FBI Director James Comey pauses while making a statement at FBI Headquarters in Washington, Tuesday, July 5, 2016. Comey said the FBI will not recommend criminal charges in its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server
FBI Director James Comey will testify to Congress Thursday on his findings about Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, the House Oversight Committee announced.
Mr. Comey said Tuesday that Mrs. Clinton may well have broken laws on handling of classified information, but he said he doubted prosecutors would try to make the case — so he wasn’t recommending charges.
Republicans on Capitol Hill said he should have laid out his findings without making a recommendation, leaving it up to prosecutors to decide what to do.
“The FBI’s recommendation is surprising and confusing,” Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said. “The fact pattern presented by Director Comey makes clear SecretaryClinton violated the law. Individuals who intentionally skirt the law must be held accountable. Congress and the American people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the FBI’s investigation.”
Democrats blasted the snap hearing, saying Republicans are fighting a political battle in trying to pressure Mr. Comey.
“The only emergency here is that yet another Republican conspiracy theory is slipping away,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
A substantial faction of the conservative intelligentsia has convinced itself that Donald Trump is so unqualified for the presidency that Hillary Clinton is a better alternative. Some, like George Will, hope for a resounding victory for her, while others living in red states like New York aver they will write in someone else because their vote is irrelevant anyway.
But now we have stark evidence that Hillary Clinton is not only a flagrant abuser of classified information, but that she is above the law, and cannot, or will not be prosecuted for obvious felonious violations of the law.
A sign of what is to come is an essay at Maggies Farm by Bruce Kessler:
Donald Trump is far from the perfect leader. But, then it takes someone with gumption and determination who will not be intimidated to take on the rot that permeates our government and self-appointed ruling class. And, Trump is the only revolution we have available.
Anyone deserves the end of our once-renowned Republic who stays home or turns coat or otherwise fails to stand up for recovering an America with basic laws and justice, an America which is not beholden to those who would exploit the government for self-aggrandizement or profits, an America with justice for all which does not favor the wealthy or powerful sycophants of state power.
Donald Trump is not George Washington. But he’s the only revolution we have, and very probably our last chance. I have faith in the American people who will bring us back from tottering over the brink of ruination to make it work when Trump is elected.
Get out and work for local candidates and for Trump. Otherwise, be part of the ruination. It’s that simple and brutal a truth.
At the risk of being labeled Panglossian, I do see a small upside in the decision of James Comey to recommend no prosecution of Hillary Clinton. This does not make me a happy camper: I mourn for the damage done to the rule of law by applying a different standard to the powerful than to the rest of us. This is civic cancer and it makes me sick.
But, if Comey had recommended prosecution and Hillary had been replaced by someone more electable (a large group, including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, for starters), Donald Trump would almost certainly be defeated. Nobody comes close to Hillary in matching the unfavorable opinions held of Donald Trump.
By providing vivid evidence that the fix was, in fact, in, Comey reinforced one of the main talking points of Trump. He didn’t have to, by the outlined a powerful case against Hillary Clinton, only to announce that she wouldn’t be prosecuted. This was tailored like a Saville Row suit to Trump’s campaign.
I can’t thank Director Comey enough for coming to this decision.
My concern has always been that Barack Obama would release the hounds on Mrs. Clinton and then push for his vice president, Joe Biden, to be the Democrat nominee. And then, to placate the far lefty socialists, who own the Democrat party, Obama would position Sen. Elizabeth Warren as Biden’s VP. That would be a really tough ticket to beat, since Joe Biden’s favorables, regardless of gaffes and such, are extremely high.
However, James Comey just delivered a gift wrapped with a bow.
What can be done? First of all it’s a matter of deciding who you believe – the political elites who are telling you everything is normal, or your lying eyes? The political system is corrupt and cannot clean its own house. What is needed is an outside political force that will begin the job by putting the interests of our country first again. Call it what you will – nationalism or common sense – it is the most pressing need for the country now. Such a force would have to find its support outside Washington. Call that what you will – populism or democracy – no reforming leader can be elected without it. No political leader can begin to accomplish this task, without the support of ordinary Americans registered at the ballot box.
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Today we have witnessed a most frightening manifestation of the corruption of our political system. Doubly frightening because of what it augurs for all our futures if Hillary Clinton should prevail in the November elections. At the center of this corruption – but hardly alone – are the criminal Clintons – the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics – and their Democratic Party allies; but we should not fail to mention also the Republican enablers who would rather fight each other and appease their adversaries than win the political wars.
We knew they could fix the Department of Justice; we suspected they could fix the FBI. What we didn’t know was that the fixes would be this transparent: the secret meeting with a chief culprit and the DOJ head; the next day announcement by Justice that the Clinton bribery investigations would be postponed until well after the election; the suspiciously brief FBI interrogation of the former Secretary of State who during her entire tenure had recklessly breached national security protocols, deleted 30,000 emails; burned her government schedules; put top secret information onto a hackable server in violation of federal law; and topping it all the failure of the FBI director after enumerating her reckless acts to recommend a prosecution – all within a single week, and just in time for the Democrats’ nominating convention. It was, all in all, the most breathtaking fix in American history.
And it wasn’t ordinary criminal corruption. It was corruption affecting the nation’s security by individuals and a regime that have turned the Middle East over to the Islamic terrorists; that have enabled America’s chief enemy in the region, Iran, to become its dominant power; that allowed the Saudis, deeply implicated in the attacks of 9/11, to cover their crimes and spread Islamic hate doctrines into the United States; it was about selling our foreign policy to the high bidders at home and abroad, and about making America vulnerable to our enemies.
What can be done? First of all it’s a matter of deciding who you believe – the political elites who are telling you everything is normal, or your lying eyes? The political system is corrupt and cannot clean its own house. What is needed is an outside political force that will begin the job by putting the interests of our country first again. Call it what you will – nationalism or common sense – it is the most pressing need for the country now. Such a force would have to find its support outside Washington. Call that what you will – populism or democracy – no reforming leader can be elected without it. No political leader can begin to accomplish this task, without the support of ordinary Americans registered at the ballot box.
And so once again the leading crime family in America skates, thumbing its nose at the rule of law as an earnest but politically clueless FBI director stands before the nation to repeat the well-worn Clinton mantra of “insufficient evidence,” and to attribute to Hillary another shopworn cliche that the Clintons habitually use in their defense: sloppiness.
In other words, it was a judgment call by James Comey. After laying out clear proof that Mrs. Clinton violated both the letter and the spirit of the law, he essentially punted by saying this is not the kind of case a reasonable prosecutor would make. Of course it isn’t — not if that prosecutor wants to both keep his job and stay above ground. As a moral failure, Comey even surpassed the supine John Roberts who twice turned down an opportunity to put a stake through Obamacare’s black heart and thereby inflicting it upon the American people with the patina of “settled law.”
“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey announced at FBI headquarters in Washington. “Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges. No charges are appropriate in this case. In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.”
But Comey had a bigger task: to prevent the nomination of a woman manifestly unsuited to the highest office in the land; a woman of no accomplishment except her sham marriage to a former president (himself impeached, disgraced and disbarred); a woman of Saul Alinsky levels of malevolence toward the nation as founded; and a woman whose candidacy would shame a banana republic in its sheer effrontery.
What Comey essentially said was that he could find no clear intent on the part of Mrs. Clinton — no intent to hide evidence, no intent to expose national secrets to enemy eyes. The 110 emails that contained classified information and blithely sent roaring along the intertubes by a “careless” Hillary Clinton are of no moment. For who could ever doubt that she, her husband, and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama have nothing but the best interests of the nation at heart?
Never mind that the woman was Secretary of State, for God’s sake, not some pencil-pushing bureaucrat toiling away in the bowels of Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State is the most distinguished cabinet position in the government, a honor generally bestowed by responsible presidents on their most trusted and able advisors. But, as it turns out, for Mrs. Clinton it was simply a resume-enhancer and if she had to let four Americans die at Benghazi at her boss’s behest in order to get her ticket punched, well, politics ain’t beanbag.
Hence the setup campaign we all just witnessed. The “accidental” meeting on a Phoenix tarmac last week between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton — an outrageous moral violation of the legal system. Lynch’s bold words that she would “accept” the FBI’s recommendations. The FBI’s sudden “invitation” on Saturday to Mrs. Clinton to “voluntarily” submit to examination. Hillary and Obama, all smiles, out campaigning together this very day. The events of the past week would give any rational person sufficient grounds to believe that the fix was in, and has been all along.
At National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy writes:
It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged.It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we’ve decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me.
James Comey was the last man standing between Hillary Clinton and the complete corruption of the American government, and he failed his country. Eliot Ness, he wasn’t:
Those who know the FBI know that it’s still basically a band of Catholic schoolboys, dutifully filling in their investigator’s notebooks in order to produce beautifully typed book reports to be turned in to Sister Mary Margaret or get their palms whacked with a ruler. They may get the facts, but the bigger picture fairly consistently eludes them; but then again, the bigger picture is not their job. Comey bleated that “this investigation was done honestly, competently and independently, no outside influence of any kind was brought to bear” — but so what? Is this how the Republic falls, one dotted-i and crossed-t at a time?
But in times such as ours, more was needed than dutiful punctiliousness. Starting around the turn of the last century, the criminal urban gangs realized they could control — and steal — enormous sums of money and wield political power by taking over City Hall. Indeed, Tammany Hall was dedicated to doing precisely that — tit for tat, pay to play — and the young Bill Clinton got a priceless education in municipal corruption in Hot Springs (known at the time as “Tammany South”) It’s little wonder he brought that corrupting ethos with him to Little Rock and Washington.
Once a city was conquered, they could move on to the state level. During the 1930s, before Franklin Roosevelt turned Thomas Dewey loose on the gangs, gangland effectively owned New Jersey, Illinois, Arkansas and Nevada. From there, it was but a short hop toward national politics, leveraging the Electoral College via their control of the major population centers in vote-rich states. As a result, the Democrats now have a chokehold on the White House, as the election and re-election of a complete nonentity named Barack Hussein Obama has proven.
In failing to find sufficient evidence of a crime big enough to derail Hillary’s candidacy, Comey missed the chance to take down the far larger racket that’s strangling America. Dewey succeeded because he was ruthless, euchring Lepke into an electric chair bounce by convincing him to surrender to J. Edgar Hoover personally on federal narcotics charges. But Hoover double-crossed the murderer and turned him over to New York State, which fried him in Old Sparky on a murder beef.
I’ll leave it to others to sort out the electoral ramifications of today’s news, but in the end it’s not going to make a whit of difference. Hillary now cruises to her nomination, taps into the Obama network, and flounces around the country shouting to her true believers that this was just another trumped-up indignity at the hands of the Rethuglican attack machine. She will say — a lie, but she will say it — that she’s now been cleared by the FBI. Who cares that Comey essentially said this woman should never be allowed near a security clearance again; after all, if and when she’s president, she won’t need one.
It doesn’t matter how hard the FBI worked, or how diligent their work was. It doesn’t matter that they sleuthed or sussed out hidden, fragmentary, lost or concealed Clinton emails. It doesn’t matter how they arrived at their conclusion to do nothing. All that matters is that they did nothing.
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.
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 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.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton marks the State Department’s observance of the first International Day of the Girl Child, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012, at the State Department in Washington.(AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
The Clinton campaign has long characterized the FBI investigation as a “security review” or “security inquiry” in order to downplay the severity of the probe. In what PJ Media’s J. Christian Adams interpreted as a very bad sign, Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently used the same language, calling it a “security inquiry.” But FBI Director James Comey said he wasn’t familiar with such language, saying in May, “we’re conducting an investigation… That’s what we do.”
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Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was questioned by the FBI for over three hours Saturday over her use of a private email server for official correspondence while secretary of state. The meeting — characterized as “voluntary” because there was no subpoena — lasted about three and a half hours according to reports, and was conducted at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Clinton “is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion” campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement. He also said Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, will not make further comment about the interview.Clinton’s use of the private server and email address — particularly whether the setup was used for classified information and how secure they were — has cast a shadow over her campaign from the start.
The FBI investigation is purportedly coming to a close, and the Clinton interview is considered among the final steps in the case.
The Clinton campaign has long characterized the FBI investigation as a “security review” or “security inquiry” in order to downplay the severity of the probe. In what PJ Media’s J. Christian Adams interpreted as a very bad sign, Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently used the same language, calling it a “security inquiry.” But FBI Director James Comey said he wasn’t familiar with such language, saying in May, “we’re conducting an investigation… That’s what we do.”
“She is the main subject — we believe with good reason — of a criminal investigation here,” said former FBI Assistant Director Steve Pomerantz on Fox News today. “And this interview — interrogation if you will — is the culmination of that lengthy investigation.”
Pomerantz said, “the agents who conducted this interview have prepared for weeks, if not months, and have a list of questions very long to ask her. It’s an adversarial process.” He continued, “these agents — if you’ll excuse the terminology — they want to sweat her. They want to get her under pressure, and they want to get answers to tough questions that they have.”
The former G-man added, “this is not a pleasant process for her.”
In this video she tries not to answer the question as to why she pressed the Obama administration to expunge all language referring to Islamic Terror from security services such as the FBI’s lexicons.
FBI Director James Comey pauses while making a statement at FBI Headquarters in Washington, Tuesday, July 5, 2016. Comey said the FBI will not recommend criminal charges in its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server
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