The Huffington Post’s Politics section has seemingly only written three original articles about Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal in as many months, ignoring major developments in a story with significant implications for the 2016 presidential election and the intelligence community.
Most recently, HuffPo failed to cover news that State Department staffers temporarily disabled security features on Hillary Clinton’s homebrew email server in 2010 — and a cyberattack weeks later forced them to shut the system down.
The Associated Press broke this story Wednesday afternoon, printing an explosive quote from a court-ordered email release: “one of Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, wrote to other high ranking staff: ‘Don’t email hrc (Clinton) anything sensitive. I can explain more in person.'”
Abedin’s warning not to send “anything sensitive” could undercut Clinton’s claim that she did not knowingly send or receive classified information on the server physically located in her Chappaqua, NY home. The FBI is currently investigating whether she mishandled classified data while Secretary of State.
As the time of this publication, the Huffington Post’s Politics page has not mentioned this news.
The latest Clinton emails story from the Huffington Post’s Politics section that is branded as news — not “The Blog” — is a Reuters wire dated June 10th. In that time, reports have claimed that Russia’s government intercepted and will release Clinton’s emails; Wikileaks founder Julian Assange announced plans to release Clinton emails which he believes would provide sufficient evidence to indict her; and CBS News published a poll showing two thirds of registered voters believed Clinton’s private email setup was either illegal (41 percent) or improper (25 percent). The site’s parent company AOL posted a video about the Assange story, but HuffPo’s political team made no mention of it.
A review of the site’s tags on Clinton and her email scandal reveal scant coverage from its own editorial staff. Aside from Reuters wires and links to outside sites (Washington Post, WSJ, CNN), these appear to be the only HuffPo original stories on the subject for the last quarter of the year:
• “Here Are All The Ways The FBI Director Tried Not To Make News On Hillary Clinton’s Email Probe,” by Ryan J. Reilly, May 11, 2016
• “Federal Judge May Order Hillary Clinton To Testify In Ongoing Email Controversy,” by Cristian Farias, May 4, 2016
• “Hillary Clinton Says She Hasn’t Been Interviewed By FBI Yet,” by Igor Bobic, April 4, 2016
HuffPo does not claim objectivity and is an openly left-leaning publication. However — per its slogan “Inform • Inspire • Entertain • Empower” — the site’s Politics team is not doing much to inform readers on a story that could drastically affect the 2016 presidential election and set historic precedent on federal employees’ handling of classified information.
A Huffington Post representative did not return a request for comment.