Laws Are for Little People - Comey delivers an indictment but won't seek one.

[Ubiquitous]

The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross wrote a clever lead for a piece
yesterday: “On Tuesday, for the first time in U.S. history, a
sitting American president will campaign with a presidential
candidate who is the subject of an FBI investigation.”

But it was overtaken by events. This morning FBI director James
Comey announced the investigation was over. He detailed its
findings, which are damning and in many cases new, and which prove
that most of Mrs. Clinton’s public statements about her private
email server were lies. Lying to the public isn’t a crime, but
handling classified information in a “grossly negligent way” is.

“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,” Comey said. Would that be a synonym for “grossly
negligent”? Apparently not. Comey’s bottom line is that “no
reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

That even though he also said—in reference to seven email chains
concerning “matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special
Access Program level”: “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.”

After announcing his no-charge recommendation, Comey added:

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.

In other words, laws are for little people.

The FBI conducted a thorough investigation, its director’s cowardice
or cynicism notwithstanding. Comey said agents “read all of the
approximately 30,000 [printouts of] emails provided by Secretary
Clinton to the State Department in December 2014.” Those that might
contain classified information were checked with the government
agency that “owns” the information:

From the group of 30,000 [printouts of] emails returned to
the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email 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.

The bureau also was able to recover some of “several thousand work-
related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were
returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014”—i.e., those that
Mrs. Clinton or her lawyers deleted before making the printouts for
the State Department. Three of those deleted emails “were classified
at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and
two at the Confidential level.”

The Comey announcement came after an eventful week. Last Tuesday, as
we noted, Attorney General Loretta Lynch—who will make the final
decision whether to prosecute—held a tête-à-tête with Bill Clinton
aboard her private jet at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. On Friday, the
New York Times reported, Lynch acknowledged the meeting had “cast a
shadow” over the investigation of Mrs. Clinton, but refused to
recuse herself.

She did say, in the Times’s words, “that she would accept whatever
recommendations career prosecutors and the F.B.I. director made
about whether to bring charges in the case.” How convenient.

Yesterday the Times reported that “Democrats close to Mrs. Clinton
say [that if elected] she may decide to retain Ms. Lynch, the
nation’s first black woman to be attorney general, who took office
in April 2015.” Some might call that a conflict of interest, but in
Clintonworld it’s known as “a win-win.”

So what now? The Associated Press reports Mrs. Clinton’s campaign
has already pronounced itself “pleased” that “the matter is now
resolved”; before sundown there will no doubt be calls from
professional Democrats and media hacks to “move on.”

But as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz noted Saturday (in a piece
about the Lynch-Clinton plane powwow), unlike earlier Clinton
adversaries, Donald Trump is not likely to let this go:

Trump’s campaign advisers long have seen the investigation
as a win-win politically: Either [Mrs.] Clinton is indicted
and a major political crisis occurs for the Democrats or,
if there is no case brought, the whole exercise was a
whitewash. He can argue it round or square. If there is to
be no charge against [Mrs.] Clinton, Trump will point to
the Lynch-Clinton meeting to question the integrity of the
Justice Department’s decision. He has been handed a gift,
and the Republican base is likely to respond with even
greater indignation if no penalty is sought.

Balz’s headline is telling: “How Everyone Looks Bad Because Bill
Clinton Met With Loretta Lynch.” We immediately disproved the
premise by checking the mirror; we still look fabulous. As Balz more
or less acknowledges, the Lynch-Clinton huddle doesn’t make Trump
look bad either (though to be sure, there are other things that do).

So whom _does_ it make look bad, other than the Clintons, Lynch,
Comey, President Obama and others in the administration and the
Democratic Party? Perhaps Balz has in mind people in the press who
are rooting for Mrs. Clinton even though they’re supposed to be
neutral.

The Clintons’ brazenness makes them look terrible. We’ll bet it
makes them feel terrible too. But as we observed in February with
respect to elderly feminists’ loyalty to the Clintons, when you give
up your integrity to defend someone, you are all the more invested
in the defense.

Will Mrs. Clinton pay a political price for her dishonesty and her
cavalier attitude toward national security? This columnist is too
cynical to be confident that she will, though not quite cynical
enough to give up all hope. Not yet anyway.


--
Hillary is still "fighting for you" and promises to fight against a
system that is rigged for the elite few.