Supplemental: Mika and Joe and the whole ship of fools!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

Scarborough does it again: In Sunday’s column in the Post, Ruth Marcus correctly noted one of the problems with the press corps’ obsession with Candidate Clinton’s emails.

We’ll suggest that you read the column. For today, let’s consider Joe Scarborough’s latest meltdown.

The latest meltdown occurred on today’s Morning Joe. Scarborough ranted and railed and “went way over.” In the process, he also seemed perhaps a bit weak on at least one basic fact.

Scarborough was deeply troubled by the fact that Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, has had access to the emails in question. Kendall even possessed a thumb drive containing the emails! This had Joe quite upset.

As he became more and more exercised, Scarborough suggested that Kendall should probably “be on his way to jail.”

As usual, Joe was enraged by what Clinton had done. As usual, Mika minced:

SCARBOROUGH (9/16/15): But I can tell you as a lawyer—

I can tell you as a lawyer, and also as somebody who served on the Armed Service committee and had security clearance—top security clearance—I would never, in a million years, have a top-secret—

And we had a lot of briefings on al Qaeda throughout the 90s. I would never take the classified documents and go to a lawyer in Pensacola and say, “Hey buddy, can you hold this in your file and just—?” No!

RATNER: OK, fine—

SCARBOROUGH: No! It’s not just fine!

I would be arrested by the FBI immediately. This is what Hillary Clinton did. David Kendall carried a thumb drive with classified information—

MIKA: [Sadly] I know.

SCARBOROUGH: Any other lawyer would be investigated and probably on his way to jail. I mean, nobody—and I think this is the biggest problem. I know we’re going way over here.

MIKA: Way over!

To watch the full segment, click here. This piddle comes near the end of the tape. Joe had gone way over!

Joe was plenty upset. He said he would be arrested immediately if he had done what Clinton did—if he had let a lawyer hold some classified documents.

As for the lawyer in question, anyone other than David Kendall would be on his way to jail!

At this point, Steve Rattner, defending Clinton, asked Scarborough what he would have done if he’d been Clinton’s lawyer. The fiery, exercised cable star began ranting and raving again.

As Scarborough ranted, the nature of his complaint became even more clear. So did his apparent lack of basic information:

SCARBOROUGH: You know what I’d say? You know what I’d say? You know what any other lawyer would say?

I would call the FBI. I’d call the State Department. I’d call the State Department lawyers and say, “Hey listen, my client wants me to look at her server. I’m afraid there’s classified information here. Could I get clearance to look at this just in the capacity as her attorney, to protect her?”

And you know what they’d say? They’d say no. But we’ll find somebody that server does have clearance to do that, sort through that.

There’s no way a lawyer without security clearance should go through the and look at this classified information! It doesn’t happen! And the fact that our federal government is not, is not raising these points more aggressively is staggering to everybody in the intel community.

According to Scarborough, everyone in the intel community is staggered by the fact that Kendall was able to review the emails in question. There’s no way a lawyer without a security clearance should be able to do that!

All the stooges sat and stared as the fiery cable star ranted, raved and railed. No one mentioned his apparent factual problem:

According to the New York Times, David Kendall does have a security clearance! So does his law partner. Perhaps correctly, the well-known paper reported these facts in a recent front-page profile:

BAKER (8/24/15): In a letter to lawmakers, Mr. Kendall noted that although some email messages had recently been deemed classified, none were so designated at the time they were sent. And he noted that he and his law partner Katherine M. Turner both have security clearances. While he did not elaborate, his security clearance appears to stem from his defense of David H. Petraeus, a former C.I.A. director who pleaded guilty to providing classified material to his lover and biographer.

His defenders say Mr. Kendall is nothing if not discreet. “He doesn't speak out of school. He doesn't gossip,” said Robert F. Muse, who represented Mr. Petraeus's paramour, Paula Broadwell. “He takes very seriously the imperatives of dealing with classified information.”

It was on the front page of the New York Times! Based on the silence of the stooges, no one on the Morning Joe team bothers to read such reports.

Darlings, that would take too long! Instead, they just memorize script!

As Joe ranted and raved today, Mika didn’t say a word about Kendall’s apparent security clearance. Neither did Willie Haskell-Geist, youthful sidekick to the two hosts. Mike Barnicle simply sat there dozing and aging, awaiting his chance to affirm the program’s brilliant consensus.

Does David Kendall have the appropriate security clearance? We don’t know, but as we watched, we did recall what we had read in the Times.

Mika and Joe and the whole ship of fools simply kept pimping the script. It’s what these horrible people do. They’ve been in this business for years.

We were impressed by this part of the profile: In the front-page profile that we alone read, Baker described a part of Kendall’s life we’d never heard about:

BAKER: Raised in a Quaker family in Sheridan, Ind., by a father who worked as a grain elevator manager and a mother who taught school, Mr. Kendall was educated at Wabash College and came of age in the liberal movements of the 1960s. In 1964, he went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer to register black voters and was arrested several times. A half-century later, the only framed item on his office wall is a receipt from the Marshall County jail for the food he had to pay for during three days behind bars.

“Any other lawyer would be investigated and probably on his way to jail?”

Maybe someone should take Joe’s posse aside and tell them that Kendall has served.