Vox Sentences: Why the Clinton email scandal is so boring

The State Department report on Hillary Clinton's email; a prisoner swap in Ukraine; the next challenge to journalism: rich dudes with really thin skin.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

More like the State Department report on Clinton's zzz-mail, amirite

Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images

• The State Department's inspector general released its report on Hillary Clinton's use of private email servers Wednesday.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The report is pretty harsh on Clinton. It says her method of preserving her emails was not appropriate and against department rules. But it doesn't unearth any newly damning details, which means the people who already think Clinton's email scandal is criminal and those who don't will both feel validated.

• The official finding regarding criminality won't come from State. It'll come from the FBI, which is still wrapping up its inquiry.

  [Chicago Tribune]

• One of the problems with the Clinton email scandal is that it was theoretically a security risk, but her server never appears to have been hacked. A guy who claimed to have hacked into her private server pleaded guilty today to hacking other people, but there's no evidence he actually got Clinton.

  [The Hill / Jesse Byrnes]

• The other problem is that the emails (at least those released so far) don't reveal anything devious. At worst, they're kind of sad.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Ultimately, the lesson the Post's Philip Bump takes from the scandal is probably the most important one: When it comes to IT, the US government is just way, way behind.

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

How Russia helped turn a Ukrainian POW into a national hero

Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

• Ukrainian fighter pilot and national hero Nadiya Savchenko was released in a prisoner swap today, after two years in a Russian prison as a prisoner of war.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Technically, Savchenko was charged with targeting two journalists who died the day she was captured. Since they died after her capture, however, the charges were pretty obviously pretextual.

  [Atlantic Council / Jeffrey Gedmin]

• This did not stop Vladimir Putin from issuing a "pardon" to Savchenko (implying she was guilty but had been mercifully spared) before releasing her Wednesday, in exchange for two Russian prisoners.

  [CNN / Michael Pearson]

• The timing is good for Savchenko, whose health had been deteriorating after a hunger strike, just one of many acts she's taken that ensure she returns to Ukraine a bigger hero than she left it.

  [AFP]

• Savchenko was elected in absentia to Ukraine's parliament during her imprisonment, and her future in politics looks bright. (Her speech upon returning to Ukraine Wednesday was a mocking thank-you note to her captors.)

  [The Guardian / Alec Luhn and Luke Harding]

• The prisoner swap doesn't change the underlying reality of the war in Ukraine: The February 2015 agreement that was supposed to stop the fighting has not worked; people continue to die, and no one really knows what a better arrangement would look like.

  [Brookings / Steven Pifer]

Get ready to feel sorry for Gawker

John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images

• Remember how Gawker is currently appealing a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan that would force the company to pay a ridiculous amount of money if the judgment is upheld?

  [Vox / Michelle Hackman]

• It turns out there's more going on there. Gawker founder Nick Denton pointed out on Tuesday that the company has been hit with several other, unrelated lawsuits — from the same lawyer — indicating that there could be a deep-pocketed, coordinated attack.

  [NYT / Andrew Ross Sorkin]

• On Tuesday night, Forbes confirmed that's exactly what's going on — and that the funder behind the attack is PayPal founder turned Silicon Valley public intellectual Peter Thiel.

  [Forbes / Ryan Mac]

• Apparently, Thiel has had a vendetta against Gawker since a Gawker blog outed him as gay in 2007 (although the author of the article in question maintains Thiel's sexual orientation wasn't a secret in Silicon Valley).

  [Death and Taxes / Jordan Freiman]

• Josh Marshall makes the case that rich people using lawsuits to drive media companies out of business is an existential threat to journalism.

  [TPM / Josh Marshall]

• Then again, the specific content of the Hogan lawsuit doesn't really pose any serious threat to the First Amendment. Gawker wouldn't be in trouble if it hadn't posted a private sex tape, and there is no free press right to post private sex tapes.

  [NYT / Erik Eckholm]

• Ironically, Thiel used to donate to the Society to Protect Journalists, which (inter alia) advocates against this sort of thing — then stopped donating to it a month after Hogan filed the lawsuit.

  [Fusion / Kristen V. Brown, Kashmir Hill, Elmo Keep, and Ethan Chiel]

• Thiel is also an official delegate from California for the presidential campaign of one Donald Trump — who also has expansive (read: terrifying) ideas about what it's appropriate to do to publications that are asking hard questions.

  [The Guardian / Ben Jacobs]

MISCELLANEOUS

Traditional police interrogations are great at producing false confessions. There's a better way: Don't intimidate the suspect. Just let them talk. [Marshall Project / Robert Kolker]

• Polar bears and grizzly bears: a climate change love story.

  [Washington Post / Adam Popescu]

• Why is Mark Ruffalo helping a pseudoscientific fraud exploit the Flint water crisis to promote a weird sponge product?

  [Huffington Post / Arthur Delaney]

• How Subaru became the official car of lesbian America.

  [Priceonomics / Alex Mayyasi]

• The best/darkest part of this piece on the BDSM subculture of "pup play" is the picture of one practitioner with "his former fiancée."

  [The Guardian / Nell Frizzell]

VERBATIM

"One of Mark McGwire’s greatest weaknesses is that he simply cannot resist an invitation to go to the Amazon rainforest to watch a person sink into quicksand." [Clickhole]

• "On the morning of May 12, LinkedIn, the networking site devoted to making professionals 'more productive and successful,' emailed scores of my contacts and told them I’m a professional racist."

  [Slate / Will Johnson]

• "As I was Photoshopping John Cho’s face on top of Tom Cruise’s in the ‘Mission Impossible’ poster, my friends and I started chuckling a little bit, like, ‘How crazy would that be?’ Then I caught myself. Why should it be crazy?"

  [William Yu to New York Times / Amanda Hess]

• "Drinking alcohol is associated with considerably greater happiness at that moment — 10.79 points on a 0-100 scale."

  [Ben Baumberg Geiger and George MacKerron, via Washington Post / Christopher Ingraham]

• "Denial is one hell of a drug, and that’s what these digital caches provide me: a way to pretend that when I say 'my late husband' I mean that he is actually just impolite and chronically tardy, and not dead of brain cancer at 35."

  [Slate / Nora McInerny Purmort]

WATCH THIS

Meet this year’s youngest Spelling Bee competitor [YouTube / Johnny Harris and Sarah Kliff]

Vox / Johnny Harris

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via