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How Hillary Helped Banks Foreclose on 5 Million Families

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Let me be clear at the outset: I think what follows is a bullshit argument. But I think it is less unfair of an argument than Hillary’s claim that, by voting to withhold the second tranche of TARP funding on January 15, 2009, Bernie Sanders voted against the auto bailout.

As you’ll recall, in October 2008, the Bush Administration threw some vaguely laid out plans on some cocktail napkins over the wall to Congress and got it to release $700 billion dollars to bail out the banks. Between the time the new Congress got sworn in but before Obama became President, Republicans in the Senate wrote a bill to withhold the second tranche, or $350 billion, of those funds. In the days before the vote, Larry Summers threw two more cocktail napkins of promises to Congress. Bernie was one of seven Democrats who voted not to release the funds based on a series of what were effectively ideas on cocktail napkins.

One of the things on those cocktail napkins, though, was a promise from the Obama Administration that actual human persons facing a crisis, rather than just banks, would get some of the second tranche of money.

The Obama Administration will commit substantial resources of $50-100B to a sweeping effort to address the foreclosure crisis.  We will implement smart, aggressive policies to reduce the number of preventable foreclosures by helping to reduce mortgage payments for economically stressed but responsible homeowners, while also reforming our bankruptcy laws and strengthening existing housing initiatives like Hope for Homeowners. Banks receiving support under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act will be required to implement mortgage foreclosure mitigation programs.

Of course, it was just a cocktail napkin, and by voting to release the funds without tying them to actual legislation requiring the Administration actually use the funds in a such a way as to help homeowners, Hillary — and all the other Democrats who voted to give their new President funds without real limits on how they could spend it — gave away any leverage they had to actually force the Administration to implement such a plan.

Last year David Dayen described how the Administration not only never spent $50 billion — they only ever spent $12.8 billion — but the number of people helped was far lower than promised, and most people “helped” actually weren’t helped at all.

On January 15, 2009, Obama’s chief economic policy adviser, Larry Summers, wrote to convince Congress to release the second tranche of TARP funds, promising that the incoming administration would “commit $50-$100 billion to a sweeping effort to address the foreclosure crisis … while also reforming our bankruptcy laws.” But the February 2009 stimulus package, another opportunity to legislate mortgage relief, did not include the bankruptcy remedy either; at the time, the new administration wanted a strong bipartisan vote for a fiscal rescue, and decided to neglect potentially divisive issues. Having squandered the must-pass bills to which it could have been attached, a cramdown amendment to a housing bill failed in April 2009, receiving only 45 Senate votes.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who had offered the amendment, condemned Congress, declaring that the banks “frankly own the place.” In fact, the administration had actively lobbied Congress against the best chances for cramdown’s passage, and was not particularly supportive when it came up for a vote, worrying about the impacts on bank balance sheets. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted in his recent book, “I didn’t think cramdown was a particularly wise or effective strategy.” In other words, to get the bailout money, the economic team effectively lied to Congress when it promised to support cramdown.

[snip]

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, 64 percent of all applications for loan modifications were denied. Employees at Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit offered perhaps the most damning revelations into servicer conduct. In a class-action lawsuit, these employees testified that they were told to lie to homeowners, deliberately misplace their documents, and deny loan modifications without explaining why. For their efforts, managers rewarded them with bonuses—in the form of Target gift cards—for pushing borrowers into foreclosure.

Because of all this, HAMP never came close to the 3–4 million modifications President Obama promised at its inception. As of August 2014, 1.4 million borrowers have obtained permanent loan modifications, but about 400,000 of them have already re-defaulted, a rate of about 30 percent. The oldest HAMP modifications have re-default rates as high as 46 percent.

Effectively, because Congress didn’t force the Administration to adopt cramdown (which would have resulted in real modifications which would have mean more people kept their homes and didn’t lose their wealth), Treasury could instead use the promise to “foam the runways” to help the banks string out losses and therefore avoid accountability for their recklessness.

This was a direct result of voting to give the Executive continued free rein on what to do with massive amounts of bailout money. So was bailing out the car industry, but the vote in January was primarily about whether to continue letting the Executive spend billions without clear guidelines.

So Hillary, according to her own logic, voted to help banks foreclose on 5 million people, which resulted in a tragic loss of wealth for American families.

Again, I think this is a bullshit argument. I assume Hillary intended to get real foreclosure relief (indeed, one domestic policy on which she was better than Obama in 2008 did just that). Though for someone who claims to know how to “get things done,” she showed no awareness of how to do that here. Nevertheless, it is the kind of bullshit argument she is making.

And having gone there — having permitted herself to engage in this kind of bullshit argument — she makes such arguments fair game for Donald Trump to make about her in June.

Ultimately, I think this vote was about whether the Executive should be able to operate without real limits. Bernie voted against that, Hillary voted for it (which makes it similar, in many ways, to the Iraq War vote in 2003, and had equally foreseeably bad results). Hillary will never make such votes for freeing the Executive of meaningful restraints again. But it’s pretty clear she’s a fan of letting the Executive operate without them.

That, to me, is the meaningful, non-bullshit, takeaway from that vote.

Bernie Wins MI — Wait Whut?

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Apparently my state gave Bernie Sanders the most unexpected of wins last night, winning a close race that only one poll even got close (but still predicted a narrow Hillary win). Most polls predicted she’d win it by 20%.

I’m going to spend the day looking at the results. But here’s what I understand to have happened:

  • Hillary won African-Americans, but not by as much as she had in the south. That’s probably consistent with MA’s results, the exit poll for which didn’t break down people of color, but as far as I know no one did the granular analysis of the MA results to figure that out.
  • MI’s Muslims voted for the elderly Polish Jew, by wide margins. That’s not a huge population, but it is big enough to have accounted for much of the differential between Hillary and Bernie. Keith Ellison, one of Sanders’ few Congressional backers, has close ties to the Muslim community here in MI and did some events for him in the last week.
  • Independents turned out in big numbers, and they voted for Sanders by big margins. MI has a completely open voting process, which means independents — who might normally be considered less likely primary voters — can (and apparently did) turn out in big numbers. I suspect, though haven’t yet confirmed it, that support for Bernie outside of SE MI was much higher in terms of numbers; usually when people analyze Democratic contests in this state they just blow off the areas outside of SE MI, because the latter is such a population center of Democratic voters. That may be what pollsters missed. Update: Adding, the Democratic party in my part of the state is pretty dysfunctional, even though there’s a population that should be turning increasingly Democratic. This is where Bernie picked up the numbers to offset Hillary’s SE MI numbers. That suggests he basically created a Democratic infrastructure that doesn’t exist (as Chris Savage pointed out, Bernie set up offices here and in other cities so had more field organizers throughout the state, save Detroit, than Hillary).
  • Students voted, and not just in Ann Arbor. Because of the way they suppress student turnout, University of Michigan is the school at which it is hardest for college students to vote (because they’re more likely to be out of state and/or from all over the state, which means if there’s a registration problem they’ll have harder time going “home” to vote). Bernie did events at EMU, MSU, GVSU, and only then U of M, and while those students are more likely to be dispersed than UM students, they appear to have turned out. Bernie continued to win young people by enormous margins.
  • Hillary underperformed in the rich suburbs. Hillary only won Oakland County, which is the second largest county and is the kind of affluent county Hillary has done really well in this year, by about 4.6%. I thought she’d win by 5 to 7%. I’m not sure why that is — again, it’s always possible cross-over voting is affecting the Democratic side. But had she gotten the numbers in Oakland I would have expected she likely would have won the state. The same is true of Detroit, but turnout in Detroit is less reliable than in Oakland.

There was a lot of talk last night about Hillary’s cynical auto bailout attack misfiring. Apparently, some top UAW people got quite pissed about it and were communicating about it among themselves.

It may be that Michiganders realized that was a dishonest attack, but I think it just as likely they responded to Sanders’ comments about Hillary’s trade record (curiously, he never even hammered on KORUS, where her involvement is much more direct than some of the other trade agreements she has supported, and which has had a clear impact on MI jobs). I’ve been predicting for some time that Hillary’s record on trade would hurt her in the state. Exit polls showed that those who think trade agreements have cost MI jobs voted in fairly big numbers for Bernie.

Update: One more point. I’m hearing a lot of talk about Hillary voters crossing over to vote for Kasich or Rubio to slow Trump’s momentum. I doubt that explains Hillary’s loss. First, any talk of that is anecdotal: there was no big discussion about how to strategize a cross-over vote. Second, the Kasich and Rubio numbers just don’t show any big swing, except perhaps in Washtenaw (Ann Arbor), but the Democratic results are about what we’d expect there. Third, the only people I heard talk about this were Sanders voters, so to the extent it did happen, it likely happened, in small numbers, among both Bernie and Hillary voters. Finally, while crossover voting is quite common here, it’s less common among party insiders than more independent voters (in part, because what ballot you pull does get recorded, so it shows in the voting rolls), so you’d think fewer of Hillary’s supporters would even consider it.

Update 2: I know that exit polls showed 7% of Dems crossed over compared to 3% of Republicans. I actually suspect those numbers are lower than what happened in other states and mostly stems from Democrats voting for Trump. Indeed, it’s possible that those who wanted to vote for a populist in MI felt like Bernie was a viable choice here (which would be consistent with where he got his biggest margins) as compared to places in the south where Trump was a more attractive populist to vote for.

Amid an Inconclusive Answer on Encryption, Hillary Reveals She Doesn’t Understand How Metadata Works

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Less than a mile from my house (at a small local tech firm called Atomic Object), Hillary Clinton got asked a question about encryption. After talking about the role of encryption in Atomic Object’s own work, one of the women asked (after 14:00; recording cuts out during her question),

What steps do you think government needs to take to make sure that the companies who build these,  create these products, keep our data secure. And also looking at the controversy between Apple and the FBI about encr–

After describing Healthcare.gov as the biggest tech failure in government because “it just didn’t really gel and there wasn’t enough testing,” Hillary admitted (in an apparent non sequitur) the government doesn’t do a good enough job protecting its own data.

We are woefully behind in the government in even protecting our own stuff. And so we’ve got to do a better job if we’re going to be a good partner with businesses to try to maintain privacy of data, whether it’s just customer data or whether it has real public consequences.

She then pivoted from what (I thought) was a project management issue, not a security one, to a long answer on the Apple v FBI that basically admitting not knowing (or being willing to say) what the right answer was.

With respect to the current legal controversy, between Apple and the FBI, I am someone who is just feeling like I am in the middle of the worst dilemma ever. I mean, think about it. Because there’s got to be some way to protect the privacy of data information. There’s got to be some way to avoid breaking encryption, however you describe it, and opening the door to a lot of bad actors. But there also has to be some way to follow up on criminal activity and prevent both crimes and terrorism. You guys are the experts on this. I don’t know enough about it to tell you how to do it. But I think that the real mistrust between the tech companies and the government right now is a serious problem that has to be, somehow, worked through.

I keep saying, you know, we have a lot of smart people in this country. You know, we invented the Internet, we invented, you know, the Internet of Things, we’ve invented all of this. Isn’t there some way without opening the door and causing even, you know, more and worse consequences to figure out how you get information?

Because I’m also very understanding of the position that law enforcement finds itself and and if any one of you were working at Quantico in the FBI lab, and you know, you had this phone that one of the terrorists in San Bernardino did and you wanted to find out who they communicated with and you know that could trace us back to somebody in this country, it could trace us back more clearly to somebody directing it overseas. You’d want to know that too.

So that’s what we need help on, so that we don’t make a grave error that affects our ability to maintain privacy and to protect encryption, but we also don’t open the door — because we know what happens, is these guys that are on the other side of us now, with ISIS and the like, they are really smart. A lot of them are well-educated. They’re not the image of just some poor guy coming to be a Jihadist. They are educated, they are increasingly computer literate, they are wanting to wage as much war and violence on Europe, the United States, as they can. They have learned, so they’re now using encrypted devices, why wouldn’t they? You know why would they be so stupid to continue to allow us to monitor where they are and what they’re doing? This is a problem. And it’s a problem we’ve got to come up with some way to solve. But I certainly am not expert in any way to tell you how to do it.

Right in the middle, however, Hillary reveals not understanding a key part of this controversy. To the extent Syed Rizwan Farook used the Apple software on his work phone to communicate with accomplices, we know who he communicated with, because we have that metadata (as Admiral Mike Rogers recently confirmed). We just don’t know what he said.

We wouldn’t necessarily know who he talked to if he used an App for which metadata was more transient, like Signal. But if so, that’s not an Apple problem.

Moreover, if ISIS recruits are — as Hillary said — smart, then they definitely wouldn’t (and in fact generally don’t) use Apple products, because they’d know that would make their communications easily accessible under the PRISM or USA Freedom programs.

This response is not really any different from what we’re getting from other to Obama officials. But it does come with some indication of the misunderstandings about the problem before us.

How Hillary Turned Her Support for Welfare for Banks into an Auto Bailout Attack

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For a campaign that has spent days insisting Bernie Sanders should not launch attacks against her, the Hillary Clinton campaign sure engaged in some dishonest hackery last night.

During the debate in Flint, Hillary attacked Bernie for “vot[ing] against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.” She was talking about a January 15, 2009 attempt to withhold the second $350 billion of TARP funding that failed (here’s the resolution); Bernie voted not to release those funds. But the vote was not directly about auto bailout funding. It was about bailing out the banks and funding what turned out to be completely ineffective efforts to forestall foreclosures.

It is true that Bush’s failure to fund an auto-specific bailout meant that TARP funds got used to fund the $85 billion auto rescue (Bush had already spent some money on the auto companies — basically just enough to ensure they’d go under on Obama’s watch, but not enough to do anything to save them). But that’s not what the vote was (and there might have been enough money for the auto bailout in any case).

Larry Summers’ two letters in support of the additional funding (January 12, Janaury 15) in support of the additional funding certainly didn’t describe it as an auto bailout bill. He mentioned “auto” just three times between the two of them. In the January 12 letter, in support of auto loans to consumers, and in the January 15 letter, limits on what I believe is a reference to GM Finance (now Ally)’s Christmas holiday move to turn into a bank so it could access funding. Contemporary reporting on the vote also did not mention the auto bailout (though there had been discussion that it might be used the previous month).

Moreover, there had been an auto bailout vote in the Senate (on a bill already passed by the House) on December 11, which failed. Both Bernie and Hillary voted in support.

So while Hillary’s attack was technically correct — Bernie did vote against giving Jamie Dimon more free money, which had the side effect of voting against the second installment on the fund that would eventually become the auto bailout — he did not vote against the auto bailout.

But Hillary’s attack did its work, largely because national reporters appeared completely unaware that they were fighting about TARP much less aware that there had been votes in December that directly pertained to the auto bailout. Even some local reporters now appear unaware of what went down in 2008-9. John Podesta helped matters along by sowing confusion in post-debate speeches.

Here’s one of what will end up being several exceptions to the shitty reporting on this that will come too late for people to figure out what actually happened.

During the testy exchange over the auto bailout, Clinton called Sanders a “one-issue candidate” for voting against the release of $350 billion in Jan. 15, 2009, to continue funding the bailout of the nation’s banks and mortgage lenders.

Sanders joined seven Democratic senators in voting against the second wave of TARP funds. President Barack Obama ended up using some of TARP to fund the $85 billion rescue of GM, Chrysler and their auto lending arms.

“If everybody had voted the way he did, I believe the auto industry would have collapsed, taking 4 million jobs with it,” Clinton said.

[snip]

David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, questioned Clinton’s attack on Sanders’ voting record in the middle of the debate.

“It wasn’t explicitly a vote about saving auto industry,” Axelrod wrote on Twitter.

U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Clinton supporter, said after the debate that senators, including Sanders, were aware the TARP money would be used to aid the domestic auto industry.

“A lot of folks said we shouldn’t do it because somehow it was helping the banks,” said Stabenow, D-Lansing. “It was the auto bailout we were talking about. I was very clear with colleagues that we had to do this.”

Stabenow’s comment, incidentally, is proof that the money shouldn’t have been granted as it was (it wasn’t spent on auto companies until much later). While she’s right that there had been public discussion of spending some money on the auto bailout, there obviously was still so little limiting what the Executive could do with the money that there needed to be nothing explicit supporting the auto bailout to make it happen. The flimsiness of the guidelines is one of the things that enabled the Obama Administration to avoid providing real foreclosure relief, choosing instead to “foam the runway” for banks.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernie did a number of other things at the debate that hurt him last night, such as his comment about ghettos that suggested all African Americans are poor and no whites are. I think, too, the optics of his efforts to stop Hillary from interrupting him as well as his own gesticulating while she was making responses will go over poorly.

But the auto bailout attack was a pretty shameful ploy, one that otherwise would make it fair game to really hit on Hillary’s own actions in a way Bernie has not yet done. That said, it was also a probably perfectly timed attack, because it will ensure victory for Hillary on Tuesday, eliminating one of the last possibilities that Bernie might really challenge Hillary.

Update: As it turns out, Hillary should be attacking Stabenow according to her own standards, because Stabenow voted no on the first TARP vote that actually paid for the first tranche of funding to the auto companies. (Here’s the second, January 2009 one.)

Hillary Is Now Picking and Choosing Which Obama Accomplishments to Take Credit For

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According to Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign ploy, she deserves credit for domestic policies passed under Obama — notably, ObamaCare — but not issues — in this case, trade deals — she negotiated as Secretary of State.

She rolled out former Governor and erstwhile Michigan resident Jennifer Granholm (when this story hit, some local folks were talking about how Granholm hasn’t been seen in these parts of late) to claim that Hillary can’t be held responsible for NAFTA — which she supported when it got passed by her spouse (who is, of course, a key campaign surrogate) — or for the Trans-Pacific Partnership — which she helped negotiate as Secretary of State. It’s the latter I find particularly remarkable.

“It’s not really fair to ascribe NAFTA to her when it was her husband’s administration,” Granholm said in an interview with The Detroit News. “And, of course, it’s not really fair to ascribe TPP to her when it was her boss’s administration. She can’t go against somebody who she worked for.”

As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) forged by Republican President George W. Bush’s administration.

“I think people have to be fair about looking at how she acted when she was on her own,” said Granholm, who is supporting Clinton’s candidacy.

Sanders has been talking about trade policy in speeches in Michigan this week. His campaign is planning a large rally a 7:30 p.m. Saturday night at Macomb Community College’s southern campus in Warren. Clinton and her husband were stumping for votes Saturday in Detroit.

On Thursday, Sanders highlighted trade policy at a press confernece in Lansing, previewing a potential topic of disagreement in Sunday night’s debate with Clinton at the University of Michigan-Flint.

“On the issue of trade, Secretary Clinton’s views and mine are very different,” Sanders said. “She has supported NAFTA, I opposed it. She supported permanent normal trade relations with China, I vigorously opposed the (permanent trade) with China. She supported permanent normal trade relations with Vietnam, I opposed that.”

“She supported the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. I opposed that. And she supported the Korean Free Trade Agreement. I opposed that.”

It’s unclear from Detroit News’ reporting whether Granholm includes the Colombian and Korean free trade deals in her absolution of Hillary’s responsibility or not. But as David Sirota has shown, Hillary’s own emails show some really damning details about her claims and enthusiasm for the former (which makes sense, because she is also an enthusiastic booster of Plan Colombia).

During her 2008 presidential run, Clinton said she opposed the deal because “I am very concerned about the history of violence against trade unionists in Colombia.” She later declared, “I oppose the deal. I have spoken out against the deal, I will vote against the deal, and I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.”

But newly released emails show that as secretary of state, Clinton was personally lobbying Democratic members of Congress to support the deal, even promising one senior lawmaker that the deal would extend labor protections to Colombian workers that would be as good or better than those enjoyed by many workers in the United States.

One of the 2011 emails from Clinton to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and Clinton aide Robert Hormats has a subject line “Sandy Levin” — a reference to the Democratic congressman who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees U.S. trade policy. In the email detailing her call with Levin, she said the Michigan lawmaker “appreciates the changes that have been made, the national security arguments and Santos’s reforms” — the latter presumably a reference to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. She concludes the message about the call with Levin by saying, “I told him that at the rate we were going, Columbian [sic] workers were going to end up w the same or better rights than workers in Wisconsin and Indiana and, maybe even, Michigan.”

Note, too, in that email that there is no exemption claimed for the paragraph that follows on the discussion of KORUS, which has been particularly damaging to Michigan’s economy.

Look, last I checked, Hillary cleaned up on Super Tuesday claiming she is running on a continuation of Obama’s policies. While I recognize she mostly means the domestic policies she had a less direct role in, at some point we get to hold her accountable for the things she did in her actual job, which included negotiating trade deals that hurt American workers, especially while she’s claiming she’ll be Obama’s third term. Her role in trade deals — and her likely dishonesty about TPP (see this Larry Summers piece that assumes if Trump wins, TPP will be dismantled, which suggests he expects it to be fully implemented if Hillary wins) is part of who she is. Yes, she voted against a trade deal once. Yes, she also had an affirmative role in a lot more trade deals. That’s a shitty record to run on in MI (and it will be a shitty record that Trump will hammer her on mercilessly if they end up being the nominees), but it is her record, part of the extensive experience that she points to as making her best qualified to be President.

 

The Return of the Reagan Democrats

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Donald Trump held a rally in Warren, MI today, a blue-collar, largely white suburb of Detroit in Macomb County. The county, as a whole, is famous for what Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg dubbed the “Reagan Democrats” after lifelong white working class Democrats started flipping to the GOP in 1980, as he described in this study done on polling about Obama in 2008.

In 1960, Macomb was the most Democratic suburban county in the country as John F. Kennedy won handily there, garnering 63 percent of the vote. Four years later, Lyndon Johnson increased the Democratic vote share even further, winning 75 percent of Macomb voters. But over the next 20 years, these voters turned on the Democrats, culminating with Ronald Reagan taking 66 percent of the vote in 1984.

Even before the election, Greenberg found Obama did worse with Macomb’s voters than he did elsewhere. Greenberg even found some racial basis for that, though not as much as he had earlier. But Greenberg judged early on that Obama did so much better elsewhere in the state — primarily, with the young, but also by generating enthusiasm among African American voters — that it wouldn’t matter.

Obama is running 7 points ahead in our statewide poll conducted at the same time. Obama obviously will be able to count on immense enthusiasm and turnout among African Americans, but there is more going on than that – including Obama’s over-performance in the growing suburban parts of the state, including Oakland County, where he is running a net 5 points above party identification and 9 points ahead of John McCain. Among young voters under 30 years, Obama defeats McCain 58 to 36 percent but Obama’s success with younger voters is even broader.

He leads McCain among all voters under 40 years by 48 to 41 percent across Michigan and matches that margin in Macomb. Clearly, the rules of the game are a little different this year.

Sure enough, Obama did over-perform in the suburbs. So much so that after the election, Greenberg said so long to his Macomb Reagan Democrats, embracing, instead, the racially diverse (or at least tolerant) suburbanites who could replace them in the Democratic coalition.

Oakland County has formed part of the Republican heartland in Michigan and the country. From 1972 to 1988, Democratic presidential candidates in their best years lost the county by 20 points. From Bill Clinton to John Kerry, however, Democrats began to settle for a draw. Over the past two decades, Oakland County began to change, as an influx of teachers, lawyers and high-tech professionals began to outnumber the county’s business owners and managers. Macomb has been slow to welcome racial diversity, but almost a quarter of Oakland’s residents are members of various racial minorities.

These changes have produced a more tolerant and culturally liberal population, uncomfortable with today’s Republican Party. When we conducted our poll of 600 voters in Oakland County on election night, they were a lot more open than voters in Macomb to gay marriage and affirmative action. We asked those who voted for Mr. Obama why they made that choice. At the top of the list was his promise to withdraw troops from Iraq, followed by his support for tax cuts for the middle class and affordable health care for all, and the idea that he will bring people together, end the old politics and get things done.

On Tuesday, Oakland County voters gave Mr. Obama a 57 percent to 42 percent victory over John McCain — those 15 points translated into an astonishing 96,000-vote margin. That helped form one of the most important new national changes in the electorate: Mr. Obama built up striking dominance in the country’s growing, more diverse and well-educated suburbs.

So, good riddance, my Macomb barometer.

But in elections since, Democrats have been doing worse and worse among whites and, in the interim years, losing elections as a result. By 2014, Greenberg was not so sanguine about Democrats’ losing those white voters anymore.

For example, a lot of blue-collar work today takes place in small groups rather than in factory settings, and most construction workers are self-employed contractors. Moreover, if by blue-collar jobs we mean jobs that involve routine and repetitive tasks, require limited skills, are closely supervised, and offer no autonomy during working hours, then it turns out that half of all white male workers and 40 percent of white working women are blue collar. Far from working on factory floors, more and more workers are employed in service-sector jobs like health care, leisure and hospitality, and, particularly, professional and business services.

If Democrats cannot figure out how to appeal to today’s working-class voters, then they don’t deserve to lead. Nearly all of the people in these jobs have not seen a raise in years. The majority of them, who now work in the service sector—maids and housekeepers, waitresses and hostesses, cooks and dishwashers, counter attendants and ticket takers, janitors and hairdressers and child care workers—earn, on average, about $400 a week.

At that point, the GOP wasn’t even doing all that well with these voters. But they are now, with Donald Trump, returning today to the site of Reagan’s victory with the support of a bunch of working people arguably voting against their economic interest. Trump is speaking the language — significantly, of building infrastructure, and not just his damned wall — that would appeal to this group in a way the GOP had foresworn. And in Macomb, as elsewhere, Trump’s voters are his voters, largely detached from either party and thus far unimpressed with the dirt the GOP threw last night and reportedly will start throwing in abundance in the near future. Trump seems to recognize he has a limited window of time to win out before the shit gets really deep, and he stands a very good chance of doing just that.

And there is a real reason to be concerned that it will lead to victory for the GOP in November.

Thus far, we’re seeing Democratic turnout down, significantly, and GOP turnout up even more. That comes, in large part, because white voters — thus far we’ve had voting in the South, so these consist of what this analysis calls old-style Dixiecrats as well as Trump cross-overs — are turning to Donald Trump. Worse, we’re not seeing the kind of turnout among people of color, not even African Americans, that Democrats have been presuming would build a permanent firewall against GOP victories.

So it’s absolutely imperative that we find some way to do three things:

  • Bring back some form of the Obama effect on African American turnout, so it does not fall (as it did in South Carolina).
  • Give younger voters the motivation to actually turn out and vote.
  • Effectively fight the Trump effect, and stem the anti-establishment exodus of working class whites to the GOP, and to Trump.

If we can’t find a way to do that, then in the outer South:

  • North Carolina will not be remotely competitive.
  • Virginia won’t lean Dem, and could be a true tossup or even lean R.
  • Florida won’t really be a tossup, but will probably lean reasonably R as in 2004 (unless gains among Hispanics are fully strong enough to offset the Trump effect in North Florida and the drift of older retirees to the GOP).

That’s enough by itself to return the electoral college map to something more similar to what we had in 2000 and 2004. And if the Trump effect is strong in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, then we could have a real fight on our hands, without any clear reason to think we have the upper hand.

In other words, with Trump on the GOP ballot and Obama off the Dem ballot, the Obama coalition could come tumbling down and crash into pieces. That “blue wall” we liked to think made America safe from another George W. Bush? Gone. History.

But even in MA, Trump drew those working class whites in YUGE numbers.

Bernie probably had a shot at winning among white and black and brown working people. Partly because the Democrats launched Republican attacks on sound policy, partly because Bernie didn’t listen to people of color enough, and partly because Trump had an easier sell to the white working class, he won’t pull it off.

Which will leave Hillary and Oakland’s voters (or, in parallel fashion, huge wins in the most affluent Military Industrial Complex suburbs of VA).

Democrats risk losing this election, once again to Reagan’s Democrats. If Trump wins, it may also be a realignment election, where Democrats become the party of those suburbs while Trump feeds the fears of those working towns. As Greenberg said, Democrats don’t deserve to win if they’re not offering solutions for those working class service workers, of all classes.

And thus far, Democrats haven’t convinced sufficient numbers they do.

Hillary’s Admission Diplomacy Couldn’t Get Pakistan To Hand Over Bin Laden

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There was a really weird moment during the foreign policy section of last night’s debate.

Bernie, to respond to Hillary’s explanation of what we need to do to win wars against terrorism, said he doesn’t support regime change. To counter him, Hillary said, in part, that he had voted in favor of regime change in Libya.

Which led to this exchange:

SANDERS: Judy, if I can, there is no question, Secretary Clinton and I are friends, and I have a lot of respect for her, that she has enormous experience in foreign affairs. Secretary of state for four years. You’ve got a bit of experience, I would imagine.

But judgment matters as well. Judgment matters as well. And she and I looked at the same evidence coming from the Bush administration regarding Iraq. I lead the opposition against it. She voted for it.

But more importantly, in terms of this Libya resolution that you have noted before, this was a virtually unanimous consent. Everybody voted for it wanting to see Libya move toward democracy, of course we all wanted to do that.

SANDERS: That is very different than talking about specific action for regime change, which I did not support.

CLINTON: You did support a U.N. Security Council approach, which we did follow up on. And, look, I think it’s important to look at what the most important counterterrorism judgment of the first four years of the Obama administration was, and that was the very difficult decision as to whether or not to advise the president to go after bin Laden.

I looked at the evidence. I looked at the intelligence. I got the briefings. I recommended that the president go forward. It was a hard choice. Not all of his top national security advisors agreed with that. And at the end of the day, it was the president’s decision. So he had to leave the Situation Room after hearing from the small group advising him and he had to make that decision. I’m proud that I gave him that advice. And I’m very grateful to the brave Navy SEALs who carried out that mission.

This is not the first time Hillary has changed the subject by bringing up the Osama bin Laden killing — a far more awkward example came when she did so to respond to Chuck Todd’s question whether she would release her Goldman Sachs speech transcripts.

TODD: Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches? We do know through reporting that there were transcription services for all of those paid speeches. In full disclosure, would you release all of them?

CLINTON: I will look into it. I don’t know the status, but I will certainly look into it. But, I can only repeat what is the fact that I spoke to a lot of different groups with a lot of different constituents, a lot of different kinds of members about issues that had to do with world affairs. I probably described more times than I can remember how stressful it was advising the President about going after Bin Laden.

But this example is more telling in a number of respects.

First, consider why she had to change the subject, aside from the fact that Libya has turned out to be such a colossal mistake. Hillary claimed Bernie voted in favor of regime change and then, without a break, described the vote as favoring Security Council involvement.

He voted in favor of regime change with Libya, voted in favor of the Security Council being an active participate in setting the parameters for what we would do, which of course we followed through on.

The resolution included, among other things, these three parts:

(3) calls on Muammar Qadhafi to desist from further violence, recognize the Libyan people’s demand for democratic change, resign his position and permit a peaceful transition to democracy governed by respect for human and civil rights and the right of the people to choose their government in free and fair elections;

(7) urges the United Nations Security Council to take such further action as may be necessary to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory;

(11) Welcomes the outreach that has begun by the United States government to Libyan opposition figures and supports an orderly, irreversible and transition to a legitimate democratic government in Libya.

It certainly called for Qaddafi to resign and transfer power to a democratic government. It even endorsed the “outreach” — which ultimately involved barely covert support for rebels — as a means to “transition to a legitimate democratic government.” And it called for the UNSC to take further action, which it did weeks later in calling for a no-fly zone. Famously, Russia and China only permitted that resolution to pass because Susan Rice had led them to believe it did not entail regime change (which is why Russia refused to play along with multilateral efforts to do something about Bashar Assad’s massacres).

VITALY CHURKIN (Russian Federation) said he had abstained, although his country’s position opposing violence against civilians in Libya was clear.  Work on the resolution was not in keeping with Security Council practice, with many questions having remained unanswered, including how it would be enforced and by whom, and what the limits of engagement would be.  His country had not prevented the adoption of the resolution, but he was convinced that an immediate ceasefire was the best way to stop the loss of life.  His country, in fact, had pressed earlier for a resolution calling for such a ceasefire, which could have saved many additional lives.  Cautioning against unpredicted consequences, he stressed that there was a need to avoid further destabilization in the region.

In last night’s debate, Sanders responded — after talking about what good friends he is with the woman who just claimed he had supported regime change — that he had supported more democracy in Libya, not regime change.

Everybody voted for it wanting to see Libya move toward democracy, of course we all wanted to do that. That is very different than talking about specific action for regime change, which I did not support.

Which led Hillary to suggest, in response, that “we follow[ed] up on,” which led directly to Qaddafi taking a bayonet up his rectum.

You did support a U.N. Security Council approach, which we did follow up on.

Hillary is suggesting (whether solely for political gain or also for legal cover, it’s not entirely clear) that that Senate call for democracy entailed permission to execute regime change. That is, she seems to be claiming that the intent all along was regime change and Sanders should have known that when he did not object to a voice vote in favor of the Libya resolution.

Then, BOOM, dead Osama bin Laden…

… Just in case you start thinking too much about what it means that Hillary suggested that Senate resolution amounted to support for regime change which therefore amounted to an authorization to use military force.

Now, thus far, the exchange is troubling, but not surprising. Hillary’s hawkishness and fondness for fairly broad exercises of executive authority are known qualities.

But the juxtaposition of the disastrous regime change effort in Libya with Obama’s decision to secretly send Navy SEALs into Pakistan to execute Osama bin Laden got me thinking about how different that OBL decision looks when the former Secretary of State is boasting about it, rather than the President.

Once you decide that the way to respond to locating OBL is to sneak into a sovereign country and execute someone, you clearly have to consult with the Secretary of State, as she’s going to have to deal with the diplomatic fallout. That was all the more true as things rolled out, given that we were already conducting delicate negotiations to get Raymond Davis out. Not to mention the way that Davis fiasco soured relations between CIA and State.

Left unsaid, though, is the other option: developing good enough relations with Pakistan — or, more likely, being able to wield enough leverage against Pakistan — such that they would turn him over without the sovereignty violation.

Maybe — likely — that was never going to happen. Maybe — likely — within the bowels of CIA and State and the White House we had good reason to know that Pakistan would not turn over OBL, no matter how much leverage we used. Maybe — likely — it’s also true that the Obama Administration thinks special forces have a better success rate than diplomacy — or thought that, in his first term; his second term, post-Clinton, has had a series of impressive diplomatic successes.

I’m not suggesting I think we could have just asked nicely. But I find it notable that the Secretary of State describes her role as advising the President on whether or not to violate another country’s sovereignty to execute someone, not as considering whether there are other ways to achieve the same objective. I find it remarkable that a Secretary of State boasts about this decision, which ultimately is about the limits of diplomacy even with our so-called allies.

Biased Pluralism and the Defense of “Reality” in the Democratic Primary

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Last week, I pointed to a problem with Jonathan Chait’s defense of Hillary Clinton’s “pluralistic” approach to governance, noting that in an era of weak labor organization, such an approach leaves out the views of the great majority of working people, precisely the kinds of people Bernie Sanders is attracting.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but since got reminded of an important paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, released in 2014. It used a dataset matching polling data to policy outcomes to test four theories for how our political system works: Majoritarian Democracy (meaning policies adopted reflect what most people want), Dominance by Economic Elites (meaning the rich get what they want), Majoritarian Pluralism (meaning interest groups, including those that represent the non-wealthy, get what they want), and Biased Pluralism (meaning interest groups that represent the views of the economic elite get what they want).

Ultimately, the paper showed that our system provides what interest groups want, not what the majority want. Importantly, it also noted that the interest groups that have influence don’t actually represent the preferences of the average citizen (which is defined to be policies supported by a median income voter).

But net interest-group stands are not substantially correlated with the preferences of average citizens. Taking all interest groups together, the index of net interest-group alignment correlates only a non-significant .04 with average citizens’ preferences!

It explains this, in part, because there are so many more interest groups (which include corporations) representing the interests of the economic elite that ultimately they’ll guide policy even when including those interest groups representing the interests of the non-elite.

As a result, majoritarian views — what most Americans want — have almost no influence on policy.

The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.

When the majority gets what they want, it is because the elite interest groups favor the same policy, not because anyone is responding to the interests of the average voter.

Finally, the paper further shows that that is even more true when the majority wants change.

A final point: Even in a bivariate, descriptive sense, our evidence indicates that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited. Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system—federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism—together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority—even a very large majority—of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants.

So it’s one thing if the majority wants things to remain the same, when they might get what they want, but another thing if they’d like to change the status quo, when they almost never will.

I raise all this because it provides an important reminder for this year’s bizarre presidential election. At least on the Democratic side, the findings totally reinforce both candidates. Bernie Sanders is absolutely right that the system is rigged, that the government’s policies don’t reflect the interests of average Americans. But Hillary Clinton is right, too, that the way to get things done in DC — or at least the way that things have gotten done in DC — is to negotiate compromises within the existing interest group structure (which includes a nearly impotent labor movement and overly powerful corporations). She’s even probably right that in the current system you need to co-opt a certain number of economic elite interest groups (that is, largely, corporate groups) to be able to acquire the critical mass of support from interest groups to get a policy adopted. You’ve got to make enough Goldman Sachs speeches to get them to the table, Hillary might excuse her boondoggle speeches.

But that also has certain implications for the policy debate going on. One problem Hillary is having is in needing to champion — to legitimize — the compromises made within that system: notably, Dodd-Frank and Obama’s insurance reform. She’s doing that by suggesting, with the help of wonk-boys like Chait, that the compromises made in those legislative processes were all that were possible at the time. As I hope to lay out, not only the record — but specific actions by those who remain a part of the Hillary entourage — disprove that claim, at least in theory: 2009 was the rare year when that might not have been true. In addition, Hillary’s choice to function within the existing pluralist system also all presumes that the existing set of interest groups, with the nearly impotent labor movement and overly powerful corporations, are a fixed set.

Which brings us back to Bernie’s call for a revolution, which we might think of as providing average people some means of being an interest group again. Whatever else it is, it could become (unlike the Dean organization that became the 50 state strategy and Obama for America that became a messaging organization within a neutered DNC) a resilient interest group. In many ways, it is a more institutionalized and better funded reincarnation of some recent protest groups, with a very strong overlap with Occupy Wall Street, and as such might have staying power, regardless of what happens with the primary.

But that brings us back to the other problem Hillary (as well as the institutional candidates on the Republican side) is having: voters aren’t dummies.

While you can defend the claim that Obama’s insurance reform was all that was possible, that doesn’t mean — even with the many benefits it has brought about — that it was a sound compromise, much less policy that served the interest of the majority or the country as a whole. Similarly, while you can claim (even more dubiously) that foaming the runway to give the banks a soft landing was necessary, real Americans know we all would be better off with Lloyd Blankfein in prison. That is, you can claim that interest group policies are all we can get, but at that same time that means that interest group policies don’t self-evidently serve the interests of Americans. Hillary can’t admit that, but that’s the truth confirmed in Gilens and Page. It’s also the reason why the wonk-boys are working so hard to claim that these policies serve the good of most people, to try to refute the obvious ways they don’t.

Hillary may well win (the primary, at least) based on truthfully claiming she represents the continuation of Obama’s policies, as Greg Sargent argued yesterday.

Beyond this, the big picture here is that Sanders has gotten as far as he has by offering up a serious, if partial, indictment of the Obama years. He is arguing that Obama era reforms — Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, his climate agenda — ended up being woefully inadequate to the scale of our challenges, because he failed to sufficiently rally the grassroots against the power of the oligarchy and because the Democratic establishment still remains in thrall to oligarchic money. Clinton full-throatedly defends Obama’s accomplishments as very much worth preserving, rejects the Sanders-promulgated notion that Obama could have gotten a whole lot more than he did, and vows to build on those achievements.

The bigger, more diverse, more moderate electorates in the contests to come might be more receptive to Clinton’s arguments along these lines. And one thing to watch will be whether Sanders tries to find a way to temper the criticism of the Obama years that is laced through the story he is telling.

I’d temper that and note that Bernie is probably closer to the real foreign policy successes of Obama’s post-Hillary term, including opening relations with Iran and Cuba and demanding that the Saudis actually start fighting ISIL. But on the Obama policies that are most obviously the result of letting interest groups, from the impotent labor movement to the overly powerful corporations, direct policy, Hillary is the inheritor of a historically fairly popular legacy. That’s true, and it may well be enough, barring any unforeseen economic reversals, though economic reversals are actually looking pretty likely, in which case that legacy may be of far less value.

The problem with being in that very advantageous position is that, especially this year, voters are all too aware that those policies didn’t necessarily serve their needs.  And that, it seems, explains the disjuncture between Hillary’s claim (true or not) to best be able to negotiate the interest groups of DC and the fact that that hasn’t been enough to convince voters.

Hillary’s Flint Gambit

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As I’ve noted repeatedly, when independent tests first publicized that decisions made by Governor Snyder’s hand-picked Emergency Manager were poisoning Flint’s children last October, he made a show of response, but it wasn’t until the Task Force he appointed laid into his Department of Environmental Quality and Detroit’s US Attorney revealed it was investigating the problem that Snyder ratcheted up his effort to appear to be responding.

But his actions since then have largely been an attempt to stall for time, presumably a hope that anti-corrosives in Flint’s pipes will bring lead levels down so that we can all move on and forget about it. True, he did get the state legislature to cough up $28 million, which will go to ramping up state agency involvement. He has asked for $30 million to alleviate some, but not all, of Flint residents’ water bills so they’re not paying for water they can’t use, but it’s not clear the legislature will fund it (and it’s just partial relief in any case).

But at the same time, he has asked for bigger funding chunks from the Federal government: $96 million under disaster funding for things including replacing a fraction of the lead pipes in the city, and the expansion of funding for WIC funding for Flint’s children until they’re 10 (which would have improved nutritional support for kids at risk of lead poisoning). The Feds denied both those requests. Snyder and the Republicans are now blaming Obama for denying these requests. Understand: Obama’s administration could only had approved them by violating the terms of these programs set by Congress. Snyder asked for something that, under the law, Obama could not give, and now Snyder is using that denial to try to pawn off responsibility onto Obama, rather than the appointed managers who created this mess and ignored it for over a year.

That leaves the lead pipes in the ground, still leaching toxic levels of lead four months after anti-corrosives were first added to the water to try to reverse the corrosion. Some houses in Flint still have so much lead in the water that filters cannot be trusted to remove the poison.

Michigan’s Senators, Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, tried to get $600 million added to a bipartisan energy bill to start the work of actually replacing those pipes. But even revising that request down to $200 million didn’t work, so Democrats filibustered the bill.

That was Thursday.

Hours later, during the debate, Hillary announced she’d do an appearance in Flint today, which ended a few hours ago.

I will be in Flint at the Mayor’s invitation on Sunday to get an in depth briefing about what is, and is not happening.

This is an emergency. Everyday that goes by that these people, particularly the children, are not tested so we can know what steps must be taken to try to remediate the effects of the poisoning that they have been living with is a day lost in a child’s life. I know from the work that I’ve done over so many years, lead, the toxic nature of lead can affect you brain development, your body development, your behavior.

I absolutely believe that what is being done is not sufficient. We need to be absolutely clear about everything that should be done from today to tomorrow, into the future to try to remedy the terrible burden that the people of Flint are bearing. That includes fixing their pipes, it includes guaranteeing whatever healthcare and educational embellishments they may need going forward, and I think the federal government has way where it can bill the state of Michigan. If Michigan won’t do it, there have to be ways that we can begin to move, and then make them pay for it, and hold them accountable.

Her appearance (which drew no national coverage) had some strong points: She reminded she had worked on lead (paint) issues in New York, she noted that many other cities are suffering from similar problems, she called to get Flint people working to replace the pipes.

She brought up the $200 million Democratic Senators are currently demanding.

Therein lies the rub.

I’m completely agnostic about whether this particular trip will hurt or help (it’s very clear that Hillary’s focus on Flint two debates ago helped draw attention, though of course that came months after the lead poisoning was first revealed in October).

It could be that next week Democrats in the Senate will be able to get Republicans to relent to their demand for Flint funding. But it could also be that Republicans will dig in, given that denying Flint funding becomes a way to deprive the presumptive Democratic nominee a win. That’s true, especially since John Cornyn already accused Democrats of trying to embarrass Republicans on this issue.

Republican Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas called the Democrats’ sudden rejection of what had been bipartisan support for the energy bill “gamesmanship” and an effort to “embarrass Republicans” by making it seem they did not care about Flint.

He said state officials are trying to figure out how much a full infrastructure repair program in the city might cost — an estimate is expected next week — and to authorize full funding before that was “putting the cart before the horse.”

“The State of Michigan and the City of Flint don’t know what they need to do to fix the problem or how much it will cost,” Cornyn said. “The senators form Michigan come in here and say we don’t need to know … we want cash.”

It seems Republicans are stalling, hoping this will fade from view before some Republican legislature — either Federal or state — ends up funding a needed infrastructure program which will not only fix the water problem, but provide a Keynesian boost to a city Republicans would like to cure with more austerity. As months go on, this year’s Presidential and next year’s gubernatorial election will exert pressure of some sort. It may well be that Hillary can use her focus on Flint to showcase a call for more infrastructure funding that will tip some elections. It may also be that the prospect of Hillary on the ballot in November exerts pressure downticket on Republicans.

But for the moment, this seems like uncertain political gamesmanship that could leave Flint residents drinking from plastic bottles for months to come.

Update: I meant to include this quote from a Flint resident, which encapsulates my concern.

“It’s bad news to me,” said Arthur Woodson, a 46-year-old Army veteran who runs New Beginnings, a Flint-based nonprofit aimed at helping soldiers return to the community. “She’s turning it into a political football. The GOP won’t ever do anything now. They’re going to turn it into a partisan thing.”

“This is a water issue,” he continued. “It’s not a political issue. We got kids who are suffering. We don’t have time for this partisan stuff.”

Update: MI Republican Chair and Mitt Romney niece Ronna Romney McDaniel is out complaining about this “calculated campaign tactic.”

Families and residents in Flint deserve better than being used as political pawns by a Presidential candidate. This visit is not an act of benevolence; it is a calculated campaign tactic – an attempt to grab headlines by a struggling campaign.

It is time to focus on solutions. As a candidate who proclaimed that the enemies she is most proud of are Republicans, I doubt that Hillary Clinton is here to contribute to the bipartisan effort to fix this crisis. The families in Flint deserve solutions, not a stunt that does nothing to help the city or the people who call it home.

One Reason CIA Is Claiming Drone Emails Are Top Secret: ACLU’s FOIA

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The NYT has a really helpful description of the emails to Hillary that intelligence agencies are claiming are Top Secret. It explained how several of the emails almost certainly couldn’t derive from the intelligence the agency claimed they came from, such as this one on North Korea.

The fourth involved an email sent by Kurt M. Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, shortly after a North Korean ballistic missile test in July 2009. The email has not yet been made public, even in redacted form, but the State Department has challenged an assertion from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which gathers data through satellite images, that the email included information that came from a highly classified program.

In a letter this past Dec. 15 to Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a State Department official said that the information could not have been based on N.G.A.’s intelligence because Mr. Campbell did not receive any classified intelligence briefings for what was a new job for him until a few days after the North Korean test.

I believe the NGA was dawdling on signing a sworn declaration about this email, unlike the CIA (whose Martha Lutz has signed her name to many a wacky claim).

Unsurprisingly, the NYT reports that the bulk of the emails in question pertain to the drone program, specifically in Pakistan.

The Obama administration’s decision to keep most internal discussions about that program — including all information about C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan — classified at the “top secret” level has now become a political liability for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

[snip]

Several officials said that at least one of the emails contained oblique references to C.I.A. operatives. One of the messages has been given a designation of “HCS-O” — indicating that the information was derived from human intelligence sources — a detail that was first reported by Fox News. The officials said that none of the emails mention specific names of C.I.A. officers or the spy agency’s sources.

The government officials said that discussions in an email thread about a New York Times article — the officials did not say which article — contained sensitive information about the intelligence surrounding the C.I.A.’s drone activities, particularly in Pakistan.

The officials said that at least one of the 22 emails came from Richard C. Holbrooke, who as the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan would have been intimately involved in dealing with the ramifications of drone strikes. Mr. Holbrooke died in December 2010.

Reading these passages and the article in general made me realize something: The reason the CIA is insisting these are classified is almost certainly because of the ACLU’s two FOIAs for drone information. In the Awlaki-focused one, the ACLU (and NYT) succeeded in arguing that past public statements from people like Leon Panetta constituted a waiver of the classification of the CIA’s involvement in the program. Any public dissemination of other official Administration figures discussing the drone program would provide ACLU another opportunity to go to the judges in these cases and demand further disclosure about CIA’s involvement in the drone program.

Over the years, the Obama Administration has gone to great lengths to defeat the ACLU in its various FOIAs, from having National Security Advisor Jim Jones get involved in the torture FOIA to delaying congressional oversight into the Awlaki killing. Here, it appears they’re even willing to damage Hillary’s campaign to serve as the inheritor to Obama’s legacy to thwart the ACLU.