WaPo fact checker embracing "Clintonesque" parsing of the verb 'to be'

[Glenn} Kessler at the Washington Post looked at the claim of Hillary Clinton on Twitter this week that “the fact is that I had zero emails that were classified.” The Post declared Clinton “technically correct” in the claim, which left out that she was substantively wrong. While the Post elects not to award any “Pinocchios,” Clinton’s statement is clearly false and even the Post appears to recognize that fact at the very end of its analysis. Indeed, “technical” truth is wonderfully Clintonesque — captured in Bill’s infamous defense during the Monica Lewinsky investigation that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” The email scandal now depends on what the meaning of “were” was. Hillary Clinton is focusing on whether the emails were marked classified as opposed to whether they contained classified information.

I previously wrote about Hillary’s claim and argued that it was demonstrably false. While I focused on her claim that there is an unfair “Clinton standard” that applies to her, I noted how Clinton is making a signature technical claim regarding classified markings rather than classified content.The tortured logic is transparently and knowingly misleading. …

“Clinton, in her tweet, suggests none of her emails were marked classified. That’s technically correct. Whether those emails contained classified information was a major focus of the investigation, but a review of the recent investigations, including new information obtained by the Fact Checker, shows Clinton has good reason for making a distinction with Trump.”

Unpack this line. The column admits that it was not the markings but the content that was a “major focus of the investigation,” but then declared Clinton “technically correct.”

The use of a strawman argument is classic Clinton, but it looks silly when adopted by a serious journalist.