AND IS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERING FOR HER?
by Sharon Rondeau
(Sep. 4, 2016) — As noted by The New York Times on Saturday, Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton attended a significant number of private fundraising events in August as compared to campaign rallies following both major parties’ nominating conventions in July.
Since before she became her party’s nominee, Clinton has opted for interviews with what could be viewed as friendly media outlets to articulate her views and has not given a press conference in close to a year.
“Mr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally,” The Times reported.
On July 28, The Washington Post reported that a Clinton pollster told ABC News that “We’ll have a press conference when we want to have a press conference.”
A schedule of Clinton and running-mate Tim Kaine events indicates that Clinton is appearing at few campaign events over the next six weeks, while surrogates, including her husband, former President Bill Clinton, will attend events and hold fundraisers without her. Overseas fundraisers in Amsterdam, Holland; Hong Kong, China; Taipei, Taiwan; and London, UK will be hosted by former ambassadors.
Contrasting with the Clinton campaign, the Trump/Pence organization is posting its schedule of events in small increments focusing on the appearances of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
On Monday, Hillary Clinton and Kaine will attend a Labor Day event in Cleveland, after which Clinton will appear in Hampton, IL. The following day, she will speak at a campaign event in Tampa, FL.
On September 7, she will attend a “Commander-in-Chief Forum” in New York City, with a voter registration drive the following day.
On Saturday, Trump visited a primarily African-American church in Detroit, where he briefly spoke and was given gifts by the church’s minister, Bishop Wayne Jackson.
Neither Trump nor Pence has events scheduled for Sunday and Monday, but each will make two campaign appearances on Tuesday.
This past Friday, CBS digital reporter Hannah Fraser-Chanpong tweeted, then quickly deleted:
Twitterers have since asked Chanpong to confirm or deny that she issued and retracted the tweet but have received no response. Although assigned to cover the Clinton campaign, Chanpong’s last tweet appears to have been posted on Friday in which she stated one of the FBI’s findings released in a report summary Friday of its July 2 interview of Clinton that “The FBI found ’13 total mobile devices’ that Clinton potentially used to send emails from her private email address:” along with a screenshot of the referenced report passage.
The summary was released in two parts, the first of which contains 47 pages and the second 11 pages. Most mainstream news outlets did not provide links to the FBI postings in their articles, but rather, simply wrote about their contents and the possible political ramifications.
One commenter on Chanpong’s Twitter feed claimed, “Accredited CBS liberal reporter Hannah Chanpong was threatened & forced” to retract her tweet claiming that Clinton staffers are resigning amid “worries” that Clinton might remove herself from the race in the wake of the FBI summary release.
The FBI is currently scrutinizing whether or not laws were broken during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, as emails released by State by court order to government-watchdog Judicial Watch indicate that many large Clinton Foundation donors were able to meet with Clinton on relatively short notice. A CBS report dated August 10 states that “Despite denials that the State Department and the Clinton Foundation had any significant ties to each other while Hillary Clinton served as the nation’s chief diplomat, a new batch of emails sheds new light on the seemingly close relationship between the two entities.”
Upon taking office at State, Clinton had pledged not to mix the work of the Clinton Foundation with her responsibilities as a public servant.
As early as May 26 of last year, however, it had been reported by the International Business Times that “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department.”
Some in the media have questioned whether or not Clinton is suffering from medical conditions such as the concussion she experienced in 2012 which limited her working hours and which she claimed impaired her memory of briefings about how to handle classified material.
On Saturday, NPR discussed the suspicions many have aired that Clinton’s health is not optimal. “To be clear, there is no evidence that Clinton in in failing health. But this belief in entirely unfounded narratives isn’t new; American politics has spawned a variety of out-there theories adopted by people on both sides of the aisle — that Sept. 11 was an inside job, for example, or that President Obama was born in Kenya,” NPR stated.
Trump, for his part, has offered to release more detailed information about his health and challenged Clinton to do the same. Last year, NBC reported that Clinton’s physician released “a two-page letter” stating that Clinton was fit to serve without showing the alleged letter.
As of press time, there appear to be no announcements of any Clinton campaign staffers resigning.