Contrary to rumors floating around Twitter today that some of my fellow Bernie supporters would love to see happen, Hillary is not going to face Federal Racketeering Charges. The source for this claim is US Politics 24, an occasionally updated site posting pro-Bernie pieces. But first of all, it does not attribute its claim of information. If it is a prediction, they should say so. If James Comey is to present a recommendation to Attorney General Loretta Lynch that Hillary be charged with racketeering charges, that is confidential information that is protected by law. Mr. Comey cannot disclose that information even if he were to resign for “health reasons.”

Secondly of all, this story conflates Hillary’s emails with her work at the Clinton Foundation; these were two totally separate enterprises. Nobody is investigating Hillary over the Foundation that we know of. The only investigation that we know of involves the emails.

This site continues:

It is a Federal Crime to negligently handle classified information under United States Code (USC) 18 section 1924. It is a Federal Class A Felony under USC 18 section 798.

While this is true, ALL the materials that Hillary allegedly mishandled were retroactively classified after the fact, meaning that she did not break the law.

The article also mentions that Hillary allegedly did not comply with State Department policies. The problem is that Hillary was in charge — she set the policies.

Finally, there is a big difference between emailgate and Plamegate. The closest that anybody has come to quantifying damage that Hillary has done comes from this recent Newsweek story:

Bill Johnson, who was the State Department’s political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, in 2010 and 2011, says secret plans to eliminate the leader of a Filipino Islamist separatist group and intercept Chinese-made weapons components being smuggled into Iraq were repeatedly foiled.

Sounds damning; however, when pressed, Mr. Johnson does not know how their targets found out about their attacks:

Johnson says he and his team eliminated the possibility of other security leaks before settling on the unprotected telephone calls of the secretary of state and her aides as the likely source—though he quickly adds they have “no proof.”

Around the same time, a U.S. special operations unit was tracking agents from the United Arab Emirates, who were suspected of buying advanced remote-control bomb devices from China to use against U.S. troops in Iraq. Their main smuggling route led through Thailand. U.S. counterterrorism agents set a trap for them in Bangkok, Johnson says, but “word of it leaked.” He suspected the “sloppy” communication habits of Clinton and senior State Department staff were to blame, but again, he admits, “I had no proof.”

In other words, it was just his opinion that the State Department was at fault. And, applying Occam’s Razor, the US has developed quite a reputation around the world for targeted killings. It could have simply been a human sixth sense of danger, not sloppy communications from the State Department.

Besides this, nobody has ever been able to quantify any kind of damage that Hillary has supposedly done to our national security. On the other hand, we know the kind of damage that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby inflicted — one million lives lost including 5,000 of our servicepeople, Valerie Plame outed and her career destroyed, dozens of US agents and intelligence sources placed in jeopardy, our war on terror undermined. Plamegate was the sort of tyrannical rage that you read about in the Iliad, where Agamemnon steals Achilles’ favorite woman for standing up to him.

Many of us in Bernie Sanders’ movement are fed up with what we see as the media not doing their jobs and reporting the news. That is a legitimate concern; however, if we are to be the media, we must do much better than report predictions as fact and human speculation as something more. The last thing we want to do is lower ourselves to the level of the people who tried to claim that John Kerry faked his service medals in Vietnam in 2004. It’s not OK when they do it and it’s not OK when someone on our side does it.