As Yogi Berra would say, "It's like Déjà vu all over again!"
The current fooflah over the AP story on Clinton's Secretary of State calendar entries rang a bell. Of course it did. I wrote about it back in June.
What I said then still applies now. The main author, Stephen Braun, cherry picks through the data. He doesn't provide the records given out by the State Department so we can verify the accuracy of his statements. And the man has never written a story for the AP that isn't related to a Clinton conspiracy.
Even Judicial Watch, my usual bête noire, provides the raw records when it makes an assertion. Most people may not look at the records, and too many take what Judicial Watch says at face value...but Judicial Watch does provide the data so we can check out the conclusions ourselves.
Not Stephen Braun at the AP. What do you have to hide, Mr. Braun? That people might do a better job than you when it comes to evaluating the data?
People like Matthew Yglesias from Vox?
...[T]he AP’s basic reporting project here seems like it was worth a shot and probably also fairly time-consuming. But it did not come up with anything. Clinton tried to help a Nobel Prize winner. She went to the Kennedy Center Honors. She had a meeting with the head of the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics about a State Department charitable initiative.
There’s just nothing here. That’s the story. Braun and Sullivan looked into it, and as best they can tell, she’s clean....
The real news here ought to be just the opposite: Donors to the Clinton Foundation may believe they are buying Hillary Clinton’s political allegiance, but the reality is that they are not. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is someone, somewhere whom Clinton met with whom she wouldn’t have met with had that person not been a Clinton donor of some kind. But what we know is that despite very intensive media scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation, we don’t have hard evidence of any kind of corrupt activity. That’s the story.
Mr. Braun better be careful. Pretty soon we're going to start lumping the AP in with publications like the Gateway Pundit. And then when he shows his AP credentials at events, folks will start laughing.
