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This you, Rudy? [1]
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Date: 2022-08-27
But never mind any of that. What Hillary did was way worse because … ooh, ooh, SQUIRREL! And he has several follow-up questions about Benghazi! (Oh, never mind. That’s just Trey Gowdy. Easy mistake.)
Of course, one of the leaders of the “lock her up” crowd was Rudy Giuliani, the once-hale and hearty New York City mayor who, in the years since 9/11, has inexorably morphed into the Portrait of Dorian Gray’s Nutsack.
And given the latest revelations—including a truly horrifying story from Friday’s New York Times suggesting a connection between the materials Trump stole and an alarming increase in the number of U.S. confidential informants being captured and killed around the world—this exchange from November 2016 between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and the masturbating bridge troll formerly known as Rudy Giuliani seems rather, well, quaint:
BLITZER: “Classified information, every document that’s classified, has a header at the top that says ‘classified.’ … And then it says the level of classification: confidential, secret, top secret, secure compartmented. It has that header. The FBI director said when Hillary Clinton had that ‘C’ in that document, there was no header, it was in the body of the document and she just saw a ‘C.’ That didn’t necessarily mean confidential.” GIULIANI: “No, it didn’t actually … Comey didn’t actually say that. That was her explanation.” BLITZER: “Yes, he did. I’ll play the clip for you. Here’s the exchange that Comey had … GIULIANI: “That is based on her explanation ...” BLITZER: “… with a member of Congress in which he explained that Hillary Clinton had a good reason to not see that ‘C’ as confidential but maybe just a letter. Listen to this, Mayor.” VIDEO/REP. MATT CARTWRIGHT: “The absence of a header would tell her immediately that those three documents were not classified, am I correct in that?” VIDEO/FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY: “That would be a reasonable inference.” BLITZER: “A reasonable inference. You just heard him say that, Mayor.” GIULIANI: “Yeah, well, but when you see a ‘C’—and by the way, it isn’t just a ‘C.’ It’s a ‘C’ first in parenthesis, and then another parenthesis around it, and then a large ‘C.’ Her explanation in the 302, which I read very carefully, was, she thought it was an indication about alphabetical order ...” BLITZER: “But there was no header. You folks are telling me we have to wrap this up, Mayor, so we have to wrap it up [crosstalk].” GIULIANI: “What she did when she said that was absolutely a lie. If she didn’t know that ‘C’ meant confidential, she shouldn’t be our secretary of state.” BLITZER: “But there was no header saying classified information.” GIULIANI: “It doesn’t matter, you don’t need a header! I looked at thousands of classified documents that didn’t have a header. It had a little ‘C’ on it ...” BLITZER: “Every classified document has a header at the top of it, and then it explains the level of classification.” GIULIANI: “It does not, and when you see a ‘C,’ you know it means confidential information.”
So there were some “C” markings (three of them) buried deep inside these emails—which were forwarded to her, by the way—but none of the documents had classified headers on them. And the FBI director himself clearly stated this was likely an honest mistake. (Here’s one of those messages that Giuliani feared might fall into the wrong hands, by the way: “(C) Purpose of Call: to offer condolences on the passing of President Mutharika and congratulate President Banda on her recent swearing in.”) Whew. We really dodged a bullet there, huh? Imagine if Vladimir Putin had gotten his greasy mitts on that one!
On the other hand, Donald Trump willfully stole scores of items—including “over 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages. Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials”—from the government and stored them in an unsecure location, where any spy (like, say, this one) could have found them and taken pictures of them with one of those little spy cameras … or, say, an iPhone.
But that’s of no concern to Rudy, because all the shit Trump stole was stored in a “safe” place:
x Rudy Giuliani tells Newsmax that Trump was just trying to preserve documents by putting them in a safe place. pic.twitter.com/tDJag4loW4 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2022
GIULIANI: “And now they want to make him responsible for having taken classified documents and preserved them. Really, if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents, it’s about destroying them, or hiding them, or giving them to the enemy. It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in in the first place.”
Well, I guess it’s okay because they all had screaming headers labeling them “classified” or “top secret,” not little “Cs” next to select paragraphs buried deep inside email threads.
By the way, the presence of “Cs” to indicate “confidential”—that’s the lowest level of classification, by the way—didn’t implicate Hillary in any crimes, though that didn’t stop R-Ghouls from insisting that the gendarmes should round her up.
The Washington Post:
On Aug. 16, the FBI sent a letter to Congress clarifying that “the fact that Secretary Clinton received emails containing ‘(C)’ portion markings is not clear evidence of knowledge or intent.” These three emails were forwarded to Hillary Clinton. The State Department determined that one of the emails contained classified information, the FBI said in the letter.
Also, no one still in Trump’s camp has managed to give a plausible explanation for why he stashed top secret documents in his basement like so many Beanie Babies. I mean, at this point, what are the chances he wasn’t selling them? Why the fuck else would he have them? Donald Trump doesn’t read! He didn’t even read his President’s Daily Brief. Are we supposed to believe our military is printing nuclear warhead schematics on the back of Chili’s take-home menus now?
x Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines sent a letter to House Intel and House Oversight chairs saying intel community is conducting damage assessment of Mar-a-Lago documents, according to letter obtained by CNN. — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 27, 2022
I can only assume Rudy will offer Hillary a full, abject apology forthwith. And then pigs will fly. Hopefully straight to Moscow. As soon as possible.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
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