One would think that a presidential candidate falsely claiming that she never was subpoenaed would be bigger news story than people in the opposing party criticizing that candidate after the fact for her obviously false statement. As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted late this afternoon, that's not the case. This post contains several more examples.
At CNN, the network's own Brianna Keilar, who conducted the interview during which Hillary Clinton denied ever receiving a congressional committee's subpoena for her work-related emails, "sharply criticized the Democratic presidential contender’s performance" for failing to answer several questions satisfactorily and for not even "engaging" when asked others. Despite Keilar's disappointment, beat reporters Jeff Zeleny and Tom LoBianco at CNN.com went light on Mrs. Clinton, and highlighted Republican critics.
Keilar's disappointment begs the following: "Why didn't you just keep re-asking each question until you got a decent answer, or, failing that, simply declare the obvious, i.e., "Okay, now that you haven't answered that question, let's see if you'll answer this one"?
Getting back to Zeleny and LoBianco, in their Thursday morning report (an update from an item first posted on Wednesday; HT NB commenter Gary Hall), the CNN pair's first order of business was to have a headline making it look like all of this is Mrs. Clinton's lawyer's fault.
(Zeleny is a former New York Times reporter whose bouts with bias have been documented frequently at NewsBusters.)
Their second priority was to make sure everyone knows that this is just another he-said, she-said partisan fight, and that this situation trumps the fact that Mrs. Clinton failed to tell the truth, thereby continuing a two-decade pattern of deceit.
Here is the result:
So it was "the lawyer's reply" which caused Mrs. Clinton to "falsely claim" that "I've never had a subpoena." The excuse her handlers are now giving, that she was really speaking about events before March 4 before the subpoena was issued, is so lame that it would be fodder for late-night comedians if a male Republican tried the same cop-out.
Other outlets aren't even admitting that Mrs. Clinton's claim is false. At CBS, she is only "accused of lying about (the) email subpoena." At the Los Angeles Times, it's only a matter of the "Benghazi panel chair" saying that the "Hillary Clinton subpoena claim (is) inaccurate." (Undertone: "And who ever believes what a Republican on a witch hunt says?")
The late Williams Safire famously and somewhat presciently wrote in a 1996 column entitled "Blizzard of Lies" that "Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady ... is a congenital liar."
Sadly, given her now much longer track record, what Safire wrote then seems absolutely undeniable now:
... she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.
Speaking of falsehoods, during the course of researching Zeleny, I came upon this howler of a passage at Wikipedia:
He (Zeleny) joined CNN in March 2015. His first act was to run a headlining hit piece on Hillary Clinton, helping cement CNN's new image as a solidly right-of-center organization.
Yeah, and his treatment of Mrs. Clinton's "not subpoenaed" lie as documented above further cements it. (/sarcasm)
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
