David Begley: The frozen Chozick

Dave Begley is a Nebraska attorney practicing elder law and estate planning. He is also our occasional presidential campaign correspondent. Drawing on his 2016 coverage, Dave provides this “campaign coda” with a look at the new book by the New York Times reporter on the Clinton campaign. He writes:

Two movies on one screen. No cheering from the press box. That’s my take based on reading parts of Amy Chozick’s Chasing Hillary.

I picked up the book to see if our paths crossed on the campaign trail. We were both in Clear Lake, Iowa for the wingding. My full post is here. Chozick reported how her rental car was hit by the owner of the bar next to the Surf Ballroom. According to Chozick, it was his fault but the first words out of his mouth were, “F***ing Democrats.” Chozick writes, “I calmly explained that I wasn’t a Democrat, I was a journalist with the New York Times.”

The only news she reported from Clear Lake was Hillary’s comment about Snapchat and how messages disappear. I wrote, “She then made a joke of sorts. Hillary said that she had a Snapchat conversation the other day and was glad to see it disappear automatically. Big laughs. Is the FBI laughing?” I wrote those lines before I knew that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok were creating the pretense of an investigation.

Chozick never understood the significance of Hillary’s emails. She wrote that her campaign coverage of this issue made her “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.” She felt that her stories were overhyped.

I thought Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails probably included evidence of the bribery scheme Hillary ran when she was at State. My theory is that the speech money and Clinton Foundation donations were payments for favors from Secretary Clinton and future President Hillary. Some evidence has emerged backing me up. Katie Pavlich reported that emails obtained by Judicial Watch include a November 2010 email from a lawyer asking “to get Bill Clinton to give a speech in Spain, noting that ‘a large bank is willing to pay for it.’” Ten of the new emails contain classified information.

My sense is that Hillary knows how difficult it is to prove a quid pro quo in a bribery case against a politician. The Supreme Court in McDonnell v. United States, 579 U.S. ___ (2016), backs her up. Add to that the canard that we don’t prosecute defeated politicians and Hillary has sovereign immunity of a sorts. She is above the law and richer for it. It also helps to have dirty cops running the criminal investigation.

The parts of the book that I read reveal that Chozick was a Hillary fan. She met Hillary when she was a high schooler in San Antonio and has been an admirer ever since.

She referred to Hillary as FWP (first woman president). Chozick and her fellow female reporters on the press bus were fully invested in the Hillary candidacy as a historic event for all women. They were of the same school as Madeleine Albright holding that it was a woman’s duty as a woman to vote for Madam Hillary. In her spiked victory story she wrote, “No one in modern politics, male or female, has had to withstand more indignities, setbacks and cynicism.” While Hillary deserved every bit of the little grief she got, how could Chozick write that line in light of what Donald Trump endured daily on the campaign trail? Two movies on one screen.

On the same page in which Chozik describes herself as having adopted her “role as a detached political reporter” she emotes how Hillary’s victory party “was ours.” This is what Trump’s Fake News is all about: media people claiming to be fair and neutral observers while overtly and covertly cheering for one team in the press box.

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