WarSclerotic

Alternative Headline: “FBI Declares Hillary Clinton to be Complete Liar” Power Line, Steven Hayward, July 5, 2016

I don’t expect we’ll see that headline, but Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post comes close to delivering this judgment:

Here’s the good news for Hillary Clinton: The FBI has recommended no charges be brought followings its investigation of the former secretary of state’s private email server.

Here’s the bad news: Just about everything else.

FBI director James Comey dismantled large portions of Clinton’s long-told story about her private server and what she sent or received on it during a stirring 15-minute press conference following which he took no questions. While Comey exonerated Clinton legally speaking, he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her in the court of public opinion.

Most importantly, Comey said that the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails. And, it even stands in contrast to her amended statement that she never knowingly sent or received anyclassified information. . .

Comey said that Clinton had used not one but multiple private email servers during her time at State. He said that Clinton used multiple emails devices during that time. (She had offered her desire to use a single device for “convenience” as the main reason she set up the private server.) He noted that the lawyers tasked by Clinton with sorting her private emails from her professional ones never actually read all of the emails (as the FBI did in the course of its investigation). . .

Cillizza’s conclusion:

It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in the spring of 2015. She did send and receive classified emails.  The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

About those thousands of “private” emails Hillary deleted, one of our readers sensibly asks:

One issue I have not seen addressed in the media is how a busy person could have half of her emails deemed as personal . If you are busy maybe 5 to 10 percent is a stretch but 50 percent either means she was not working at her job or hiding something probably as a result of Clinton Foundation connections – we may never find that out but any busy person understands the 50 percent is just not possible and suggests only one reasonable conclusion.

I think a great many Americans will understand the larger picture here quite clearly. It certainly doesn’t help the fading public trust in our political class.

FBI: Hillary Lied and Illegally Sent Classified Emails, But We Won’t Do a Thing About it, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 5, 2016

Is anyone seriously surprised?

Yes all sorts of people might have gone down for this. But the idea that government, in its current state, would hold a presidential candidate from the government party accountable for anything less than choking a nun to death in broad daylight while cackling evilly was always a pipe dream. (And probably not even then.)

Hillary Clinton has a vast and influential network at her disposal. And the current administration backs her to the hilt. Furthermore, Lynch no doubt made it clear to the FBI that no charges would be pursued no matter what. And that made the outcome inevitable.

The FBI investigation provides plenty of ammunition for the election. It makes it crystal clear that Hillary Clinton lied about not sending classified emails. But it also states that it isn’t going to do a thing about it.

Here’s Comey trying to sum up the classified email abuses

FBI investigators have also read all of the approximately 30,000 e-mails provided by Secretary Clinton to the State Department in December 2014. Where an e-mail was assessed as possibly containing classified information, the FBI referred the e-mail to any U.S. government agency that was a likely “owner” of information in the e-mail, so that agency could make a determination as to whether the e-mail contained classified information at the time it was sent or received, or whether there was reason to classify the e-mail now, even if its content was not classified at the time it was sent (that is the process sometimes referred to as “up-classifying”).

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.

With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”

But….

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

The clear evidence standard is of course absurd, because Clinton and her people knew the regulations and clearly violated them. That standard would apply to any other employee, yet Hillary is allowed to act as if she had no idea of what the law was or that she was violating it.

So Comey demolishes Hillary’s lies about classified emails on the one hand and then shrugs the whole thing off on the other. You can see that as the action of a man in an impossible spot who does his job demolishing the alibi and then walks away having provided the information while knowing that it can be used politically, but not criminally.

Effectively he’s blown the whistle but can’t do anything about it.

FBI recommends no charges to be filed against Clinton, Fox News, July 5, 2016

FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday he will not recommend the Department of Justice seek criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her personal email use while secretary of state.

The decision helps remove what was arguably the biggest threat to her presidential campaign going forward – a criminal referral that could have led to an indictment – just weeks before her party’s national convention in Philadelphia where she is set to seal her nomination as the Democrat standard bearer.

Clinton consistently had downplayed the FBI investigation, even calling it a “security review,” and as recently as June 3 said there was “absolutely no possibility” she’d be indicted. Weeks ago, a scathing State Department inspector general report directly countered her long-running claim that her personal email use was allowed, though her campaign continued to defend the candidate’s actions.

In the wake of that report, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump stepped up his criticism of her email actions and said she belongs in “jail.”

The DOJ decision does not strip the email controversy as a campaign issue – Trump and the Republicans are sure to keep hammering it as the campaign lurches into full general election mode post-conventions – but shows the federal investigation did not determine the actions to be criminal, even if they were ill-advised and potentially damaging to national security.

The decision comes more than a year after knowledge of Clinton’s use of a personal email and server first became public. Clinton responded at the time with a point-by-point written explanation and a press conference in which she said she had opted to use her personal server for “convenience.”

But critics said she was clearly circumventing government systems in order to try to shield her communications from public records requests, potentially putting sensitive and highly classified government secrets at risk in the process.

During a subsequent review, more than 2,000 emails on the server were found to have contained information now deemed classified, though they apparently were not marked classified when sent.