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Why It's Hillary's Emails Again - FBI Chief James Comey lied to the electorate in the middle of a presidential race.
We should also stress that some kind of a revisiting would be bedeviling a Clinton administration now if Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Donald Trump. Way back in 2014, had Mrs. Clinton returned her "personal" emails and devices to the State Department instead of destroying them, it would have closed matters for most Americans. After all, the Obama administration knew of and condoned her private server, amounting to an implicit endorsement of her unorthodox handling of classified materials. But she didn’t, and the administration was not about to prosecute its heir apparent, especially after she became the sole alternative to Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump. President Obama’s public statements on the case could not have been clearer. He essentially directed his Justice Department that Mrs. Clinton did nothing wrong, as arguably a president is entitled to do. The part that never made sense was why FBI Director James Comey intervened to do the president’s bidding so the Justice Department wouldn’t have to. It was unnecessary and improper. Whatever its wisdom, no serious person of either party believes the outcome was anything but predetermined. Mr. Comey simply intruded himself as a more plausible vehicle to carry out the administration’s will on the "matter" than Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have been. That much is clear by applying even the minimalist interpretation to the text messages of his lead investigator on the case, Peter Strozk, as well as other evidence surfaced by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Mr. Comey gave different reasons in public and private for his action. In closed congressional session, he pointed to intercepted Russian intelligence that he said could be used to discredit the Justice Department. That is, he relied on information from one or more U.S. intelligence agencies. It doesn’t tax the imagination to suppose Mr. Comey and fellow intelligence officials were operating on a shared premise that a Clinton presidency was inevitable and needed to be protected from email-related risks. Since then, Obama intelligence officials have leaked intelligence and planted scurrilous innuendo about Mr. Trump, apparently aimed at giving credibility to the "collusion" narrative and discrediting his victory. But what Mr. Comey did was worse. Again, I’m not saying it was realistic or desirable that Mrs. Clinton be prosecuted, but the choice not to prosecute was a political decision that the Obama administration and Obama Justice Department had a duty to make and to own. The American people are not idiots. They would have considered the reasons, spoken and unspoken, understood the complexities, and come to their usual, wildly divergent views about the propriety of the Obama decision. Instead, Mr. Comey lied to the electorate in the middle of a presidential race. He lied when he said the FBI conducted a thorough, apolitical investigation of the candidate of the party in power. He lied when he said the evidence alone exculpated Mrs. Clinton and her aides. He withheld from the public information about Russian intelligence activity that appears to have been a pretext for his intervention. When the partisan red mist clears, his surviving plausible defense will be that Mrs. Clinton was certain to win and needed to be protected from any attempt to use the controversy over her missing emails to weaken her. But Mr. Comey had no business prejudging the election based on his personal estimate that Mr. Trump was as unacceptable to the American people as he was to Mr. Comey and his Obama administration colleagues. It almost slips by unnoticed, by the way, that all this was the consequence of the Obama Democratic Party’s hostaging itself to Mrs. Clinton‐the same Mrs. Clinton whose law-firm billing records, under subpoena for two years, magically turned up on a table in the White House in the run-up to the 1996 election, while the world muffled its astonishment and skepticism. In fact, the reaction was not dissimilar to the one that greeted Friday’s report that Mr. Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller back in June but was stopped by his staff. Consider it another reminder, like the Clinton email case, that law and politics inevitably meld at this level. Mr. Trump rightly fears that the Mueller investigation is becoming an open-ended inquiry into obstruction and/or his financial past. His best defense is to be a successful president. He needs to win an endorsement from voters this fall and keep the House in GOP hands. If he doesn’t, the hard reality is that Mr. Trump can blame himself for what comes next. Posted by: Besoeker 2018-01-27 |
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