"Move along you serfs. There's nothing to see here. Absolutely nothing, you here me?"
FBI’s Comey Makes It Clear: Hillary Clinton Is Above the Law
Is
Hillary Clinton innocent? Or did she manage to avoid indictment? The
two are not the same, as FBI Director James Comey made clear, even as he
decided against recommending that Clinton be prosecuted for mishandling
state secrets.
About
half the country will now conclude what it has long suspected: the
Clintons are above the law. How else to interpret Comey’s announcement?
Comey
revealed his decision today, just in time to let Clinton hit the
campaign trail with President Obama. And, just days after former
president Bill Clinton happened to bump into Justice Department chief
Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. What a happy coincidence —
allowing the two old pals to catch up on the joys of grandparenting.
It
is difficult not to be cynical about the sequence of events. Unhappily,
given the multiple occurrences of corruption in the Obama White House
(see: Lois Lerner, Fast & Furious, etc.) and the innumerable
scandals that have engulfed the Clintons over several decades, cynicism
is quite appropriate.
Let’s
consider Comey’s conclusions. Most curious is that he judges Clinton
and her aides to have been “extremely careless in their handling of very
sensitive, highly classified information.” Nonetheless, he declines to
prosecute her for “gross negligence” in the handling of classified
information, which is a felony. How Clintonian to find airspace between
those two standards.
As
Comey said, “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.” In other
words, Clinton broke the law, but the evidence is not solid enough to
indict. Is that the issue? Or were the straight arrow Comey and his FBI
deterred by the calamitous political fallout of charging the presumed
Democratic nominee for president with a felony.
Most
fair-minded people will believe that Clinton purposefully hid her
correspondence. It turns out, as Comey noted, that the former secretary
of state employed not one personal email server, but several. When she
shifted from one to another, large caches of emails disappeared.
Specifically,
Comey said, “Secretary Clinton used several different servers and
administrators of those servers during her four years at the State
Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on
that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older
servers were taken out of service, stored and decommissioned in various
ways.”
The
FBI laboriously tried to reassemble much of what was destroyed, with
only partial success. Remember that public officials are supposed to
preserve their work-related correspondence for posterity; Clinton did
not.
That
Clinton lied repeatedly about her personal server use is a fact. She
said she never sent or received classified information. To the contrary,
Comey notes that “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the
State Department [from Clinton’s server] 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…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.”
In
true Clintonian fashion, Hillary would have us believe that classified
emails sent to her were “not marked” as such; Comey blows that line out
of the water arguing that “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.”
That
mishandling such information is against the law is a fact. Comey
referenced the “federal statute making it a felony to mishandle
classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent
way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove
classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.”
It
is also worrisome; there’s a reason officials are meant to use secure
communications systems. As Comey noted: “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.” At the
least, the infractions prove Clinton’s judgment appalling.
Clinton
also lied about those 30,000 personal emails she claimed concerned
matters such as her yoga classes and Chelsea’s wedding. Comey: “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.” Not only did
Clinton lie about those emails, in destroying them she broke a law.
Some
will draw parallels between Chief Justice John Roberts’ surprising
decision to uphold Obamacare and Comey’s decision on Clinton. Both may
have decided that it was more important to prevent massive political
upheaval than to follow the letter of the law. Comey himself gave us
some sense of that, when he said, “To be clear, this is not to suggest
that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity
would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often
subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what
we are deciding now.”
Individuals, for instance, like Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier,
who was indicted recently for taking cell phone pictures of the engine
room of his submarine — even though the government agreed he had no
intention of sending the photos to anyone. In a case that many
contrasted with the Clinton investigation, Saucier was expected to serve
several years in prison for having mishandled national defense
information.
So
Comey let Clinton off the hook, even as he accused her of breaking the
law. Let us hope that voters come November do not follow his lead.
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