By day five — Oct. 10 — Cillizza had reached his breaking point. Or at least the point where he had to write something. “The deafening silence of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Harvey Weinstein,” read the headline on the story. Ever the specialist in political appearances, Cillizza noted that just about any statement addressing the allegations against the major Democratic donor and Miramax co-founder would do: “My guess is that the growing public pressure on the Clintons and Obama to say something — anything! — about Weinstein will force them to speak (or release a statement) sometime in the next 48 hours. But, the question remains: What the heck is taking them so long?”

Events overtook the column, as Clinton issued a statement on Weinstein that very day. A headline change was in order: “It took Hillary Clinton five days to issue this statement about Harvey Weinstein.” No one violates the commonly accepted four-day acceptable silence standard for Democrats to denounce sexual misconduct by their donors. Cillizza will get you!

AD

AD

On a more serious note, Cillizza’s punditry reflects a strange season in which Clinton, who lost the presidency last November and professes no interest in running again for elective office, remains a focus of political chatter. Part of the reason for this circumstance stems from President Trump and Fox News, who enjoy shifting attention to Clinton’s misdeeds as a means of short-shrifting the president’s own, more contemporary, failures. Another factor is Clinton herself, who recently published a look-back book on the election — “What Happened” — and who has no intention of remaining silent on the current president’s daily idiocies.

“Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position,” noted a study on the coverage in the final stages of the campaign.

AD

AD

Nearly one year after the election, Cillizza and the Clinton camp took part in a bout over this never-say-die issue. On Sept. 11, Cillizza wrote a post under the headline, “The mistake Hillary makes in diagnosing her biggest mistake of 2016.” The analysis was pegged to a Clinton interview with Jane Pauley in which she admitted that “the most important of the mistakes I made was using personal email.”

The CNN analyst springboarded off of that remark: “Not only was she the first secretary of state to exclusively use a private email address (others, like Colin Powell, had used both a private email and an official state.gov address) but the decision to use her own private server reinforced many of the negative perceptions people had about Clinton.”

Bolding added to highlight a parenthetical that caused non-parenthetical angst at Clinton Inc. David Kendall, the personal lawyer for Hillary Clinton, wrote a correction request to Cillizza. No, he pointed out — Colin Powell didn’t use both a personal email and a state.gov email during his tenure as secretary of state. Two very, very official documents support Kendall’s position on the matter:

AD

AD

The State Department’s May 2016 inspector general report on the email controversy stated, “OIG could only identify three cases where officials used non-Departmental systems on an exclusive basis for day-to-day operations. These include former Secretaries Powell and Clinton, as well as Jonathan Scott Gration, a former Ambassador to Kenya.”

A deposition from Karin Lang, a State Department official, put the matter bluntly: “Prior to Secretary Kerry, no Secretary of State used a State.gov e-mail address.”

Pretty definitive stuff. (An aide to Condoleezza Rice, who served in between Powell and Clinton, has said she didn’t use email as secretary of state.) In an email correspondence, Cillizza countered with this: “My issue is that Colin Powell told a source of mine he did have a state.gov address.” After some more pressure from Kendall, Cillizza responded, “We have looked into it and we’re comfortable with our wording.” The spat took weeks to transact. On Oct. 4, CNN updated the column with this tweak: “CNN subsequently reconfirmed with Powell’s office that Powell had a state.gov email account which he used for classified information.” A CNN spokesman told the Erik Wemple Blog that it addressed Kendall’s complaints with the tweak; an emailed request for an interview with Cillizza about his Clinton coverage hasn’t yet fetched a response.

When the Erik Wemple Blog ran that language past Peggy Cifrino, Powell’s spokeswoman, she replied, “We said that? No.” After further examining the matter, Cifrino noted that CNN had called to ask whether Powell had a separate system for sending classified information. Indeed he did, responded Cifrino — but that doesn’t mean that the separate system was a state.gov system. Back in 2015, Powell told NBC News, “I had a secure State Department machine for secure material and I had a laptop that I could use for email.” That statement appears to indicate that Powell was drawing a stark line between email and his conduit for classified information. “Powell would not have used state.gov for classified information,” notes The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, a former State Department correspondent who wrote various fact-checks about Clinton’s email mess. “That’s an unclassified system.” When it came to transmission of classified information, Clinton, too, professed to use a “separate, closed email system.”

Nor is Kendall persuaded by CNN’s invocation of Powell’s office. If you’re a journalist, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of a Kendall correction request. Here’s how he responded, in part, to Cillizza’s attempt to fight off a correction:

AD

AD

(1) In what way is the Inspector General wrong in its conclusion? (2) In what way is Ms. Lang wrong in her statement of fact, made under oath? (3) Regardless of what your “source” says, do you have a single e-mail sent or received by former Secretary Powell on a State.gov account?

And: “It’s highly ironic that in an article purporting to analyze the former Secretary’s mistakes in diagnosing her mistakes, you are utterly incapable of diagnosing or acknowledging your own demonstrable mistake.”

Comparative Email Violations 101 is a course that the U.S. body politic will continue taking: News broke last month that at least six White House advisers had used personal email accounts to conduct professional business. But did they use a private server, as did Clinton? Did they transmit classified information? Or just exchange gossip about the “moron”?