Wikileaks: All Headline, No Scandal: Algeria and the Terror Watch List

Yesterday, I wrote about how the Wikileaks email dumps aren't actually filled with tons of scandals, but they are just used to generate scandalous headlines. I keep challenging people on Twitter to provide me the big smoking gun. Show me the email that is the most damaging. Show me the email that will finally convince me of the horrible actions of Hillary Clinton.

Today's contestant was @GenMichelle. She suggested that I must not be able to read english and that denying the obvious lies shown in wikileaks was surreal. So I told her that if there were so many, it should be very easy to show me one. Just one. Any example of this supposedly damning evidence will do. She did what they all do, she dodged. She talked in vague statements and told me to do my own research. I explained that I've done it over and over and keep coming up with empty claims which is why I was asking her for the most damning thing she could find.

What did she find? The claim that the Clinton campaign emails revealed that Hillary Clinton took a bribe as Secretary of State, via the Clinton Foundation, to remove Algeria from the Terror Watch List.

That does sound like it would be damning, doesn't it? And it certainly makes for lots of headlines as seen on Google.

I know you're going to be shocked by this, but... it's a headline with two major flaws in the claim.

Firstly, the email that was hacked and released on wikileaks isn't some big secret, it was a summary of a discussion on MSNBC's Morning Joe! Joe Scarborough was on national TV and made a vague claim that he was trying to pull from memory about an article he had read. This isn't some secret discussion about how Hillary Clinton took this action.

Secondly, and most importantly, Algeria was not on the Terror Watch List. It is literally impossible for Secretary Clinton to have removed Algeria from the Terror Watch List because they weren't on it! Joe Scarborough was making false claims from a vague memory and even went on his show later to apologize after Politifact proved him wrong. 

This is how stupid the Wikileaks email stories are. Every time I dig into one, this is what I come up with... nothing.

It's all headline, no scandal.

Here's my discussion with Michelle: