Obama: Um, Okay, Actually I Did Know Hillary Was Using a Private Email Service

Just a few days ago, the White House claimed that it only became aware of this issue in August 2014, when Hillary inveighed upon them to keep it quiet.

Now Josh Earnest "clarifies" -- "clarifies" is a White House euphemism for "completely reverses a previously-told falsehood" -- that in fact Obama did notice that Hillary was using private email since like forever ago, but didn't know the exact extent of her usage of it, nor that she had completely refused to even set up a government email.

"I would not describe the numbers of emails as large.... He was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up," Earnest said.

That's a shift from Saturday, March 7, when Obama told CBS that he learned about Clinton’s private email system at "the same time everybody else learned it through news reports."

This constant dissembling from the White House, in which broad and emphatic untruths are later replaced, less prominently, but selective disclosures, is a calculated technique of deception. The White House knows that people firm their strongest, most enduring perceptions of an issue just as they form perceptions of a person -- first impressions dominate all subsequent information learned.

So the White House always -- always -- chooses to lie very big in the beginning, to establish that First Impression in the minds of the public, which will never completely dislodge, that they "didn't know" this or that.

Then, once that deception is implanted, they offer less false (but often, still pretty false) accounts.

posted by Ace at 04:39 PM

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