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Journalists must remember the George Carlin Rule
By Kent R. Kroeger (August 30, 2018)
Two recent news reports have again raised serious doubts about the veracity and integrity of past reporting surrounding the Hillary Clinton email controversy and its over-reliance on government sources.
First, in an August 23rd RealClearInvestigations story, Paul Sperry reported that the FBI’s examination hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Weiner’s unsecured laptop may not have been as complete as originally suggested by FBI Director James Comey.
In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.
“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
Yet even the “extremely narrow” search that was finally conducted, after more than a month of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her unauthorized basement server, the official said. Contradicting Comey’s testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.
The second news story was broken by The Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock on August 27th, in which he reported that “a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.”
According to Pollock’s anonymous sources, who were briefed on the intelligence finding, the Chinese firm was a cover for a Chinese intelligence operation which “obtained…
