It pains me to say it after having defended the FBI and Director Comey in July, but with each new revelation it becomes more obvious that the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information was a sham. As the FBI dribbles out its interview notes week by week it's clear even to a non-lawyer that there was more than enough evidence for a grand jury to indict Hillary Clinton, and the fact that no grand jury was even convened means that there was never any intent to seek a prosecution.
Remember: we're just learning about this stuff now, but the FBI and the DOJ have known all this for months. They knew this when they decided not to convene a grand jury, which would have certainly issued an indictment given this mountain of evidence. They decided to let Hillary walk. "Too big to fail" indeed.
On Monday, however, the various issues associated with Clinton's email setup came roaring back. According to emails released by the FBI, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy asked the FBI to ease up on classification decisions in exchange for allowing more FBI agents in countries where they were not permitted to go. The words "quid pro quo" were used to describe the proposed exchange by the FBI official. ...The Clinton campaign will, as it has done every time there is any news about whether she sent or received classified material on her private server, chalk this up to an interagency dispute over classification. Typical bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, they will say. This sort of stuff happens all the time!
Except, not really. First of all, we already know from FBI Director James B. Comey that Clinton sent and received emails and information that was classified at the time. ("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," Comey said in his remarkable press conference on the FBI investigation.) Clinton's explanation has now evolved to this: She didn't know documents marked with a "c" meant they were confidential (and therefore classified) and, therefore, she never knowingly sent or received classified material -- with the emphasis on "knowingly."
That's a tough position to hold in light of Kennedy's attempted quid pro quo, which suggests that at least some people at State were actively trying to fiddle with classification determinations made by the FBI.
It's hard to square the idea of Kennedy offering a quid pro quo to the FBI regarding a classification decision and Clinton not even knowing that "c" on documents stands for "classified." One suggests deep understanding of how the classification process works. The other, um, doesn't.
Directory Comey did everything possible to avoid finding evidence against Clinton.
The agent was also surprised that the bureau did not bother to search Clinton's house during the investigation."We didn't search their house. We always search the house. The search should not just have been for private electronics, which contained classified material, but even for printouts of such material," he said.
"There should have been a complete search of their residence," the agent pointed out. "That the FBI did not seize devices is unbelievable. The FBI even seizes devices that have been set on fire."
And when the FBI did find evidence, they agreed to destroy it to prevent Congressional investigators from seeing it.
Immunity deals for two top Hillary Clinton aides included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices, House Judiciary Committee sources told Fox News on Monday.Sources said the arrangement with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson also limited the search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015. This meant investigators could not review documents for the period after the email server became public -- in turn preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice, sources said.
Instead of writing letters, Congress should be writing articles of impeachment against Loretta Lynch and James Comey. Nothing prevents Congress from immediately impeaching Hillary Clinton if she wins the election. (Of course, none of this will happen because Congress is full of cowards. It's a collective action problem: all Congresscritters know that the Senate won't convict, so no one does anything except write sternly worded letters.)
