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Breaking: FBI Won’t Prosecute Clinton Over Emails
Via the WSJ:
Published in GeneralFBI Director James Comey said the bureau won’t recommend Hillary Clinton be indicted over use of private email while secretary of state, but he said there is evidence Clinton and colleagues “were extremely careless” in their handling of highly sensitive information.
Great men seize the opportunity to do good when circumstances demand it. It’s Ryan’s opportunity to act or to cave. I’m not taking bets. Just pointing out what should happen. If the Speaker or Congress does not act then the restraint on the Executive Branch is further weakened and Americans move ever closer to serfdom.
James Comey, 60 Minutes, on threatening to resign over “warrantless wiretaps” during George W Bush presidency:
“I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That’s why they divided power among three branches, to set interest against interest”.
My sorrow outweighs my anger at this moment.
Many employees of a number of heavily regulated private businesses, such as healthcare providers, would be in jail, too, and their employers would be bankrupt.
Small, well-meaning, honest little hospitals like the one I worked for for 20 years spend millions of dollars a year on ‘compliance,’ and live in terror that something will fall through the cracks, or an employee will go off the rails, and that the Feds will lower the boom (after the organization has reported itself, which it’s required to do by law), even though the organization had no ‘intent’ to expose information.
In Hillary’s case, the security issues of ‘private email account’ (for yoga, weddings, etc) on something like gmail, versus a private domain on a private server, used for everything, including all national security work, were very poorly explained in stories about the problem. Saying “well, others did it too,” meaning Colin Powell and Condoleezza rice, is a red herring–the cases are nothing like.
This should not be a surprise. The issues are complicated, although they can be explained in plain English, but the media is in the tank for Hillary, and the public at large seems disinclined to engage their brains for any length of time in order to really understand the issues. If it can’t be explained, or absorbed, in 140 characters or less, forget it.
So, Donald, over to you. You’re good at Twitter. Please don’t mess it up. Stay on point.
This is important.
Me too. I could cry right now. I’m in disbelief.
I’m cynical enough to believe a “message” was sent to Comey & Lynch to the effect they’d be wise to wrap things up without anything that would lead to an indictment and move on.
Mis,
Comey is full of it. This is going to be a real test. Let’s see who in the media has the guts to call out Comey on this nonsense.
Regards,
Jim
When it is said that Pres. Clinton and AG Lynch met and discussed grandkids, I believe it.
The relative health and security of Ms. Lynch’s was clearly the topic.
The term, “settled science” comes to mind. That being said, I’ll put down $5 on Andrea Mitchell, the odds are irresistible.
Paul,
No reasonable prosecutor would not prosecute given the evidence. That should be the headline.
Regards,
Jim
Too bad he refused to take questions in the so-called press conference. My question would have been “What do they have on you, Mr. Comey? This is now your legacy. Hope it was worth it.”
Why not just come out and say “We are recommending to not prosecute”? What is the point of first making the case for guilt and then saying they will not prosecute. I wish he would have spent more time on the case to not prosecute. It seems like Mr. Comey just gave us the big middle finger. Unnecessary.
As someone else put it, rubbing it in was the point.
Something tells me that Comey will become Head of Global Security at the Clinton Foundation next year, with a yuuuuuuuuge signing bonus and salary.
As I understand it, it takes a lot of courage for a prosecutor to bring charges against a major crime organization. The personal pressure with the prospect of peril can be intimidating, I imagine. That is even with the comfort of believing the Government has “got your back”. What if the Government is the crime organization. Who “has your back”?
The Republicans?
Conservative punditry?
The good common citizen?
I would not bet on it.
Now I see the genius of the Clinton Foundation. It’s a slush fund to reward loyalty and to pay those corrupt bureaucrats who play ball. Comey will get paid with a high paying job. Lynch will be on the Supreme Court.
The sound you hear now is the sound of a million checkbooks opening to donate to the Clinton Foundation. Watch out for the stampede of Saudi sheikhs and third world kleptocrats and corporate CEOs. I’m sure the price of access to Hillary just went up 10x over her being Sec of State.
Heh:
Watch. Soon, some poor schmuck will get the book thrown at him in some unrelated case just to show “the system still works”. It’s going to happen, and when it does, think of that scene in Gangs of New York where Tammany Hall tells Bill the Butcher to go and round up 5 random people to be hanged, so that people can be reassured that “justice is being done” in the Five Points.
At least they waited until the day after Independence day to rub our noses in it.
The going rate is 30 pieces of silver.
I know nothing about the man’s history. Is there anything in his background that might suggest that maybe he actually loathes the decision, that he was coerced into it, and that making the case for guilt was sorta like a P.O.W. crossing their fingers when ordered to spout enemy propaganda for the cameras?
Knowing nothing about the man, I’m inclined to want to believe that if Comey was truly a feckless crapweasel, he would have simply hidden behind the usual bureaucratic boilerplate about lack of evidence/unlikelihood of securing a conviction/yadda yadda yadda. It’s often nonsense, but it works because even though you can disagree with their interpretation of the facts, at the end of the day it is their decision.
By contrast, I’ve never heard of a prosecutor/investigator saying “oh, yeah, we could totally prove that they violated the statute, but we’re not going to prosecute because they didn’t really mean it”.
It’s so weird, and so outside the usual prosecutorial/investigative playbook, it’s just baffling.
But, again, I know nothing of the man.
Better yet, Paths of Glory, where random soldiers are chosen to be executed as punishment for the generals’ incompetence.
Mis,
You’ve got an interesting theory. Did you see this?
Regards,
Jim
From Director Comey’s statement:
“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.”
Okay, so according to the FBI no crime was committed. Will there be any effort for administrative discipline against those State Department employees “with whom she was corresponding”?
I know, I know, I know … those employees are probably all either working for her campaign or the Clinton Foundation.
The point of the civil service is supposed to be a bureaucracy that runs the machines regardless of who is in charge. They enjoy certain protections as a result of it. Clinton would never have caused so much damage if the career employees of the State Department had called out their requirement to use her personal email.
If there is to be no consequence to her, then those who helped her get away with it should at least be called to account for why they allowed it to happen in the first place.
Naïve? Yes, guilty as charged. But this could never have happened without dozens of senior State Department officials allowing it to happen.
Let us remember that in addition to being corrupt, our federal government is unbelievably incompetent. Incompetence is baked into the system as there is no penalty for being so.
I’ve wondered this myself.
Lack of intent? Lack of proof of intent? I don’t buy it. Granted, all my experience is in state courts, and federal courts are different. But how do you normally prove intent? Not by a person’s words, but by his actions. Here we have a long chain of events, each of which would have required her actual, personal, authorization or order, most of which would have been blatant violations of agreements she signed, and contrary to training she was required to have. Did she “attend” these classes “administratively?” very possible. Did she read the agreements? If she didn’t, then she failed to do so at her own peril. Unless, of course, she knew at the outset that, being the beautiful person that she is, she faced no peril. Which, I guess, turns out to be true. But she had to have been dumber than a brick not to recognize the consequences in real lives – and deaths – of what she was doing.
And none of this applies anyway if intent is not required in these statutes.
I always defer to attorneys and their more extensive knowledge, but not before arguing with them. So there’s the challenge: Convince me that her intent isn’t clear as can be.
How will this demoralize the FBI agents? What sort of signal does this send to the great men and women who spend hundreds of boring hours poring over evidence?
Did Comey just drop a pebble in a pond, and are we going to see the ripple effect of agents shortcutting cases on other well connected people because they lack the confidence in leadership to follow-through on the evidence collected?
Indeed! The whole tone of his statement comes across (for me, anyways) as, “here’s all the evidence and the myriad reasons, item-by-item and in great detail, why there’s clearly a prima facia case for prosecution under the statute.”
It totally feels like he’s building up a case and that the punchline will be that he’s recommending prosecution but, like the twist at the very last second of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, ‘we’ have decided (not ‘I’, but ‘we’) not to recommend prosecution because ‘reasons’.
If his goal was truly to carry water for Clinton and to exonerate her in the court of public opinion, he could hardly have chosen a worse way to do it.
That’s why I’m inclined to want to believe that laying all the prima facia evidence out on the table, so to speak, was a middle-finger at Clinton, rather than a middle-finger at the American public.
But, again, I know nothing of the man.