There Is 'No Doubt' Hillary Violated Federal Law on Classified Information
Maybe Hillary Clinton doesn't skate after all. To hear former NSA officer John R. Schindler tell it, the facts of her wrongdoing aren't really in dispute anymore: What, then, does all this means for Hillary? There is no doubt that she, or someone on her State Department staff, violated federal law by putting TOP SECRET//SI information on an unclassified system. That it was Hillary's private, offsite server makes the case even worse from a security viewpoint. Claims that they "didn't know" such information was highly classified do not hold water and are irrelevant. It strains belief that anybody with clearances didn't recognize that NSA information, which is loaded with classification markings, was signals intelligence, or SIGINT. It's possible that the classified information found in Clinton's email trove wasn't marked as such. But if that classification notice was omitted, it wasn't the U.S. intelligence community that took such markings away. Moreover, anybody holding security clearances has already assumed the responsibility for handling it properly. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had no authority to disseminate IC information on her own, neither could she make it less highly classified (a process termed "downgrading" in the spy trade) without asking IC permission first. We're now getting an open admission that government business was done from private accounts: The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday told a federal judge that Abedin — long considered her boss's keeper and even dubbed her "shadow" — had her own email account on Clinton's now infamous home-brewed server, "which was used at times for government business," Clinton acknowledged. That's an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department. Abedin had been granted "special government employee" status, allowing her to work both for Clinton and the private sector — and it's unclear if she continued using the server that appears to have held classified information following her departure from her full-time State gig. Abedin's "special government employee" status, enabling her to function both as Clinton's right-hand woman at State and as a consultant to private firm Teneo Holdings seems like one the biggest, loudest, flashing-neon-sign conflicts of interest in the history of government. Why did she get that special status? Other than the fact that she and Hillary really wanted her to have it. Our Brendan Bordelon has more on Abedin's troubles -- for example, I had completely missed this: On July 31, Grassley exposed the State Department inspector general's finding that Abedin owed $9,858 to the government for unauthorized vacations and leaves of absence. Abedin's lawyers dispute the claim, saying she was working even while on vacation in Italy and during her maternity leave. The probe, which Grassley says may be criminal in nature, is ongoing. Here's Slate's Jamelle Bouie: Among Democrats? She'll be fine. But if some start to rethink her electability, I won't blame them. The press distrusts Clinton and holds her to a different standard than other politicians, while Republicans just despise her. Given that, she should have used her official email account, as a way to prepare for the worst and avoid undue scrutiny. Put differently, the choice to use a private email account was an obvious blunder with consequences that have marred her campaign, even if they don't ever end it. Finally, our Charlie Cooke asks, why are so many people greeting a prosecution of Hillary Clinton for this as utterly unthinkable? Doesn't that attitude an effective endorsement of the idea that she's above the law? Perhaps it's because of the surreal question, "If Hillary Clinton went to prison, would the Secret Service protect her there?" Okay, No More Avoiding It. Time to Dissect True Detective. I've been trying to digest True Detective season two. Maybe that explains my stomach distress. Vox has a pretty thorough rundown of what went wrong -- the site is terrible for political news, but they've got some entertaining pop-culture writers -- but I have a few more to add. First, even if it was going to be impossible to equal last season's lightning-in-a-bottle performances by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, moving from two main characters to four was a mistake. Even if season one's storyline had lesser actors, the two main characters gave us someone to relate to and someone to fascinate us. Harrelson's Marty Hart was our relatable everyman, or at least he seemed that way through the first few episodes. As the story progresses, we learn he cheats on his wife, has a violent temper, is willing to lie to cover up his execution of (admittedly reprehensible) perpetrators, and has a remarkable and destructive knack for self-justification. But in those important early scenes, he says and reacts the way the audience does. McConaughey's Rust Cohle was fascinating but alien, utterly consumed by a need to examine every detail of the case and constantly explaining his dark, almost nihilist philosophy. True Detective's season two had four characters who were all too similar to each other and each one hard to like. I think it was Allahpundit who said something like, "We get it, they're damaged." I understand the aim to create complicated, flawed characters, but at some point the audience needs somebody to root for in order to get emotionally engaged with the story. Season one had a simple but completely enticing concept, thrown right at us from the opening scene: a brutal, elaborate murder is committed in rural Louisiana. As the story progresses, the heroes find clues suggesting the murder was part of a ritual committed by a creepy cult that included the state's most powerful men. Midway through season one, the creative team hinted at the presence of the supernatural or Divine in the story, and I can't help but feel that drove a big part of the fascination with True Detective. (Yes, we're in a similar thematic territory to my beloved Twin Peaks, as these mash-ups prove -- faraway small towns, brutal murders, driven detectives, and a strong sense that something beyond man is at work.) The explanation was that because of past drug use while working undercover, Cohle experienced sporadic hallucinations. But we in the audience were given that little bit of wiggle room . . . what if he wasn't hallucinating? What if the murderer and pursuing detectives were chess pieces being moved around the board by Godly and Satanic forces? 
Yeah, the pattern in that flock of birds is totally normal. But apparently writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto said "to retreat into the supernatural would be a disservice to the story" and set out to make True Detective's second season supernatural-free. Which was not to say it wasn't surreal; in the second episode, one of our protagonists gets shot by a mysterious assailant wearing a giant crow mask, in something of an extremely David Lynchian moment.
"Stop ignoring my caws!" This gave one of the few really compelling questions to the early episodes: Who was "Bird Head" and why was he wearing that mask? The last episode revealed the identity but never gave much explanation for the crow mask. The show set up mysteries and then forgot about them. Pizzolatto didn't seem that interested in answering the audience's questions . . . and preferred instead to give us seemingly endless scenes of the characters staring at each other in tense, pensive silence that gradually turned into self-parodies. (Unlike most other viewers, I didn't hate Vince Vaughn's performance. If this season did anything interesting, it was having the guy most driven to solve the crime be a gangster. The non-cop was arguably the "true detective" of season two.) Perhaps most importantly, this season's emotional beats were all wrong. Remember, season one grabs you with the moral stakes immediately: someone insanely cruel is targeting the most vulnerable in the most far-off corners of Louisiana. In season two, it took the entire plodding first episode just to get to the discovery of the body and the beginning of the murder investigation. It doesn't take long for the detectives and the audience to learn that Ben Caspere was a sleazy, corrupt, sick SOB. That angle could have added to the mystery -- "Everyone had motive!" -- but instead we see he was the lynchpin for the corruption in barely-fictional Vinci, California. We learned the situation was actually the opposite -- "Everybody needed Caspere for their dirty schemes, so nobody had motive!" The more we learn about the sordid, sleazy life of Caspere, the more his murder looks like a public service (and it turned out to be a crime of revenge). Why are we rooting for this crime to be solved? Where's our sense of consequence? Ah, well. One of the joys of a series that starts each new season with new characters, location, and story is that there's always the chance they'll get it right next year. ADDENDA: Trump's the frontrunner, China's blowing up, the Jets quarterback gets knocked out by his own teammate over a $600 debt, and some couple in Mississippi planned on joining ISIS on their honeymoon. This is the kind of week where a sharknado would feel normal. | 
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