During a press conference today, FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI will not be recommending any charges be brought against Hillary Clinton and her staff over the email scandal. Hillary Clinton, you may recall, violated State Department procedures, Federal FOIA laws, and National Security Laws when she set up a private email server to handle all her official email correspondence while she was Secretary of State. This brings to an end an investigation that could have seen Clinton face the same kind of charges that derailed the careers of countless federal employees, including former CIA Director David Petraeus.
Does anyone think the timing of this is a little suspect? Just 1 week ago Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who is Comey’s boss, met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport where it is rumored that Clinton offered to retain her as Attorney General should Hillary win the presidency. Next thing you know the FBI is clearing Hillary and closing the investigation.
In an effort to avoid being thought entirely in the bag for the Clinton’s, Comey added language in his statement to make it clear that he thought Hillary and her staff were being very, very naughty:
“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 information that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,”
Of course, this verbal wrist-slap seems to ignore the fact that ignorance of the law is typically no excuse for breaking it, and I don’t know how you could possibly believe that they didn’t intend to break the law when they actively created a separate email communication system that was designed for the express purpose of avoiding government oversight into their emails. Furthermore, since Hillary purposefully deleted tens of thousands of emails from her server before turning it over to the government, we will never know just how willfully she violated the law, and what kinds of secrets she allowed to be accessed by anyone who was able to hack her private server.
Is anyone really surprised? Did any of you really expect that charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton? This the same kind of double standard that undermines trust in our government. When criminal charges are selectively brought against political opponents of the current administration but allies are set free, we become no better than any third-world banana republic.
You can read the whole statement from Director Comey here.
