George Packer's Blog, page 146

Clinton Had a Bad Week, but Trump Is Still Lagging

With nine days to go until the Presidential election, Hillary Clinton remains the strong favorite. She’s ahead in the national polls, and the early-voting figures are going in her direction. In the contest to amass two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College, her opponent, Donald Trump, is where he’s been for some time now: holding a weak hand, and needing to pull an inside straight.

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Bonus Daily Cartoon: Sunday, October 30th
If Hillary Wins, She’ll Be Grateful for Comey’s Move
Donald Trump Is Visited by Three Spirits

If Hillary Wins, She’ll Be Grateful for Comey’s Move

On October 11, 2015, President Obama was asked by Steve Kroft of CBS News about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server while she was the Secretary of State. It was an awkward question for Obama. The F.B.I., led by James Comey, whom Obama chose to run the agency, was in the middle of an investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information. His Administration has been unusually aggressive in prosecuting government officials who leak classified material. But the Clinton e-mail investigation had also turned into a highly partisan issue, with Republican Presidential candidates making wild and unsubstantiated claims about her conduct. Still, Obama could have remained silent. There is a long-standing tradition by which Presidents do not comment about ongoing F.B.I. investigations, especially when a former member of their own Administration is under scrutiny. Obama seemed to want to follow that protocol and swat the question away. “Well, I’m not going to comment on—” he said before he was cut off.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Clinton Had a Bad Week, but Trump Is Still Lagging
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Sunday, October 30th
Donald Trump Is Visited by Three Spirits

James Comey’s Letter and the Problem of Leaks

Since Friday afternoon, the political world has been convulsed by the decision of James Comey, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to release a three-paragraph letter to congressional leaders, announcing that the F.B.I. had found additional evidence that might be relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton for improper handling of classified information. Was Comey’s letter appropriate, because it disclosed an important development to Congress, especially since he had earlier told them that his investigation was complete? Or did Comey’s letter represent unjustified meddling in the Presidential election, less than two weeks before election day?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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James Comey Broke with Loretta Lynch and Justice Department Tradition
Comey Praises Brave F.B.I. Agents Who Had to Touch Anthony Weiner’s Computer
James Comey’s October Surprise

Erick Erickson Is Sorry About Some of the Things He Has Said

Erick Erickson, the forty-one-year-old right-wing radio host and political pundit whom The Atlantic described in 2015 as “the most powerful conservative in America,” has made a career of online provocation. He became the editor-in-chief of the influential conservative blog RedState in 2006, a position he held for nearly a decade. In a 2008 blog post, he dubbed Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy.” In a 2009 tweet, he called the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter “a goat fucking child molester.” Later that year, Erickson argued that President Obama won the Nobel Prize because of an “affirmative action quota.” The 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Texas, Wendy Davis, was, in due time, “Abortion Barbie.”

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James Comey Broke with Loretta Lynch and Justice Department Tradition

On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Comey Praises Brave F.B.I. Agents Who Had to Touch Anthony Weiner’s Computer
James Comey’s October Surprise
The F.B.I. Reinvigorates Trump

James Comey’s October Surprise

On Friday morning, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent a letter to the heads of several committees on Capitol Hill, in which he said he wished to “supplement” the testimony he gave in July about the Bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. During that testimony, Comey had defended his decision not to bring any charges in the case, even though his agents had found evidence that Clinton and her aides were, in his words, “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
James Comey Broke with Loretta Lynch and Justice Department Tradition
Comey Praises Brave F.B.I. Agents Who Had to Touch Anthony Weiner’s Computer
The F.B.I. Reinvigorates Trump

The F.B.I. Reinvigorates Trump

“I need to open with a very critical breaking-news announcement,” Donald Trump told a crowd in a hotel ballroom in Manchester, New Hampshire, today. The news that the F.B.I. had discovered more e-mails related to Hillary Clinton’s case had spread through the room a few minutes earlier, and as Trump, his voice grave, parcelled out what he knew the audience cheered in anticipation; it already knew where his story was heading.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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James Comey Broke with Loretta Lynch and Justice Department Tradition
James Comey’s October Surprise
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What Lady Gaga Finds Appealing in Reel-to-Reel

A week ago, Lady Gaga released her fifth album, “Joanne,” which has a stripped-down sound that is quite different from her previous efforts. She has promoted the album with performances at small night clubs and dive bars, a coming home of sorts to the days when a young Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta would tear up a West Village bar with nothing but her voice and a piano. Beyond Gaga’s performances, what’s unique about “Joanne” is how some of the songs were made. When she announced earlier this year that she was recording an album with the producer Mark Ronson, the press began calling it her analog album.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Did Trump and Clinton Get a Pass on Education?

Last March, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute published a study analyzing the vocabulary and syntax in speeches delivered by the Presidential candidates. The authors of the study, Elliot Schumacher and Maxine Eskenazi, discovered that while Hillary Clinton addressed Americans in language that someone with a ninth-grade education could understand, Donald Trump’s word choices and his grammatical command were roughly equivalent to those of a sixth grader.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Why a Brexit Shocker Is Unlikely Here

If you listen to Donald Trump or Sean Hannity, the United States is heading for a Brexit-style surprise on Election Day, in which the pollsters and pundits who have largely written off the Republican Presidential candidate get humiliated. “There’s going to be a lot of Brexit happening in about two weeks,” Trump said in Florida on Tuesday. “Remember that? Everyone went to bed. They said, ‘Oh, gee, I think it’s not going to happen,’ and I said it’s going to happen.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Did Trump and Clinton Get a Pass on Education?
Afternoon Cartoon: Thursday, October 27th
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