Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security
Only in the distopian worlds imagined and penned by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley would a statement such as that, a clear statement that it is a mere belief founded on the flimsiest and challengeable reasoning, be reported by a dutiful press as a fact. This is tantamount to the daily reports that: We have always been at war with Eurasia.
So I encourage people to not fall victim to the overt government propaganda line being dutifully "reported" by what seems to be its extension in the press - and to explore, and critically analyze, the substantive and troubling facts contained within the leaked Podesta emails. I hope that this evolving guide will help you navigate through the mass of records in this process of critical evaluation and subsequent rational, critical, public discourse on what it reveals about the normalized and legitimized practices of parties and officials and its implications for democracy in America.
John Podesta is uniquely suited, via his "private" voice, to getting a fairly full big picture of the situation and its problems.
He not only serves as the Chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the most central figure in that effort second only to the candidate herself (and in many ways even more so), but serves as Counsel to President Barack Obama as well as Chief of Staff, in the latter years of the Bill Clinton presidency.
Within the emails you will find a great deal of information revealing the inner, private, workings of all three.
He remains a key advisor to Bill Clinton in his private life, and plays a central role in the Controversial Clinton Foundation. The emails show just how problematic the private foundation, with a surface appearance as a philanthropy, has a deeply embedded - but all too hidden - public role in both indirect and direct influence on government, both in converting his name and influence in Washington on behalf of its donors interests, as well as during Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State.
Similarly, Podesta serves as Chair and Counselor for the Center for American Progress, which puts forth a public face as a progressive think-tank, yet when we view his communications with persons such as Neera Tanden, the organization's current President, and a key inside player in the Hillary Clinton campaign, we see that there is at minimum a blurring of the lines between their publicly stated purpose (and perhaps even laws) and their actual, private, machinations.
So within the mass of emails, approximately 60,000 - of which at the time of writing this initial introduction to the guide only about 10 percent have been released - you will find what you would find in anyone's email inbox. A large volume of personal correspondence with friends and family, or work related (Podesta is a law professor at the prestigious Georgetown Law School) emails. Most of these have little public value and the citizen or journalist will want to try and avoid spending their time milling through the noise to get to the documents of true public interest (although this is not a universal statement - as even within a private email there may be information valuable into understanding the totality of the public significance of the whole batch. But even still one would want to only review these after grasping the more directly relevant information.). Indeed one will also find the regular emails of travel websites, banks, and other such entities which will have little general significance (again - not necessarily all without any potential significance to the investigative journalist) and to email lists that pertain to politics but don't reveal the actual workings of the government or campaigns. You will also find within the total set of documents spam - which should be a good indicator of the genuine nature of the Wikileaks release.
On that note let me describe the contents both generally and in particular.
What is contained within the leaked set of records are emails from one of Podesta's many email accounts - his Gmail account - to which he had much of his other emails forwarded. The records are in the original .eml file format - although for the purposes of online display what you primarily see when you go to the site are .html renditions thereof so that they can be read in your web browser. The original email files, however, are actually there if you look closely. [SEE the two parts ] [explain .eml format]
Significantly the fact that you can download the email in its original .eml file format means that you can see the normally hidden "header" and "metadata" information contained therein - thus providing even more evidence of the authenticity of - and means to verify - the documents.
One note however should be remembered when reading the documents using the Wikileaks browser. While it is factually correct, the time stamp on the emails as displayed, can be misleading. This is not necessarily the actual time that John Podesta actually sent or received the particular email - as the time is given in PST (Pacific Standard Time) - whereas it is reasonable to assume that most, if not all, were actually sent or received in what would appear to be earlier in the day - as Podesta, being based in Washington D.C. - operates on normal days in EST (Eastern Standard Time). Thus what might appear to be a 3 a.m. tweet (not that, despite the impressions intentionally spread recently by both campaign and press, this is somehow inappropriate or abnormal) would actually be a late night, not early morning, email. The reason for the PST time stamp showing up on the Wikileaks browser is likely explained by the fact that the metadata recording the times is not generated when the email arrives in Podesta's inbox - but how the servers of Google see the information given that these are housed in their California facilities.
So be aware of this and beware claims that this may be proof of their fabrication. The strategic use of semantic sleight of hand consciously employed by the party and campaign to date make this argument a plausible future possibility (if someone has not already made such an allegation). [See Palmiari and Eichenwald] The practice of political prestidigitation deliberately seeks to deflect from the facts by distracting the viewer with misdirection - no less than the great Las Vegas performers do on a daily basis (I don't mean those who will appear on the state of UNLV this coming Wednesday).
The effectiveness of this partisan ploy can be seen in two cases: The claims of Jennifer Palmieri that she doesn't "recognize" a particularly embarrassing email, the Director of Communications and formerly holding that position in the Obama administration. This position, significantly, is formally in the business of spin - or public relations - once known by its original form "propaganda." The art of deception by sleight of hand semantics is her profession. [http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/politics/hillary-clinton-email-hack-catholic/index.html ]
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