Everybody and his brother is talking about Hillary’s emails, especially after James Comey folded under the internal pressure created at his own agency and released a statement to congress that actually said nothing but hinted at everything. So let’s take a look at what’s there and what’s not.
Let’s start with the old emails. After months of investigation Comey came out with a statement that very simply, there wasn’t a case to prosecute, that no reasonable prosecutor would take what the FBI had to trial. Of course, that didn’t satisfy the GOP. If the world had been reversed it wouldn’t have satisfied the Democrats either, but that’s all about politics, not justice, not the law.
Now, anyone who knows anything about the FBI knows that like most law enforcement agencies, it tends to lean very strongly to the right. That is not to say that it makes decisions based on politics but that the kind of person recruited by law enforcement in general, tends to be into all the things that make a person lean right.
In addition, there were many members of the Bureau that had done a lot of work on Hillary’s emails and didn’t look favorably on the fact that their work had come to naught. This is not unusual. Functioning people hate to waste their time and see their work go for naught. So right away there was a serious insurgency at the FBI that wanted to push ahead regardless of the evidence and find something, anything, that could lead to prosecution.
This is a mindset that is all too prevalent in law enforcement. This is why we find people who have served twenty years for crimes they didn’t commit. They are usually poor black men and not a rich white woman running for president but the mindset is the same.
So there was Comey, with a full-scale revolution going on in his Bureau and without whatever it took to quell it. When some of his agents, investigating Anthony Weiner for being a pervert, uncovered a treasure trove of emails on one of Weiner’s computers that were either to or from Huma, his estranged wife, who is Hillary’s chief aide, they decided that here was the cure for all the wasted work they had done on Hillary’s emails.
Of course the first question that comes up has to do with the notion that no one has read any of these emails because they had no right to. The agents say that this is the case. Comey agrees, but if they couldn’t read them without a warrant, how come they knew enough about what was in them to start this whole stink?
The second thing has to do with Comey who has now been praised and attacked by both parties for his work on the emails. The reality is that he is a good man, a good lawman, who maybe made a couple of bad calls. It could happen to anyone. His first bad call was the news conference that he called after stating that the FBI had no criminal case to pursue on Clinton’s emails. That’s all that had to be said, period, end of sentence. But Comey didn’t leave it alone. He should have, but he didn’t. It was a sign of weakness that he felt that he had to mitigate a message that he knew would be unpopular with the GOP. Once he started up with how Hillary had been careless and what all, he had already taken the first shovel full of dirt out of the hole he was digging for himself.
Now his agents find these emails on Weiner’s computer. As it turns out they found them a week before they told Comey. Why didn’t they tell him immediately? Maybe they were afraid he would bury them to back up his original findings. Who knows? But by the time they told him it was 9 days before the election. That’s when he made another dumb move. He ignored the policies that are in effect in the justice department about not talking at all about material that is under investigation and second releasing any information about any investigation less than 60 days from an election.
No matter what you think about Comey and he appears at this time to be a functioning bureaucrat, he made another major blunder by releasing anything about a hot topic matter like this without having some knowledge of what he had. It was probably right not to bury it completely until after the election but he should have held it until he got a warrant and had at least twenty four hours to have an army of agents look at the material to see if there was anything there. He didn’t and now he has created a major influence on the election. It was a humongous mistake.
Meanwhile in the Trump camp there is great rejoicing. The ape that almost walks like a man, stands at any mike he can find, blabbing about Hillary being guilty, about her being a criminal, about the horrible crime, bigger than Watergate. This shows that he is a baboon and that he knows nothing about Watergate. It also demonstrates that he is indeed a sociopath. He has committed the same crimes for which he attacks Hillary. The only difference is, he has committed it so often it is hard to keep track of all the instances. His companies have destroyed records of their misdeeds from the 3500 lawsuits in which he and his companies have been involved. Newsweek investigated thousands of pages of court records from the 3500 law suits and other criminal proceedings and discovered a history of Trump and his lawyers having destroyed subpoenaed records from hundreds of cases. But still he has the gall to attack Hillary against whom nothing criminal has been proven about crimes, of which, he has been continually guilty. This guy is the lowest of the low and he insists on proving it every day he takes a breath.
But back to Comey’s attack on Hillary. The biggest thing that stands out as wrong about it is, there is a strong probability that the newly uncovered emails have nothing to do at all with Hillary and even if they do there will be nothing different from the ones already examined in depth which led to nothing but an FBI declaration of innocence.
Don’t forget, no one, anywhere in the world, has gotten one single shred of information, from Hillary’s emails that has in any way helped them do harm to this country. The same cannot be said for the files of the DNC, the Federal Government or for that matter, the FBI itself. In retrospect, it actually seems that the safest place for Hillary to have kept her communications was on her own server rather than anything associated with a government that really can’t seem to keep any of its own secrets.
Now, a former highly placed Republican, former Bush administration, House Ethics Lawyer, Richard Painter has filed a complaint against Comey with the Office of Special Counsel for violations of the Hatch Act, a law that holds that no government official may use his position to influence an election. Additionally the law states that whether one has specific intent to do so is irrelevant. So even if he had no ulterior motive, Comey is now on the spot because he has definitely influenced the election.
Interestingly, Painter mentions in the complaint that if Comey had used his position to attack Trump for potential and seriously rumored connections to Putin he would have been liable for the same complaint. Where did this come from? Is this really something? Harry Reid has already written to Comey complaining that even though there seems to be a connection between Trump and the Russians, a connection of which the Bureau is fully aware, nothing has thus far been done about it. Things are getting very murky in Washington, murky and very ugly.