through writing it together, we dont want to just turn it over to someone else. Of course, everybody we were pitching to wanted us to be involved in some way.

Chelsea: When we initially pitched it, we had this idea of a travelogue with us at the beginning and the end, not really in the middle. I also had ideas that we were going to have all of this wonderful archival footage, we would talk to historians a more admittedly earnest paradigm.

Figuring out how to make something as earnest as you want but that people really can connect with is an interesting challenge.

Chelsea: I think its entertaining and earnest together. With the series, we really wanted to spark conversations. And for that to happen, people have to watch it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently in an interview with GQ that part of her believes there could never be a woman president. Do you agree?

Hillary: No, I dont agree with that. I do agree its really hard. I agree that the double standard is alive and well. And so therefore any woman in politics or any walk of life faces challenges that men who are equivalent in experience dont face. I believe that I came so close, I got more votes, unprecedented things happened to me we all learned a lot from that campaign. I do think its possible. I do think its hard. Theres a line from one of my favorite movies, A League of Their Own: If it wasnt hard, anybody could do it.

I would also add that there is a feeling of increasing pushback to womens ambitions and roles. We see it obviously with the Supreme Court, but social media has enhanced misogyny and sexism. Its hurtful, because it becomes part of the ecosystem. There are a lot of good points that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez made in the article that I do agree with, but I think we will get there. But everybody needs to go after that goal with clear eyes and understanding how hard it is.

When a number of women ran for president in 2020, did you caution them?

Hillary: I was delighted that so many women ran, because we need to break the myth of the token woman. The more women who actually run, who are mixing it up at the highest levels of politics, the better it is. I met with and talked to every woman with the exception of one or two. The ones I knew well, I talked to them and gave them advice, but they had to experience it to understand it. Its such a high-wire act with no net; until youre on it, you cannot know how youre going to be responding.

In a world where Facebook had never been invented, would you have won the 2016 election?

Hillary: I cant do that hypothetical. We know that they were unfortunately instrumental in permitting Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign to engage in a massive campaign of mis- and disinformation. I think that wouldve been harder, but I cant hypothesize about what would have been different.

Chelsea, did serving as a campaign surrogate for your mother twice give you a different perspective on politics?

Chelsea: I wasnt surprised by the intensity of reaction on both the incredibly supportive, affirmative and positive side or the cruel, vitriolic, meanness side. I wasnt surprised by the lies or the efforts to obfuscate and gaslight. But what I found not necessarily surprising, but a wow moment, was the relentlessness of it. No one individual experience felt like This is what it is like to campaign for a woman to be our next president. But the relentlessness was exhausting in a way that I had not anticipated.

Your family was the first great target of Fox News approach.

Chelsea: We were the reason that Fox News was created. Because Rupert Murdoch recognized a great market opportunity.

As a media enterprise on a much smaller scale than Fox, do you see yourselves as fighting back?

Chelsea: Climate change illuminated where Fox News was willing to go and its destructive impact. Its not singularly about Fox News; its also about conservative and right-wing enterprises that sprung up during the 1990s and early 2000s. Im 42, and when I was in junior high, two-thirds of Americans knew human activity is partly responsible for climate change. The right proved to themselves, We can hit people with relentless misinformation and every night pipe into their homes to disbelieve scientists what else could be possible? Today, with COVID, its the same playbook.

Hillary: Theres an element to this which is quite frustrating, because they get away with it. The so-called mainstream media, even the so-called progressive media, is just not as relentless in rebutting, refuting and making clear that this is nothing but a play for profits at the cost of truth. It might have mattered if one of the other networks for 10 days said, Do you know one of the very first people to get vaccinated in the U.K. in December of 2020 was Rupert Murdoch? Did you know that Fox News requires all of their employees to be vaccinated?

Tech companies, the rest of journalism, ordinary people with platforms, we havent done enough to point out the dangers, point out the falsehoods, point out the hypocrisy. There is a path to limit the damage theyve done, but it requires leaders on the side of facts and evidence. We now have that with Biden, and hes making slow progress in trying to open peoples minds and eyes to what reality actually is.

Hearing you describe political combat as relentless makes clear to me, Chelsea, why youve never run for office.

Chelsea: Its important to say that even though it is relentless and exhausting, we continue to get up every day and fake it till we make it, because we do believe the future of our country and our very world is at stake. The fact that Fox News broadcasts some version of the great replacement theory on a regular basis and it doesnt get a robust response from the rest of our media is really disturbing to me. The fact that you frequently see the cabal of George Soros, my mom and President Obama, who seem to be their three favorite villains, and there isnt a continued outcry about anti-Semitism is really problematic to me.

I have had a unique experience with the right. It has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Anything I can do to push back and create space for the stories I think we should be focused on is what I want to do. I dont think the only way to do that is to run for office. The answer now is Not now. But I dont want to say, Not ever, because I do think its an important question for any of us who care about our country.

In the time we have left

Chelsea: Can I make one more point? As a daughter, because I cant turn off that part of my reality, the relentless, gruesome imagery of my mom being hung or burned at the stake the fact that that was not answered and shifted aside opened the aperture for even more violent imagery and more violent language around every woman in politics today. I dont know how we put that genie back in the bottle, but we have to do a better job.

Hillary: I was in England a few months ago and met with a group of women parliamentarians. The main thing they wanted to talk about was the increase in violent threats against them. They think about the woman who, during Brexit, was murdered because she was against Brexit a fanatic, hopped up on violent rhetoric, killed her. [Jo Cox, a Labour Party member of Parliament, was murdered in June 2016 in England.] Its something that was in the Ocasio-Cortez article: How do you tell young women to go into politics when there is so much pushback and threats of violence? Its a big issue, and people are not taking it seriously enough.

Many people saw the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, as a wake-up call. Did you?

Chelsea: We have known this was coming for a long time.

Hillary: I warned about it in the 2016 election I was sounding an alarm they didnt hear.

Chelsea: I always spoke about the Supreme Court, and the right accused me of dancing on Justice Scalias death. I got called histrionic, I was fearmongering. No! Im living in the world of taking them seriously and literally from then-candidate Donald Trump to the elected Republicans at every level of our government who say they want to take away my fundamental human rights. I continue to be lambasted, and I continue to make the point.

The reaction to Dobbs reminded me of the Womens March in 2017. Did you, Secretary Clinton, feel frustrated that all this energy was catalyzed after you lost the election campaigning on a feminist message?

Hillary: Its hard for people to imagine something that is not actually happening yet. I, frankly, was shocked at the inauguration, where he painted this dark, dystopian picture of America. There was no outreach thats not the person he is. People who supported him, who enabled him, they are engaged in a culture war. The culture war is dark and negative and fearful. The Womens March was an incredible response to what happened in the election. It was important. But if you dont stay organized to vote for people who have a more hopeful, positive, inclusive vision of our country, you can march from now until doomsday it doesnt make a difference. You have to show up and actually vote.

If theres a culture war going on, you two are in an interesting position: Youre creators of culture now. Do you see Gutsy as a salvo in this ongoing battle?

Chelsea: We have polio now again here in New York. We have thousands of Americans dying every week of COVID. We have gun violence every minute of every day. We have the planet warming at faster rates than were initially anticipated. We have so much work to do. And so either we can live in the dark carnage of what the right wants us to believe is the inevitable story of our past, present and future, or we can build a more hopeful, inclusive, sustainable future, where theres more joy and laughter.

Speaking of joy and laughter, I loved that you included Symone as one of your gutsy women. Had you seen drag before working on this show?

Chelsea: Yes, both shows here in New York City. And I was so excited when someone from Arkansas won Drag Race.

Favorite venue for drag shows? Or do you not want it to be flooded with people?

Chelsea: Exactly. Not for public consumption!

Link:
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton on Their Gutsy Star Turn, Fox News and Whether a Woman Can Be President - Variety

During Varietys Power of Women dinner, presented by Lifetime, on Wednesday, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton spoke, and the former secretary of state took the Iranian government to task.

I could not stand up here tonight without also recognizing the brave women in Iran who are standing up for their rights, their freedom against a horrific regime who stays in power in large measure because they oppress women, Clinton said. And I could not stand here without thinking about the women in Afghanistan who are being deprived of education, or the women on the front lines in Ukraine who are trying to defend their country against the barbarity of Putins invasion.

So we have a lot of work to do, she continued. Its work in our own country to keep our progress going and not let the clock be turned back, and its also caring about the rest of the world.

The Clintons are in the midst of promoting Gutsy, the Apple TV+ series adapted from their 2019 Book of Gutsy Women. On the show, in which the mother-daughter pair appear and which they produced with their new HiddenLight shingle, luminaries from rap star Megan Thee Stallion to labor activist Dolores Huerta share their wisdom.

The series merges the former secretary of state and the health advocates cerebral energy with a dose of star power from outside politics. In an interview with Variety for the Power of Women issue, Clinton said, When we interviewed the really well-known women, like Kim Kardashian, we didnt want to focus on just her amazing success in business and everything else that goes with it, but on her efforts to help people caught up in the criminal justice system. Thats what was meaningful to us.

She expanded on that idea Wednesday night, saying, We showcase a lot of different kinds of women who have done all sorts of things. Some of their own choosing, some because they were challenged, but each of them having to dig down deep to find the resilience and the determination to find their own gutsiness and not just about themselves, but trying to right injustice. Trying to solve problems for others as well. Because were at this moment of reckoning, not only in our country, but around the world, about human rights and womens rights. Its critically important that we tell these stories.

Chelsea spoke directly to the experience of raising children in America in the era of Roe v. Wades reversal.

I am full of palpitating rage as I look at my daughter and realize that she could have fewer rights than I had growing up in this country, she said. And I look at my sons and realize that they could, too, because while weve talked a lot about abortion tonight, its also the right to contraception. Its the right to equal marriage. Its the right to privacy. Truly, everything that has enabled all of us to lead our lives is under threat. And while that is acutely and urgently true for women, it is not exclusively true for women.

This is an existential moment. We certainly need all of us to be gutsy, because I dont want to go further back. I think a lot about the admonition of the great Coretta Scott King, and others who reminded us that progress has to be defended and protected in every generation. Sometimes we also have to win it back.

Closing her speech, she added, We certainly hope that you will take up the call to tell more stories of choice, of privacy, of equal marriage and equal rights because we need you to help defend them, to protect them, to win them back. Because I know Im not the only parent here. And I know Im not the only one whos enraged. And I also know Im not the only one whos optimistic.

Secretary Clinton also remarked on the idea of optimism: Its a choice to be optimistic. I have to end with one of the best answers that I ever heard from anybody, from my wonderful late friend and predecessor as Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. When asked if she were an optimist, she paused and she said, Yes. Im an optimist who worries a lot. So lets be optimistic. But lets also make sure that we take our worry into action in order to beat back the dark forces that want to turn us back. Lets be gutsy together.

The Clintons, along with Elizabeth Olsen, Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay, and Malala Yousafzai, are honorees at this years Power of Women event in Los Angeles.

Read the rest here:
Hillary Clinton Slams Horrific Iran Regime: Theyre Only in Power Because They Oppress Women - Variety

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch obtained evidence that a computer contractor working under the direction of Hillary Clintons legal team destroyed subpoenaed records that the former secretary of state stored on a private email server she originally kept at her New York home, and then lied to investigators about it. Yet no charges were brought against Clinton, her lawyers, or her paid consultant.

The leniency accorded to Clinton contrasts with recent moves by Attorney General Merrick Garland to aggressively investigate former President Trump and his lawyers for allegedly obstructing investigators efforts to locate subpoenaed records at his Florida home. Legal experts say the apparent double standard may provide a useful defense for Trump and his legal team.

The treatment of Clinton included a deal with her defense team that required the FBI to, in effect, obstruct its own investigation. During its 2016 probe, the bureau agreed with her lawyers' demands to destroy two laptop hard drives containing subpoenaed evidence immediately after searching for files on them. They did so while the information was still being sought by congressional investigators and even though the lawyers had served under Clinton at the State Department and were subjects of the FBIs investigation. In fact, the laptops were theirs.

Long before it bowed to the request, the FBI suspected Clinton's lawyers played hide-and-seek with evidence, making the concession that much more baffling.

The scandal first erupted on March 2, 2015, when news broke that Clinton had secretly set up a non-government email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion in the weeks before she started her job at Foggy Bottom in early 2009. She used the unauthorized and unsecured device to conduct official State Department business including transmitting and storing classified information which allowed her to bypass legally mandated archiving of her government records.

The next day, the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent her attorney David Kendall a letter advising his client to preserve all electronicrecordscreated since January 2009 and specifically not to delete any emails on her private server. The panel then issued a subpoena for recordsrelated to the deadlyterroristattack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

Three weeks later, on March 25, Kendall and former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills, who also acted as her personal attorney, asked a computer contractor with Platte River Networks, which hosted Clintons secret email server, to join a conference call with them, according to FBI documents. Over the next week, the contractor, Paul Combetta, deleted the entire email archive from Clinton's server using a software program called BleachBit, which digitally shreds" files to prevent their recovery.

All told, the paid Clinton agent scrubbed 31,830 emails from her server and backup files. In addition, he permanently removed duplicates of the emails from the laptops of Mills and another Clinton lawyer and aide, Heather Samuelson, where they also had been stored. According to FBI records, Combetta knew the documents he destroyed were under subpoena.

In July 2015, the FBI counterintelligence division opened a criminal investigation, codenamed Midyear Exam, in response to a referral from the intelligence community inspector general concerning Clintons unsecure server. The FBI predicated the opening of the probe on the possible compromise of highly classified Sensitive Compartmented Information. Emails classified at the SCI level were later found on Clintons server.

Some career FBI agents working on the case, which was tightly controlled within headquarters and deemed a SIM, or sensitive investigative matter, thought they had a slam-dunk case of obstruction, a key aggravating factor for prosecuting cases involving the mishandling of classified information or government records. All they had to do was get Combetta in a chair and pressure him to implicate the high-level Clinton surrogates who told him what they wanted done.

Several investigators believed "that Combettas truthful testimony was essential for assessing criminal intent for Clinton and other individuals, because he would be able to tell them whether Clintons attorneys Mills, Samuelson or Kendall had instructed him to delete emails, according to a 2018 report by the DOJ's inspector general.

But during voluntary interviews with FBI agents, Combetta falsely denied he haddeleted or purgedClintons emails from the server or back-ups, and insisted Clintonslegal team never requested that he do so.

Combetta refused to talk to investigators about the critical March 2015 conference call with Clinton's lawyers that precededhis purge ofevidence, the only topic he refused to speak about. So investigators and prosecutors agreed to givehim immunity and interview him again.Still,they never got his account of the conference call. A written FBIsummary of the interview, known as an FD-302 report, does not reference thecall, indicating that agents failed tofollow up on a key line of questioning in the investigation.

Investigators declined to pursue other aspects of the case as well. They obtained an email in which Combetta told a colleague he was part of aHilary[sic] coverupoperation and said he would elaborate later at a "party." Asked about it, Combetta claimed he was just joking; the FBIaccepted his explanation and did not appear to follow up with the colleague to learn what they discussed at theparty.

The FBI also accepted another explanation for why Combetta, using the screen name stonetear," sought technical assistance on theReddit forum on how to "strip out" the email addresses of a VERY VIP" client from a a bunch of archived email, in an apparent reference toClinton. (AfterInternet sleuths revealed stonetear was a name Combetta used in other forums,he began scrubbing his postsfrom the web.)

An FBI case supervisor told the inspector general that he believed Combetta should have been charged with false statements for lying multiple times, according to the IG report, but prosecutors refused to indict him. The FBI also obtained forensic evidence from the server that could establish that Combetta made the deletions, but prosecutors balked at charging him with obstruction.

Then-FBI Director James Comey personally agreed with the DOJ decision to give Combetta immunity ratherthan sweating him in a grandjury box, which typically is done with subjects who are lying, to get them to tell thetruth.

Comey was forced to defend the deal in an October2016 conference with FBI supervisors, who werehearingcomplaintsfrom rank-and-file agents that headquarters handed out immunity dealslike candy toClinton witnesses.Comeyexplained the bureau wasn't interested in prosecuting a small fish like Combetta, and sought only tomassage him for information to make a caseon Hillary Clinton, even though internal FBI emails reveal Comey already had decided to let Clinton off the hook. He did not explain why the contractor hadnt been pressured more with threats to bring charges against him for lying to agents, the traditional investigativemethod for getting such an uncooperativewitness to turn.

With respect to Combetta, we found his actions in deleting Clintons emails in violation of a congressionalsubpoena and preservation orderand then lying about it to the FBI to be particularly serious, DOJ InspectorGeneral Michael Horowitz said in hisreport. We asked the prosecutors why they chose to grant him immunity instead of charging him with obstruction of justice.

One DOJ prosecutor told Horowitzs investigators they wanted to make Combetta feel comfortable enough that he would eventuallycooperate on his own. Another said they weren't interested in prosecuting a bit player for lying and that doing sowould just bog down the investigation, which they were rushing to wrap up well before the November 2016 presidential election.

"I was concerned that we would end up with obstruction cases againstsome poor schmuck on the down that had a crappy attorneywho[was]hiding theball,the unidentified prosecutor said.

"And soat the end of the day, I was like, look, lets immunize him. Weve gotto get from Point A to Point B. Point B is to make a prosecutiondecision aboutHillary Clinton and her senior staff well before the election if possible, the prosecutor added. "And this guy with his dumbattorney doing somehalf-assed obstruction did notinterest me.So I was totally in favor ofgiving him immunity."

The prosecutors reported directly to then-DOJ counterespionage official David Laufman, who would later play a key role in the discredited Russiagate probe, including opening investigations on several Trump advisers and signing off on wiretap warrants targeting at least one Trump aide, even though he knew they were based on a fabricated dossier financed by the Clinton campaign.

Prosecutors also gave Clinton aides Mills and Samuelson immunity deals, over the objections of some FBI investigatorswho wanted to bringthem before a grand jury to explain their actions.

A handful of agents also argued for issuing a searchwarrant to seize their personal laptops, which they used to upload all the emails fromthe Clinton server and cullaway supposedly personal messages that they claimed were out of the reach of investigators. Instead,prosecutors opted to review the laptops through an unusual consent agreement, which restricted searches tocertain files and specific dates and nothing before or after Clintons tenure as secretary, which put anyemail exchanges with Combetta out of reach and required theFBI to destroy the hard drives after conducting thelimited search, according todocumentsoutlining the agreement.

This is simply astonishing given the likelihood that evidence on the laptops would be of interest tocongressional investigators, formerSenate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and three other GOP congressional leaderscomplained in aletterto DOJ at the time.

In his talk at the FBI conference, Comey explainedthat he had to agree with prosecutors and defense lawyers to limit the search because ofhuge concernsthat attorney-client privilege and attorney work product could be discovered on the laptops, a concern that apparently didnot register in the broad,sweeping search of Trumps records. Agents scooped up at least 520 pages of attorney-client privileged informationduring their raid of Mar-a-Lago,according to a federal judge who has ordered an independent inspector to review the seized records forprivileged material.

Mills and Samuelson, who agreed to answer only a narrow scope of questions to prevent investigators from solicitingprivileged information,were later allowed to sit in on Clintons own interview, which the FBI conducted after Comeyhad already drafted a statement exonerating herof mishandling classified information and obstructing justice. Thedirector famously delivered the statement in a July 5, 2016, pressconference, proclaiming the FBI found no evidencethat Clintons emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.

Grassley says the FBI pulled its punches investigating Clinton in comparison to Trump, who he says is being harshly investigated andprosecuted for the same offenses.

Trump has not been provided the same (gentle) treatment given to Secretary Clinton and her associates,Grassley asserted in a recentstatement.

To be sure, the agency has used more intrusive methods probing Trump for similar allegations ofmishandling classified information andconcealing documents under subpoena.

Unlike the Clinton probe, where investigators and prosecutors sought to obtain evidence by consent whenever possible, the department has used a federal grand jury to issue subpoenas to Trump for thousands of documents, as well as surveillance video footage, from his Palm Beach estate. They also obtained a search warrant to raid his private office and family bedrooms. In addition to seizing more than 11,000 documents, agents confiscated some 1,800 personal items, including gifts, photo albums, clothing, passports, and medical and tax records, according to court records.

Clinton and her representatives were spared such heavy-handed tactics andindignities, the senator pointed out.

Even though Secretary Clinton and her attorneys did not hand over classified records in their possession, they were not subject to a raid similar to what occurred at Mar-a-Lago, Grassley said.

In the end, computer-forensics investigators and intelligence analysts were able to determine that at least 81 classified email chains were transmitted and stored on Clintons unclassified personal server. Their levels ranged from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM, a highly sensitive designation which makes access to certain information restricted even to Secret and Top Secret clearance-holders without a need to know. By comparison, the FBI recovered 100 documents with classified markings from its raid of Trumps home. They range in level from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET.

In a court filing last month, DOJ said it developed evidence that presidential records held in a basement storage room at Mar-a-Lago may have been concealed or removed prior to a June visit by FBI agents to pick up classified documents, suggesting possible attempts to obstruct investigators.

Investigators issued a grand jury subpoena in May for the records and visited Mar-a-Lago on June 3 to pick them up. When they got there, the filing said, a Trump lawyer handed them a large envelope containing documents. Another lawyer acting as the official custodian of Trumps records certified in a sworn statement that they conducted a diligent search for classified papers in response to the subpoena. Over the next two months however, officials developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the storage room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the governments investigation, DOJ said in its filing, without specifying what it believes was removed from the room, or by whom. The affidavit explained that this suspicion is why it sent some 30 armed agents back to Mar-a-Lago early last month to conduct a massive search of the property.

Prosecutors say the additional documents they found with classified markings cast doubt on claims by Trumps lawyers that they were fullycooperative with the subpoena. They aresaid to be focusing their investigation on Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, in particular, who allegedly acted as the custodian who signed the certification.

Bobb, who has not been charged with a crime, did not respond to requests for comment. Trumps legal team has told the court that the DOJ significantly mischaracterized the June meeting with Bobb and another lawyer, but did not elaborate.

Laufman, the top prosecutor in the Clinton case and a caustic critic of Trump in the media, believes Trump should also be worried and has significant criminal exposure to an obstruction rap. Either [his lawyers] wittingly lied or they got that assurance from their client, in which case Trump has jeopardy, Laufman, an Obama appointee and donor, told Politico.

But at this point, investigators can only speculate that documents were intentionally moved or destroyed to avoid compliance with subpoenas, which would be a felony. Legal experts note that prosecutors were careful to say in their filing that documents were likely concealed and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the investigation, indicating they still lack solid evidence.

It is not clear from the filing if the FBI has evidence of intentional acts of concealment as opposed to negligence, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said.

By contrast, prosecutors had solid material evidence including emails, phone calls, work tickets and computer forensics that Clinton operatives conspired to not just conceal but actually destroy documents under subpoena in violation of Section 1519 of the federal criminal code, the same statute cited by the FBI in its warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. It bars the destruction or falsification of any documents or materials with the intent to impede, obstruct or influence an investigation.

"Did Hillary Clinton violate 18 USC 1519 when emails from her private email server were destroyed during government investigation?Possibly, yes,saidDonald Skupsky, a lawyer specializing in government records-retention procedures.

"In December 2014, she did instruct her team to destroy remaining emails after 60 days. And ultimately, she never halted nor protested again any records destruction, he added. "Under 18 USC 1519, Clinton may have concealed and covered up the destruction of records."

Both the Trump and Clinton cases also invoke Section 2071, a federal statute which prohibits the willful concealment, removal, or destruction of federal records. But in investigating Clintons homebrew server scheme, prosecutors declined to pursue a Section 2071 charge because they argued the statute had never been used to prosecute individuals for attempting to avoid Federal Records Act requirements by failing to ensure that government records are filed appropriately, according to the IG report. Some legal experts say the same standard should apply to Trump, whom the DOJ said tried to avoid Presidential Records Act requirements.

Trump lawyer Jim Trusty said Trumps retention of allegedly classified papers is akin to an overdue library book and complained that Bidenadministration prosecutors are holding him to a different standard than anyone else because he is a Republican.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon earlier this month issued an injunction temporarily barring the Justice Department from using the seized material in its espionage investigation until a Special Master can review it for privileged and other information outside the scope of the probe.

Despite the order, the obstruction part of DOJ's probe can move forward. Among other things, investigators can continue to interview witnesses about whether subpoenaed documents were moved or concealed.

DOJ is in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation pertaining to potential violations of the Espionage Act, as well as obstruction of justice, 18 USC 1519, and unlawful concealment or removal of government records, 18 USC 2071, DOJ chief counterintelligence prosecutor Jay Bratt stated in a recent court filing.

Read more from the original source:
Unpacking the Apparent Trump-Hillary Double Standard: For Her, the FBI Helped Obstruct Its Own Investigation - Longview News-Journal

Seth Rich was a young DNC staffer in Washington who was tragically murdered early one morning in 2016. Our WITHpod guest this week described him as smart, ambitious, telegenic and someone who might run a presidential campaign someday. In the absence of an arrest, questions remain about who killed Rich. Unfounded theories about the motives for his murder continue to circulate on social media, including ones that enmeshed the Clintons and other high-profile figures. The search for answers, and this age of widespread disinformation, is the subject of A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, written by ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll. The true-crime story unravels this saga of murder, deceptions about what happened and the role of conspiracy mongers in disparaging Richs memory. Kroll, who actually knew Rich, joins WITHpod to discuss Richs life, death and what happened to his story once it got into the hands of numerous bad actors.

Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos.

Andy Kroll: Someone you met at a party one time and thought to yourself, man that guy is going somewhere. He's smart, he's telegenic, he's ambitious. He's going to be running a presidential campaign in the next 10 years, no question. And then you find out he's dead, murdered not that far from where I live here in D.C.

So, I felt it on that personal level, but then when this local news story, this private family matter gets transformed into a political story, a viral meme, a hashtag, a billion threads on Reddit and 4chan, that's when the switch happened for me. That is when I felt these two separate worlds of mine collide, the personal, the day job and I thought I just have to know what the heck is going on here.

Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to the "Why Is This Happening?" with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, I think one of the central experiences of our age is a sense of constant vertigo and dislocation as regards information about the world. First of all, there's just a lot of it, there's obviously too much of it to pay attention to. There's also a lot of things that are just wrong that are floating around. It's very hard to figure out what's wrong and what's right, sometimes a tweet will go viral, and it will turn out to be like satire or photoshopped or some random person like took something wildly out of context.

And then at a bigger level, you see entire media platforms devoted to untruths, whether that's about the election lie or about vaccine efficacy. And I mean, look, it's easy to get overly presentist about this. It's always hard to separate fact from fiction and things that are true from things that are not. The world is complicated and there's all kinds of stuff, like I love when there's like some big dispute in some country you don't follow, and you like you try to get into it. It's like, was the trial against Lula in Brazil like actually corrupt or like did he do the thing? And it's like, well good luck trying to figure that out, just come beaming in from 30,000 feet, particularly when you arrived in very contested debates.

That said, if you were to ask me, what's the moment where it felt like we veered off into a new level of surreality, disinformation, confusion, and vertigo, I think it's pretty clearly 2016. Like, the 2016 was really -- it really did feel like that year and that campaign and the rise of Donald Trump represented us moving off course that we were on. Not the course we were on was like amazing, like, well everyone agreed about the facts like, you know, like one of the major parties had been denying climate change for 20 years. But the level, the acuteness of almost deranged counterfactual narrative and disinformation was truly headspinning. It elevated to the highest levels. It moved from the margins to the center. It set the agenda often for mainstream discourse.

And there's one particular example of that, that is in some ways a microcosm, in some ways a kind of allegory, and in some ways just an actual example of this phenomenon, which is the death of a DNC staff named Seth Rich. Seth Rich was a young, DNC staffer who tragically was murdered in Washington D.C. late one night in 2016. A private tragedy, an awful, awful, awful thing to happen, brutal for his family and friends and the people who love him, that then got pulled into an updraft of conspiratorial insanity that basically pointed to him as a central figure in this grand conspiracy.

My guest today is someone who wrote a book about this chronicle, about Seth Rich, his life, his death, his legacy, and what happened to his story once it got into the hands of all kinds of bad actors. It's an incredibly well-told tale. It's very humane and empathetic and also really provocative and an incredible tale about what it means to live and die in the informational universe we live in now. His name is Andy Kroll. He's a reporter of ProPublica. I've known him for a long time. He's a great reporter, and the book is called, "A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy." And Andy it's great to have you in the program.

Andy Kroll: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Hayes: Just talk to me first about the origins of this because you knew Seth Rich. This starts as a personal story, not a reporting story. So, just tell us a little bit about who he was, how you knew him and what happened.

Andy Kroll: It was a strange experience for me as a reporter. When you start on a big story, let alone a book, it comes from a source that you have or a particularly intriguing piece of information you read in the news, a tip that comes across the transom, and you take it in, absorb it and pursue it with your investigative reporter hat on.

But for this story, it was a text message from a friend of mine, someone who has nothing to do with journalism, nothing to do with politics, anything like that, just a buddy, with a link to the local news story that said Seth had been killed on July 10th, 2016 in this tragic matter of a wrong place, wrong time situation.

And for a couple of weeks there, I followed the news of what had happened to Seth as the details trickled out, as memorials happened and the funeral took place back in his hometown of Omaha, as not a journalist but a peer or someone who traveled in similar social circles. It's like someone you met at a party one time and thought to yourself, man, that guy is going somewhere.

Chris Hayes: Yes.

Andy Kroll: He's smart, he's telegenic, he's ambitious. He's going to be running a presidential campaign in the next 10 years, no question. And then you find out he's dead, murdered not that far from where I live here in D.C., so I felt it on that personal level.

But then, when this local news story, this private family matter gets transformed into a political story, a viral meme, a hashtag, a billion threads on Reddit and 4chan, that's when the switch happened for me. That is when I felt these two separate worlds of mine collide, the personal, the day job, and I thought, I just have to know what the heck is going on here. I have to know how this has happened.

There is this moment when the personal and the journalistic collided. I remember sitting at my desk in August, probably, of 2016 and I saw #sethrich trending on Twitter. I thought to myself, what the heck is going on? How is that possible? I had followed some of the small conspiratorial chatter that had popped up right after he'd been killed, but not at this level, nothing had blown up in the way that I was now seeing it blow right before my eyes. And really from that point onward, August of 2016, I've been chasing the story, reporting on it, trying to understand again what happened, how this could happen, and eventually got to a point where I thought, I can't fit this into a story or two or three. This is really a book, and that's what led me to write the book.

Chris Hayes: Tell me about who Seth Rich was. What was he doing for the DNC and what do we know about the circumstances of his death?

Andy Kroll: Seth was from Omaha, Nebraska, a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican state. He grew up weaned on The West Wing, on watching C-SPAN in his free time in his bedroom at home. He was a total political nerd, a junkie. He followed Congressional races and redistricting fights in his home state the way we follow sports scores and eventually how our college did on a football game over the weekend. He was obsessed with this stuff.

He moved to Washington the first chance he got after graduating from Creighton University again in Omaha, and he wanted to be in the middle of the action. He was like so many people who flocked to Washington after college. They want to make their mark. They want to make a difference in the world. They want to play some small part and maybe someday a bigger part in the story of the country and its government and that was Seth.

He described himself as a patriot. He wore crazy stars and stripes outfits on 4th of July, in part as a sort of winking gag with his friends, but in part also because he believed that stuff. He was earnest about how much he loved his country, how much he cared about American democracy. When he was killed, he was working for the DNC in the voter expansion department. He was the only non-lawyer on the team of lawyers, trying to figure out ways to expand the franchise basically, how do we find Democratic votes, wherever they are, and get them to vote? How do we find people who aren't registered, get them to register, so that they can vote?

He really believed in voting is the lifeblood of the country and that regardless of whether you're a Democrat, you're a Republican, the country was at its best when everyone was participating, everyone is voting, everyone's voice was heard. That was what he was doing on the day he was killed. He was about to accept the job on the Clinton campaign, doing similar work, and that would have fulfilled a dream of his. He always wanted to work on a presidential campaign and he was maybe a week or two away from that when he died.

Chris Hayes: How old was he?

Andy Kroll: Twenty-seven years old.

Chris Hayes: And he had been at the DNC for a few years at that point?

Andy Kroll: Yes, he had been there for two and a half, three years at that point. He had been through a bruising midterm election, which I think opened his eyes to the less savory parts, the less glamorous parts of working in politics. I think he had come to see that politics in real life is not The West Wing and not everyone is walk and talks and quippy one-liners and the idealism of President Bartlet.

He loved that show but was also coming to grips with the fact that, that's not exactly how politics works, certainly not how politics worked in 2016, as you described earlier/ But he still wanted to work in voting. He wanted to continue this passion of his, something again that he had been passionate about since he was in high school.

Chris Hayes: So, he's coming home from a bar one night, which is something that I've done in Washington D.C. I have to say that someone I knew, Brian Beutler who now is at Crooked was shot and was in critical condition under extremely similar circumstances back when I was living in D.C. You know, it was someone I knew. They were walking down a block I'd walked down. They had come back late at night. Brian survived, it was extremely traumatic. He's written about it.

But this sounds like a somewhat similar situation basically, like random street crime as far as we can figure.

Andy Kroll: I remember hearing when Brian was shot all those years ago, and I thought about it when I first heard about Seth, walking home 2:00, 3:00 in the morning anywhere in D.C. can be a problematic situation through no fault of the person's own. Seth lived in a neighborhood in D.C. called Bloomingdale, Northwest, but just barely so, kind of hugs North Capitol Street, the big North-South Corridor here.

Bloomingdale at the time had been plagued by armed robberies all summer long. Weirdly same MO as well, two guys, one with a gun, robbing people for their valuables, especially their iPhones, and you can see this in the police reports, which I pulled and compiled for the book. The two guys would stop people, usually people who were talking on the phone, which Seth was doing at the time he was killed. They would ask for the phone but they would say, disable the Find My Phone tracking app, and then gives us your phone with the gun pointed --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Andy Kroll: -- at their face. And the police have said all along that Seth's murder and the circumstances of it certainly sound a lot like all of these other armed robberies that were happening in Bloomingdale, in Seth's neighborhood. The neighborhood had also been ripped up because they were putting a tunnel underneath it. It floods all the time, so they're trying to fix this problem. And so it's kind of an open-air maze, there's fences everywhere, lights were knocked out. It was just not a good place to be walking around that late at night, talking on the phone.

And from the day that this happened, and from the day that the police announced that Seth had been killed, they said this was an attempted robbery, maybe Seth tried to fight back, maybe there was some kind of altercation. There were some markings on him that suggested that there were, and he was shot several times and did not survive that attack, which unfortunately happens all the time in major American cities. But the details of this crime would fuel so many of the conspiracies that would come afterward, in part because people were looking for a reason to doubt. They weren't looking to buy the official story from the police.

Chris Hayes: Well and it also was a homicide that was not solved. I mean it was not cleared at the time that when the conspiracy theories take off, but that too was extremely common in major American cities and D.C., sort of a shocking percentage of homicides go unsolved.

Andy Kroll: Right, right, that's right. And this is unfortunately one of those cases, the murder is unsolved to this day. The investigation is active but now we're going on six and a half years or so, six-plus years. The police haven't announced suspects. They haven't announced any leads yet, even though the investigation is active. And that alone fuels these theories that come --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Andy Kroll: -- afterward.

Chris Hayes: Right, and part of my point there is that I think part of that is people's unfamiliarity with how shockingly and awfully common it is for people in the West Side of Chicago, in Anacostia Washington D.C., in all kinds of neighborhoods throughout America, particularly neighborhoods that are poor and predominantly non-white, that murders happened without being solved. That happens quite a bit.

When I think I've seen, you know, when I've seen this sort of conspiracy theories like this extra air of mystery that is unsolved, it's like, yeah, a lot of murders in America are unsolved. So, this happens. It's a horrible tragedy obviously and profoundly upsetting for his family, for his friends from around him.

What are the first inklings that this is going to move from a private and terrible tragedy to something else?

Andy Kroll: It's remarkable how fast those initial inklings appear. I went back and almost like a social media archeologist of sorts, retraced as best I could, the origins of these theories about Seth. What I found really interesting was that they began on the far left end of the political spectrum before they eventually moved and would really take off on the right end of the political spectrum.

And you got to go back to, again, this chaotic, insane year of 2016, this presidential election like no other. In the summer of 2016, one of the biggest stories was the state of the Democratic Party and the near civil war between supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, more on the progressive side, and supporters of Secretary Hillary Clinton, the more centrist establishment Democratic camp.

Clinton had just about sewn up the nomination. She would be named, crowned the nominee at the convention a couple of weeks after Seth was killed. But the animosity, the tension within the party at the time that Seth was killed was at a fever pitch. That is where the Seth Rich conspiracy theories first took hold. It took hold among Sanders supporters and supporters of then Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, to give you a real throwback, shout out here.

And there was speculation among these folks that Seth had been a whistleblower of some kind, that he had been trying to expose the DNC's wrongdoing as it related to Bernie Sanders, that he was somehow a Sanders supporter who is going to blow the lid on how the DNC had stolen the nomination or rigged the nomination process for Clinton and against Sanders, and that's the origin.

People forget that. It's easy to forget it because there's really only a window of a couple of weeks there before these theories would explode on the opposite end of the spectrum but that is where it started within the party. People who were thinking that Seth was this Bernie bro, for a lack of a better way to put it, who was angry about what he had seen in terms of the treatment by the DNC of Sanders.

Chris Hayes: And not just online, not just in threads and Twitter and those kinds of places the people are saying and the implications that it was a hit, right, that he's killed to keep him quiet, to stop him from spilling the beans about DNC wrongdoing.

Andy Kroll: That the Clintons or their emissary, someone working on behalf of the Clinton family had ordered a hit on this DNC staffer because he had tried to expose fraud, wrongdoing, nefarious backdoor dealings of the DNC, that's exactly right. You see this stuff popped up on Twitter. I mean I found tweets and some of them are still there to this day, within minutes of the official announcement, the news breaking on Monday, July 11th, that Seth had been killed. I mean there was no sort of period for percolating or --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Andy Kroll: -- moments where people are trying to figure out what do we say. I mean this was a reflex. This was almost immediate on Twitter, on Reddit, anywhere where there were sort of congregations of Sanders and Stein supporters.

Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.

Chris Hayes: To the best of your knowledge, this is just random and essentially organic, right? I mean these are just people who are in an extremely paranoid mindset. There's of course like lineage of the conspiracy theory against the Clintons that goes back to Vince Foster's death and the Clinton body count. And the idea, you know, Vince Foster of course, a friend of Bill and Hillary who worked in the White House which occasion (ph) all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories that went very mainstream, particularly in Republican Party that he had been murdered. He had been whacked by the Clintons.

And there's this idea of like a Clinton body count where the Clintons just go around like having people killed. This was in the ether before Seth Rich and I think it's sort of a necessary context to understanding why anyone is making this particular leap.

Andy Kroll: The only part of the book where I stepped out of the main timeline, where I --

Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.

Andy Kroll: -- jumped backward from the blow by blow on the book is this really sort of fascinating moment where it's a few days after Seth had been killed, the funeral just happened. Hillary and Bernie are about to appear on stage for their first sort of moment of reconciliation after Clinton had won the nomination effectively. Seth's old colleague, the DNC, thought to themselves, well hey, wouldn't it be great if Hillary said something at this event to remember Seth. Everyone is going to be watching. Media is descending from around the world on little ports of New Hampshire.

Can she like work Seth's name in the speech? She does, and I quote someone who had worked with Seth at the DNC saying, we watched Hillary Clinton say this and the gratitude that this person felt almost immediately melted away into a oh my God, what have we done, knowing that in the ether there's this long history, a lineage is a great word for it of Clinton conspiracy theories and that's the chapter in the book where I jumped back. I actually found this story that I haven't even known about going to the book, about a woman with intern in the Clinton White House.

Chris Hayes: Yup.

Andy Kroll: Very briefly, it was Caity Mahoney. She was an intern. She worked in like the tour guide office and then had left. She was working at Starbucks in Georgetown, a tiny neighborhood here in D.C. and was killed in an attempted armed robbery, noting was taken. She and two other colleagues were pretty brutally murdered by a robber, and then for several years the murder went unsolved, and she became the latest addition to this Clinton body count, that's next to Vince Foster, next to Ron Brown, the former Commerce Secretary, next to all of these people from Arkansas that no one had heard of but had somehow been attached to this Clinton body count list.

And I did that in the book because I feel like people needed to know. Why would folks on the internet immediately jump to the Clintons did this? Why would they immediately suspect a political hit job? I mean that is quite an accusation to make and yet people had been making it, the American politics --

Chris Hayes: Exactly.

Andy Kroll: -- 20 (ph) years at that point.

Chris Hayes: One of the things that you start to see there and you do this in that chapter is you start to see the sort of magnetic logic of conspiracy which is once you start looking for it, once the way you reasoning is, let's find anyone who had any brush of the Clintons who died an untimely death. You start to see this pattern emerged. Now the pattern is nonsense because the pattern could emerge for anyone.

That was how you started to look into someone, right? You're reasoning backwards. It's a deficient means of understanding the world and yet it does have kind of magnetic draw. And so with this already established, there's this kind of vortex pull, right, when Seth Rich dies, that this is a ready-made story there that people picked up immediately.

Andy Kroll: And then it gets to the underlying appeal of conspiracy theories writ large. You're confronted with an event that you find confusing, you don't understand, you're skeptical of what the people in power are telling you happened in this particular instance. Obviously, with trust in any institution on a constant decline, it seems like people are prime to doubt what the official story is. And so, they go looking for alternative explanations. They "do their own research" as we like to hear from conspiracy theorist all the time.

And in this case, it's so easy to make the leap from he was shot and killed, it was an armed robbery gone wrong to no, no, no to the nation's capital, this guy worked for the crooked DNC as so many people like to say it at that point in time. The Clintons have a history of doing this. Of course, something more was going on here. And you know you said a second ago, Chris, presumably this was organic. This was real people doing this.

You know, I found some data in the course of reporting a book showing that, yes, there was some back (ph) activity or the Russian Internet Research Agency came along a month or two after Seth was killed and they amplified some stuff. But this was not a creation of the Russians or the Chinese or some domestic troll farm. I've interviewed people. I interview them for the book who were among the earliest to say, this was a hit. This was politically motivated.

Some of them interestingly have backed away from it in the time since, like I quote a long Reddit thread that was posted again within hours of Seth's murder by a young man in Florida. And I tracked him down and talked to him, and in that case, he said I was just, again, trying to do my own research. I didn't necessarily trust mainstream media. He was a Sanders supporter. He thought that he could advance a story in a way that felt authentic to him.

And you know, five years later, four years later whenever I talked to him, he felt some regret about that, when I talked to him. But I have also talked to people who to this day say, nope, definitely it was a hit, way too many questions, doesn't add up, don't believe the police, you know, your book is nonsense.

Chris Hayes: Right. And I think this point those interviews are fascinating by the way and I was so glad you did them because I do think there's a little bit of a comforting fiction we tell ourselves about disinformation being some product of Russian interference. And clearly it is something that they have pushed and something they amplified, and it isn't a very effective means of like messing with the population but there's just a massive organic part of it too which is like people believe crazy stuff.

They get together in the internet and they goad themselves into believing crazier and crazier stuff and then in the case of where (ph) going to get to, it can get amplified, people with really big platforms. So, all of these is happening immediately after, it's working on the already well-established universe of Clinton conspiracy theories, about them as essentially serial murders who have like hit squads. This is July 10th, July 11th news. When is the first WikiLeaks?

Andy Kroll: August 10th, 2016, a month later.

Chris Hayes: So, it's a month later and that happens right before the DNC. It's timed very obviously to kind of like blow up the DNC, and I remember that because I was in Philadelphia, and it goes off. The first one happens right when, the first posting of WikiLeaks of the purloined e-mails of the campaign manager, John Podesta, right, are posted by WikiLeaks right when Trump is facing the worst crisis of his campaign which is the leaked Access Hollywood tape which he says you can just grab them by the P-word.

It's really disgusting, huge condemnation, people are fleeing him. This is obviously timed to counteract that and it's also right before the convention. What does the appearance of WikiLeaks and the WikiLeaks' e-mails do the Seth Rich conspiracy theorizing?

Andy Kroll: If there was a single moment that happens in the larger arc of the story that if it didn't happen would change the course of history, at least as it relates to Seth Rich and his family. WikiLeaks and Julian Assange's intervention would be that flashpoint. When you laid out this timeline, I'll add a couple of dots to it. You have WikiLeaks releases these stolen e-mails we now know taken from inside the DNC right before Philadelphia.

I was there too. I remember the look of sort of barely contained terror and fear in the eyes of most DNC employees I encountered in Philly. You have the release of Podesta e-mails right after Access Hollywood, very clearly intended to distract and deflect from that. And what you have in between those two things is this really critical moment in the Seth Rich story, critical moment in the book. Julian Assange is giving an interview to a Dutch TV station. To the interviewer's credit, he's pressing Assange, where did you get these stolen e-mails at the time, the DNC e-mail specifically.

You know, cyber security experts are saying this is most likely Russian-relate that some kind of hacking group affiliated with Russia took them and gave them to you. Assange is denying, he's deflecting, he's disingenuous and in this Dutch interview, he says, well, don't you know, he says this out of nowhere without prompting, without any suggestions. So, clearly, he had it in his mind. He says, well, there was this young DNC staffer who was murdered in Washington D.C. recently. Our source get concerned when they see things like that.

Chris Hayes: Oh so despicable.

Andy Kroll: Yes.

Chris Hayes: It's just so despicable. It is an unbelievably despicable thing to do.

Andy Kroll: Yes and I had never thought about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks the same since this moment. Obviously --

Chris Hayes: Yes, same here.

Andy Kroll: -- Unique have written a whole book about this, but it's clear what Assange is doing there but the effect of that online is an explosion of tweets, Reddit posts, memes, Instagram post, everything under the sun saying, Julian Assange just pointed a finger at this guy, Seth Rich. This Russia story is nonsense.

Chris Hayes: The Russian story is nonsense, right. So, there's a few things going on here, right? The DNC leak happens. When do they first start posting the DNC e-mails?

Andy Kroll: Right before the DNC convention, so that's like late July 2016.

Chris Hayes: Right. And it's after those e-mails start to come out that he gives his interview and --

Andy Kroll: Correct.

Chris Hayes: -- at that point there's already people inside the DNC who are like we know, you know, they had hired CrowdStrike, they had hired other outside firms to look at there, like we know this was foreign penetration, like we have a pretty good sense it's the Russians. These are not and those people doing that are not like FBI or government officials. These are just people who don't have a dog in the fight, right? They're brought into like basically run an audit and they're like, "Yeah, we kind of had figured it out where this came from."

And so, it becomes pretty clear that like the Russians have had to be in CE as a form of political interference. They've somehow gotten into Assange, and Assange is now publishing this which is completing the operation on behalf of the Russians whether he knows that or not. We don't know, right, if he knows where it comes from so I'm just going to give it to him.

And he goes on, this Dutch TV, to deflect attention away from the Russians and put it on Seth Rich and in doing so, A. Implying that he was murdered; B. Also implying that Seth Rich was this kind of whistleblower who had secretly been a source and then finally doing the thing that, if they were true, is the most irresponsible thing that you could possibly do for any journalist or anyone which is protecting sources. Like, you would never in a billion years say anything about who your source is if they give you something important.

So, all of that together, it just like the peak of disingenuousness and it's disgusting and that you say in the book, that's the moment where it blows up. It goes from like people saying on the internet to like a thing.

Andy Kroll: And I retraced the hours and days after the Assange interview because it was a little case study of how this tantalizing piece of disingenuous spin could go from the mouth of Julian Assange to the front of the Charge Report which obviously needs its firewall of the internet at that point, that becomes the subject of hundreds of thousands of tweets that ends up on Fox News the following night. You have Eric Bolling who was sitting in for Bill O'Reilly at the time just come out and say, plain as day, that Seth Rich had been killed in a hit. This was not an attempted robbery. This was a hit. That was Eric Bolling said on primetime Fox News after the Assange.

This is the first blow on the first Superspreader Event if you will of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

Chris Hayes: And Bolling says it's on Fox News. This is the first time that it gets introduced into the like the cable news Fox-viewing audience, right?

Andy Kroll: That's right, yup.

Chris Hayes: And he says this, I mean, it's just a crazy thing to say. I mean obviously, it's Fox News, it's Eric Bolling so, you know, not surprising but just a, like to say that there was a hit against someone is like a really freaking serious accusation to make.

Andy Kroll: I mean, one thing I started to struggle with in the book, and I feel like I got lost in the contemporaneous coverage of the story, people are making accusations all the time related to Seth Rich and I was always having the sense of, do you understand how serious the thing you're saying actually is? Do you realize the gravity of what you are accusing someone of doing or claiming had happened?

Yes, Eric Bolling, people forget the Bolling comment because it happened so early and because the later Fox News involvement in the Rich story which is so much more of a scandal, so much more of a bluff but yes, during the 2016 campaign a Fox News host was saying this was a hit, that there was a political crime, the murder of a democratic staffer in the middle of campaign for some related crime or some attempt on the part of this guy, Seth Rich. You know, I think people forget about it but Fox had been all over this almost from the beginning.

Read this article:
Discussing the death and life of Seth Rich with Andy Kroll: podcast and transcript - MSNBC

On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented on Trumps possession of classified documents and having them at his country club. In early August, Donald Trumps country club Mar-a-Lago was raided by FBI agents due to his possession of classified top secret documents, some dealing with nuclear security measures.

CLINTON: I don't care what political party you are, but come on, cut the hypocrisy. This is a threat to our national security that somebody would actually have in his country club storage room, his desk, his bedroom top secret information and you have to ask yourself, why? What was he going to do with it? Who is he giving it to? Or what had he already done to it? And so let the investigation go forward and lets, you know, find the facts. Unlike those guys, I'm not saying lock him up, I'm saying, let's just find the facts and follow the evidence wherever it goes.

View original post here:
Hillary Clinton on Trump stealing classified documents: "Cut the hypocrisy, this is a threat to our national security." - Yahoo News