Clinton Email Controversy Taints All Involved

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. So folks, the 2016 US presidential election is one week from tomorrow. I've tried to stay away from this election. I don't want it to be seen as a purely political podcast. The show is about communication, excellence, public speaking, how great leaders in every kind of industry, of all sorts of professions, ideologies, even political parties communicate and how the best communicate successfully. So I don't want this to be another show where you hear something that you think someone saying something nice about someone you hate or is saying something bad about someone you love and you then use that as an opportunity to hate that person. Because that does happen, let me tell you. So today I'm perhaps getting myself in trouble, but I'm going to say something that is going to offend pretty much every everybody because I'm going to be wildly critical of the Hillary Clinton campaign, of the Republicans and of the media. Now I don't, I hate to be one of these politically correct people who say, oh, everybody's bad, everybody's equally awful except for me. That's not it. But I want to give you my analysis. Having worked in the political arena on hundred or so campaigns, more than that over the last 30 years, and having worked in the media for the last 30 years, in and around it and as a part of it. So that's what the show is going to be about today. Shortly, once we get through this election, we will revert to more of our regular programming focus, which is going to be in depth, lengthy interviews with the most interesting and most influential people in the world on what they do and how they communicate. So that's the focus of the show, folks. Those of you listening regularly give you a little bit of a sneak preview. I'm about to officially unveil and launch the new website speakingwithtjwalker.com now, what I had done in the past is just post on my blog@mediatrainingworldwide.com some of you may ask, well, why? Why are you doing that? T.J. your main brand, your main corporate entity is Media Training worldwide and the website mediatrainingworldwide.com what I found is the people who are most successful with their podcast make it really easy for people to find their podcast. They create a sole identity for that podcast and they create a podcast website that just has that name in it so you're not going off and having to go 10 clicks in before you find it. You find it right there. So I'm trying to adapt to best practices. The other reason is, frankly, if I'm approaching a world famous celebrity, intellect, author, expert, and they have no idea who they am, who I am, it's a little confusing. If they get an email from tjediatrainingworldwide.com and I'm asking them to be a guest on my show and then they just go to my main website and they start seeing something about training public speaking courses. So I'm trying to make it less confusing for when I'm talking to publicists, PR representative, spokespersons and possible guests. So that's the reason for that and also just want to make it easy for people to come and consume the podcast. Some people don't like to subscribe to podcasts on itunes or on YouTube, but are more than happy to just actually go to a website and click on and listen on their PC or their cell phone or you may prefer an RSS feed. So that's why it is if you want to weigh in on the website, what you think of it, how it could look better, I'd certainly love to hear from you. There'll be a whole new set of contact information options for you at the top of that site as well. Also, the reason I'm creating this site is to make it easier, frankly, to reward regular listeners like you. We've got a resources section with a toolbox that makes it very easy for you to sign up and get access to several of my books on spoken communication as well as access to online training courses as well. So please take a look at that in more detail. I think you'll, I think you'll see something there that you enjoy. Onward to today's program. Now I'm recording this Monday on Halloween Day, October 31, 2016. The show goes live at 12:30am Eastern Time on Tuesday morning, November 1. So bit of a bombshell, or at least it's been positioned as a bombshell. Friday afternoon, the release from the FBI director claiming that he is now reviewing emails that may or may not relate to Hillary Clinton that are on Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop as a part of the investigation of Anthony Weiner sexting an underage girl. And the connection, of course, is Anthony Weiner's soon to be ex wife. Uma Abedin is a longtime, top, close personal aide to Hillary Clinton. Now this really stirred up the whole political world, the media world, both campaigns, and I think that people have behaved abysmally all the way around. Let me start first with the Clinton campaign. Now I have been accused by some of you of being this horrible, evil Clinton apologist, allegedly. I've never, ever criticized the Clinton campaign, which just isn't true. Well, here's some criticism. This story came out, and when it came to them actually getting a reaction out to their voters through email, the email list where they send to their supporters, it took about 30 hours. I mean, that's just way too. They should have gotten something out in about an hour. The next thing is, I just think they overreacted to it by making it sound as if, oh my gosh, the sky is falling. Isn't this horrible what the FBI director did to make us look bad and evil and guilty? And now, of course, we're going to lose lots of votes? I think they played into it in a way that made it a bigger story. Now, there's no doubt this is not what the Clinton campaign want. It's not what any political campaign would want, just 11 days before a major national election to have an FBI director say, and he didn't say, we're reopening the investigation. But that's of course, how it was played out in the media. Nobody wants that. But how do you handle it? I'm going to toss out one suggestion. Some of you will laugh at it, but if I had been an involved with the Clinton campaign, I would have put out a release and a statement from the candidate that said, this is great news. This is yet again another reminder of how Hillary Clinton has been the most single most investigated person in the history of politics and no one has ever found any cause of her doing anything illegal. And checking more emails when the FBI director admits there's not a single sign of wrongdoing is yet further amplification that Hillary Clinton has never done anything illegal. And this is in great contrast with Donald Trump, who next month is going to trial for after the election for fraud when it comes to his Trump University, and the month after is slated for trial, or at least the preliminary hearings of a trial for having raped a teenage underaged girl. We applaud the FBI director and frankly think he's given us a $10 million in kind contribution. I think if now you can say, well, tj, you're being too cute, nobody would buy that. If you act like something is horrible, you're gonna convince everyone else it's horrible. If you act like something is great and great news, you're at least gonna make it harder for people to position the issue as, oh my gosh, the Clinton campaign must be feeling so awful, so depressed, they must be suicidal. They must be thinking of jumping out windows. And sometimes you can defang an issue by acting like it doesn't bother you, because, truth be told, I think the Clinton campaign made it worse by going on and on and on about how the FBI director interjected himself into politics and this was awful and this was unethical. They're making it sound as though she's done something really awful and is just upset about the timing. It's almost as if she's suggesting, well, if he's going to indict me or arrest me or pull me up on charges, he sure should have waited until the week after the election. Well, that's hardly comforting to anyone. So I give very poor marks to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now, let's move on. Again, I reminded you at the onset of this podcast, I'm pretty much going to make everybody angry. The Clinton campaign, the Republicans, the FBI director's office, and the media. The FBI director in this really comes across horribly. You've got a guy who first of all was a lifelong Republican, a Bush appointee, someone who previously in his career was considered a paragon of integrity accepted by both parties. Well, earlier this summer, when he said that there is no reasonable evidence that Hillary Clinton knowingly committed any wrongdoing and that no reasonable prosecutor would indict her, he was vilified, excoriated, and I have to think he probably received thousands of death threats a day from Republicans and conservatives who didn't really care about the facts. They just like the idea of Hillary Clinton being indicted, going to prison, being declared ineligible as a presidential candidate, and mostly going to prison. You know, lock her up. That's the favorite mantra of many in the crowd at a Trump rally. So they hated him, attacked him, vilified him. He made matters a lot worse by his press conference in the summer and sort of made himself look and sound like a politician. And the Republicans in Congress extracted from him this promise that if any more information came up, they would alert him instantly. Now, here's the problem with that. Transparency sounds great in the abstract. Everyone's in favor of it in the theory. But when you look at the decade after decade after decade of tradition of the FBI, that's not how they do it. FBI officials do not comment. Ongoing investigations. They don't comment every single time someone has an email that if you squint the right way, could somehow make somebody five chains up the command of, of the chain of command look bad in some way. That just has never happened. The FBI, the Justice Department in general, has tried to not seem political and that's why they typically don't make any major announcements a month prior to a major Election Day. And here's what I think really happened. I think that the FBI director was so frankly chastened by his experience with the Republican. I mean, he'd been the Republican's boy for decades. Everybody loved him, respected him. He was always considered a good team player. But when he actually looked at the facts and came to the conclusion that no reasonable person would indict Hillary Clinton for any alleged wrongdoing surrounding her emails, he was treated as if he were Willie Horton, essentially the famed rapist murderer who had so much prominence in the 1988 campaign because Michael Dukakis had given him a weekend furlough. And I think the FBI director was so scarred by this experience, and he remembered that he did in fact tell members of Congress that he would alert them to any new information that he just felt, oh, if I don't tell them that we're now looking into emails and it comes out later, after the election, the Republicans in Congress are going to scream bloody murder that I misled them, that I lied to them, that I abused the powers of office to aid Hillary Clinton. So even though I might short term get criticism from Hillary Clinton and the media for releasing this 11 days before the campaign, at least I will defuse some of the tension, the hatred, the vitriol, and frankly, the death threats from the right wing that I might get if this comes out after the election. I think that's what he did. He wanted to cover his you know what, and he just reasoned that, you know what, if this really hurts the Clinton campaign, but I don't get removed from office two months after the campaign, so be it. If the whole destiny of the country has changed because of this. But I saved my job. I'd rather save my job. I think that was his political calculation. Now, I readily admit I'm guessing, I don't really know. But that is simply what I think is the most logical explanation for this unprecedented turn of events coming from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So if we're grading this on an academic scale, so far, I give the Clintons an F minus. I give the FBI director an F minus. Now let's switch to the Republicans and the Donald Trump campaign. Their reaction is, oh, this is the greatest thing in the history of the world. This proves essentially that Hillary Clinton should be thrown in prison. And it just doesn't prove anything. In fact, unnamed sources from the FBI have revealed information that none of the emails are to or from Hillary Clinton. And there's not a single shred of evidence of any wrongdoing. It's just that somehow there are some emails that may or may not have something to do with Hillary Clinton because they are a part of an account of Umamidine, who has worked for Clinton. So the Republicans look like this blood thirsty, ugly, nasty witch hunting mobile where they could not care less about facts or fairness or any sense of balance and they just look like, frankly, lynch mobs. So I give the Republicans F minus. Let's move on. Who next is a part of this? The news media. Now, the news media has done a horrific job hyping this as if this were the single most important thing thing in the world at this moment, when if they were fair, I think they would have made this a story on for you millennials and younger people out there, forgive this reference. I would have made it, you know, the bottom of page B or perhaps page B3 in a newspaper. This is a minor footnote to the story of the day. Blown way out of purport. Again, I should remind you folks that nobody in the FBI knows anything about what's in the emails. It's not reopening an investigation into Hillary's email scandal because investigations are never really closed if someone has more information about Al Capone being murdered can always be looked at. So there's so much misinformation put out there by the news media, they instantly just pull all the quotes from Hillary's opponents saying, you know, this proves you should go to prison and this reopening the investigation is just, just the right time, just simply wasn't true. I think any honest newspaper reporter, editor, editing manager, or a television producer, assignment editor who really looked at the facts would say, hmm, there really doesn't seem to be anything important here. The FBI has said they're now looking at emails of someone who works for Hillary Clinton, whose husband, who hasn't been in Congress in five years, was involved in sexting a teenager. And we have no idea if there's anything bad on the emails and we have no idea if there's anything there that we haven't already looked at. And there's absolutely zero evidence of any wrongdoing from Hillary Clinton. And oh, by the way, tens and tens and tens of thousands of emails of Hillary Clinton have been reviewed and there's never once been actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing. I think any editor or person with news judgment who really put those things together, I'm frankly surprised they would even run the story. But to do like the New York Times and There was like 10 stories all on this. I mean, they couldn't have made a bigger deal out of it. If Hillary Clinton had been found covered in blood, having murdered her husband and new evidence coming out that she had murdered Vince, they mean they couldn't have made a bigger deal out of it than they did. Was there context? No. Were stories balanced? And to say something like, well, and by the way, Newsweek did this today. They put out a good story showing that for years and years and years and years, Donald Trump and his organization have thumbed their nose at judges and legal requests and they've destroyed emails that are a part of criminal investigations and in civil investigations that Donald Trump has willfully been by any objective manner, a thousand times worse regarding email management than Hillary Clinton. But none of that came out when the story broke Friday or Saturday or Sunday. The media could have put out stories that showed context and said, okay, so Hillary Clinton has been investigated more than any human being in the history of the world. There have been dozens and dozens and dozens of governmental investigations of her. She's never been found to be guilty of anything. There have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent investigating her and her husband. She's never been found guilty of committing any crime. There have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books investigating Hillary Clinton that have alleged, you know, murders and all sorts of things. None of them that have really been given credence. And by the way, Donald Trump is going to trial next week, excuse me, next month after the election, where there is incredibly detailed specific evidence that he broke crimes regarding fraud with his Trump University. And while it's not an airtight case and some people look at it with some sense of skepticism, there is a case involving Donald Trump and the allegations that he raped a 13 year old 20 years ago that's headed towards a courtroom in a couple of months. Reporters could have put that. And if you really put all those facts together, I don't think anybody in their right mind would care about an email on Anthony Weiner's laptop. You only care if you have decided in advance. Clintons are always guilty of crimes and the only issue is what crime and what evidence we can find. If you go into every single news story with that assumption, yeah, it colors your. And you know, you expect that from the political opposition, but the so called neutral news media is not supposed to do that. And that is exactly what they. So I give the news media an F minus. So if you're tallying it all up, an F minus for the Clinton campaign, an F minus for the FBI director, an F minus for the Republicans in the Trump campaign, and an F minus for the news media. I hate to sound like a negative, nattering nabob where everybody's wrong and I'm the only one right, but I have to tell you, I just, I call it like I see it today and this incident brought out the absolute worst in everyone. Now, is it really going to change the outcome of the election? I'm skeptical about that. Of course, any issue like this, even if it doesn't transfer to final vote count at the top of the ticket, could have an impact down ballot when it comes to Senate races, congressional races. So you'll never really know. I can't imagine anyone switching their vote for this. But if there's someone who was perhaps going to vote for Clinton but didn't like her and now says I'm just going to stay at home, that could affect who controls the US Senate in 2017. It certainly could control the House of Representatives. It could control governors races. So we'll never really know. And that's the shame. And the shame deserves to be spread around. What do you think? I'm not interested in hearing who you want to be president or who you think is a criminal, but what do you think of how each one of these players has communicated during this? I am interested in the communication aspect. I'd love to hear from you. Please post your comments and you can now do so at speakingwithtjwalker.com you can post your comments right there on the blog. On the same post where you see this show. You can also post on Twitter. I'm JWalker. You can post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you are seeing or hearing this show. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to speaking with T.J. walker.