One of the striking things about the Hillary Clinton email scandal up until this weekend was that it had been studiously ignored both by Clinton and her defenders and it had largely been ignored by the media– except for POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein who crawls out of the woodwork to assail the integrity of the investigation and investigators. Even her fellow geriatric seeking the Democrat presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, wasn’t interested in discussing it. It his a been shocking to see revelation after revelation and none of the usual suspects rising to her defense.

Yesterday, though, everything changed.

Yesterday the State Department announced it was withholding, in toto, some 22 Clinton emails in 7 email strings because they were classified TOP SECRET. The documents were not merely redacted, that is, blacked out, they were completely withheld:

One source, not authorized to speak on the record, suggested the intelligence agencies are operating on the assumption there are more copies of the Clinton emails out there, and even releasing a partial email would provide enough clues to trace back to the original – which could allow the identification of “special access programs” intelligence.

(Keep this pullquote in mind as we go forward. It is key)

Where would “out there” be? Tehran. Moscow. Beijing. Caracas. London. Berlin. Tel Aviv. Paris. Brussels. Andorra. Lichtenstein. And any other nation with an intelligence service with sufficient ambition to browse through Clinton’s totally unencrypted server.

Now the hive-mind of the left is in full throated defense.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones completely invents a story that has been floated by Gerstein, that the classified documents are actually nonexistent:

So what do you suppose the “closely guarded secrets” in the latest batch of 22 emails are? Drones? That’s a pretty good guess. Most likely, this all started with someone sending around a news article about the drone program in Pakistan or Yemen, and then several other people chiming in. It wasn’t classified at the time, and most likely contains nothing even remotely sensitive—but the CIA now insists on classifying it retroactively. That’s why Clinton’s spokesperson calls this “classification run amok” and says, once again, that they’ll seek to have all these emails released to the public.

Drum is no stranger to telling whatever lie is convenient to his cause. He has been doing this at least since the Iraq War. To believe the crap Drum is selling you have to believe that the intelligence agency(ies) running our drone programs reacted to seeing information from an UNCLASSIFIED and open source document in an email by immediately declaring it was TOP SECRET and thereby telling people who did not know it was TOP SECRET that was the classification. In fact, that is the complete opposite of the way the leakage of classified information his handled.

Left wing legal correspondent Dan Abrams claims No, Hillary Did Not Commit A Crime… At Least Based On What We Know Today. This is notable only for the fact that it reveals Abrams actually doesn’t know anything at all about the law or the facts in the case (as he worked at MSNBC, I am open to this interpretation) or he is a duplicitous f*** set on deceiving his readers (see my comment about MSNBC).

Vox.com’s resident anti-Semite, Max Fisher, concludes that the problem is that here is just too much classified information and Clinton is innocent. If you follow Fisher and Vox.com, in addition to incurring brain damage you will note that their conclusions are invariably wrong.

The bottom line is that left wing outlets, print and online, had tried to ignore the email scandal in the hopes it would be swept under the carpet. Yesterday’s revelation changed the landscape forever. They are being dragged into a fight over the issue because it is deadly serious, and the more they fight it, the more prominent the issue will become.