Hill, The

The FBI’s announcement that it may have found new evidence related to Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server is a “stunning development” that “raises serious questions” about the Democratic presidential nominee, the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) said. "The FBI’s decision to reopen their criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server just 11 days before the election shows how serious this discovery must be,” said Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement shortly after news broke about the FBI’s action. “This stunning development raises serious questions about what records may not have been turned over and why, and whether they show intent to violate the law." "What’s indisputable is that Hillary Clinton jeopardized classified information on thousands of occasions in her reckless attempt to hide pay-to-play corruption at her State Department,” Priebus continued. “This alone should be disqualifying for anyone seeking the presidency, a job that is supposed to begin each morning with a top secret intelligence briefing.”

Facebook rolled out a ballot guide aimed at preparing people for the voting booth, the company’s latest effort at civic engagement. The feature allows users to scroll through and get more information about the candidates and ballot issues they’ll see when they go to vote. What users see on the guide is what they'll see on their ballot, according to Facebook. “We’re interested in offering people a space that’s separate from News Feed where they can prepare for that they’re going to do in the ballot box,” said Jeremy Galen, a product marketing manager with the company.

A user can scroll through to see all the candidates for a given office and choose to see their position on the issue, assuming the candidate has uploaded that information to their Facebook page. They can also see other users who have endorsed the candidate. The website serves information on the presidential race first, followed by down-ballot races and ballot questions. The order in which candidates are presented on the page is randomized. The information comes from the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit group. Users can favorite a candidate they plan to support, an action they can either keep to themselves or share with friends. That data will be discarded 60 days after Election Day, the company said, and will not be used for any advertising purposes.

[Commentary] The recent news that Facebook staffers had sought to delete Donald Trump’s posts calling for restrictions on Muslim immigration as violating the company’s hate speech policies has revived the ongoing controversy about ideological neutrality in the social networks. This time at least, the Facebook employees were overruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the grounds that this would amount to political censorship, but the issue raises the question: Is there a problem of anti-conservative bias in the social media? And if so, what’s the answer?

It should be noted that Trump is not a standard conservative — indeed, many conservatives say he’s not a conservative at all — and plenty of people on the right have denounced his proposed Muslim ban. But this is far from the only instance in which major social media platforms have been accused of political censorship toward right-leaning content. Last May, allegations were made that Facebook had suppressed conservative views from its “trending topics;” while Facebook claimed that its internal investigation found no evidence of systematic suppression, the company also announced that it would modify the process of trending topic selection to minimize the potential for abuse. To stop the fragmentation, these companies’ leadership should make a good-faith effort to live up to their promise of political inclusiveness and free debate. The conversation on curbing harassment while protecting speech is important; but it must include a truly diverse base of advocates.

[Young is a contributing editor for Reason magazine and a columnist for Newsday.]

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign-in-waiting appeared unprepared for a New York Times story in 2015 that exposed her exclusive use of private e-mail account and server for government business, according to a newly released e-mail. The day the Times story was published, John Podesta, who would later be named campaign chairman, asked future campaign manager Robby Mook if he had seen it coming. “Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?” Podesta asked Mook in an e-mail late on the evening of March 2, 2015, roughly a month before Clinton launched her bid for the White House. “Nope,” Mook responded after 1 am that night. “We brought up the existence of emails in reserach (sic) this summer but were told that everything was taken care of.”

The discussion, which was released by WikiLeaks from a batch of messages apparently stolen from Podesta’s account, sheds additional light on the campaign’s lack of preparation for questions about Clinton’s bespoke setup. The private e-mail arrangement has become a cloud over the Democratic presidential nominee and spurred a yearlong FBI investigation. The e-mail released Oct 27 is one of several published by WikiLeaks detailing the Clinton campaign’s scurrying response to revelations about her e-mail server.

The Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC linked to Senate Democratic leaders, reported that it raised $19.3 million through the first 20 days of October, setting a record. It’s the most the political action committee, run by former advisers to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and his deputy, Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY), has ever reported raising.

“Record-setting support has us well-positioned for this final stretch of the cycle. In less than two weeks Democrats are going to take back the Senate,” said Shripal Shah, a spokesman for the group. Senate Democrats expect to pick up five to seven seats on Election Day and are focusing their spending in battlegrounds such as New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Indiana and Missouri. They need a net pickup of four seats to win Senate control if Hillary Clinton is elected president. Without her in the Oval Office, they need five. The fundraising report shows Democrats are catching up with outside Republican-allied groups. The Senate Leadership Fund, a group linked to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), announced that it plans to spend $25 million on half a dozen Senate races in the final days of the campaign.

[Commentary] For the third time in less than a decade, AT&T is merging again. In the wake of the announcement, there is rampant speculation on whether it’s unconscionable or inevitable. However, whether or not the $85 billion merger rises to the level of an outright rejection or just strong conditions, there is still a far more profound problem, which is not the merger, but the market itself. Four massive firms (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter) now totally dominate the digital communications landscape. Preventing any further consolidation of distribution is a no brainer, but that will still not address the underlying problem. Public policy cannot force firms to compete and the prospects of a new distribution network entering the market are slim to none. Breaking up the dominant firms requires decades of litigation and may not succeed.

Our only option is to ensure these mammoth network operators cannot use their power over the pipes to stymie competition for the content and applications that ride over them. However, the Federal Communications Commission has four active and nearly complete proceedings that will further that goal and the proposed AT&T Time Warner transaction makes completing them all the more critical: Set Top Boxes, Zero rating, Privacy, and Business Data Services.

[Dr. Mark Cooper is the Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America.]

Presidential politics are casting a shadow over the biggest media acquisition of 2016. The outcome of the White House race could help determine the fate of the proposed $85 billion sale of Time Warner to telecommunications behemoth AT&T, an unusual situation for a massive sale. “It’s such an interesting thing about this deal, is the fact that it was announced when it was announced,” said Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, which argues the deal would be bad for consumers. “I think this would be a highly controversial deal whenever it happened, but the fact that it’s happening two weeks out from the election and will be decided by … appointees who nobody knows who they are yet, makes this a much more political fight than maybe it would have been if it had happened at another time.” Neither of the presidential hopefuls has spoken kindly of the proposal.

The State Department is months behind on a request that it explain how a former IT aide’s e-mails appeared to have disappeared, and Republicans are crying foul. Documents obtained by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and given to ABC News reportedly show that the State Department has not responded to a July request from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) despite a demand that it do so within 30 days. The missing e-mails are from Bryan Pagliano, an IT worker responsible for many aspects of the private e-mail setup Hillary Clinton used during her time as secretary of State.

In May, the State Department said that it did not have Pagliano’s e-mail archive, prompting outrage from the Obama Administration’s critics. It’s unclear whether Pagliano deleted his e-mails or they went missing through some other means. Despite the missing archive, the department has located some e-mails that Pagliano sent or received through the e-mail accounts of other government staffers. The National Archives, which has broad responsibilities for federal record storage, asked the State Department to describe the steps it has taken to recover Pagliano’s e-mails this summer. So far, officials have not responded. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the department is “still in the process” of responding to the letter.

[Commentary] The media is rigging this election in favor of Donald Trump by swallowing hook, line and sinker Russia's efforts to boost his campaign. The media continuously reports on hacked e-mails that intelligence officials with a high degree of certainly have traced to Russian hackers. Conveniently, Trump has failed to recognize this reality despite his penchant for truly absurd conspiracy theories such as Muslims in New Jersey cheering the 9/11 terrorist attacks or Sen Ted Cruz's (R-TX) father being part of the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. This hacking represents a blatant and unprecedented effort by a hostile foreign power to influence the outcome of an American presidential election. The hacking is also a serious violation of American law. Under the federal Stored Communication Act, it is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to hack into a private e-mail server.

So far, leakers linked to the Russians have released tens of thousands of Democratic documents and zero Republican documents. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out whom the Russians are attempting to elect in 2016. The media's complicity in Russian hacking tilts the playing field in favor of Trump because we have no Republican documents to compare with the material contained in the hacked Democratic e-mails, which may or may not have been doctored. It also threatens the long-term health of our democracy. By selectively leaking illegally obtained documents that the media dutifully covers, the Russians have proven that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from such meddling in our elections.

[Lichtman is distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington.]

President Barack Obama gave an “entirely factual” response when asked in 2015 about how he discovered Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail server as Secretary of State, his top spokesman said. President Obama’s claim that he first learned about Clinton’s server “through news reports” was called into question again after an e-mail chain released Oct 25 by WikiLeaks showed a top Clinton aide expressing concern in March 2015 that the president might be accused of lying. "What the president said was an entirely factual response,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. "I recognize that some of the president’s critics have attempted to construct some type of conspiracy about the communication between the president and the secretary of state,” Earnest continued. “But they’ve failed to put forward a conspiracy that withstands any scrutiny, so I guess they are back to recycling thoroughly debunked conspiracies."

The White House has repeatedly insisted that President Obama did not have knowledge of Clinton’s unusual e-mail server, even though the two did communicate by e-mail during her time at the State Department. But Clinton’s allies privately expressed concern about President Obama’s claim during a March 2015 CBS News interview that he first learned through media reports that the secretary of State used an e-mail system “outside the U.S. government for official business,” as reporter Bill Plante described it while questioning the President. “[L]ooks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news,” Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin told other allies in a March 7, 2015, email published by WikiLeaks. “[W]e need to clean this up - he has emails from her - they do not say state.gov,” responded former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills. At a White House press briefing two days after the email exchange, Earnest said that Obama knew about Clinton’s email address because he sent messages to it. But he said the president was unaware of the exact nature of the server or the extent to which she used it.