Huma, Bill to blame for Hill loss
WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton is still blaming everyone from Washington to Moscow for her election loss while ignoring her own failings, but if she truly believes she took a hit from FBI Director James Comey’s Oct. 28 letter about new emails from her private server, she can blame her innermost circle.
Specifically, Huma Abedin and Bill Clinton.
Let’s start with the astonishingly massive lapse of judgment by Abedin, Clinton’s closest campaign aide.
Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that the day before sending that infamous letter to Congress, just 10 days before Election Day, he learned investigators had found thousands of Clinton’s emails on — of all places — the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman, serial sexter and estranged husband of Abedin.
Then Comey answered what had been a lingering head-scratcher: How did those emails — including some containing classified information — end up on Weiner’s device in the first place?
“His then-spouse, Huma Abedin, had emails forwarded to him to print out for her so she could deliver them to the secretary of state,” he said.
Comey said there’s no evidence that Weiner read the highly sensitive material. “My understanding is that his role would be to print them out as a matter of convenience,” Comey said.
What remains unexplained is why Weiner had any “role” at all. There would be less danger using the Staples in Foggy Bottom.
Abedin’s inexplicable decision to use her troubled husband as some sort of office assistant — she reportedly told FBI investigators that she found the State Department’s printers too hard to use — would prove politically perilous. Lucky for her, it fell short of criminal. “We didn’t have any indication that she had a sense that what she was doing was in violation of the law,” Comey said.
Then there is Clinton’s husband, the former president, whose ill-considered chat with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac led to Comey’s public excoriation of the Democratic presidential nominee.
Comey told the committee Lynch’s “meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me.” Soon after, he held the press conference calling Clinton’s email server use “extremely careless,” but announcing no charges would follow.
Were Abedin’s and the former president’s actions bigger factors in Clinton’s defeat than Clinton’s own failure to campaign effectively in places like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — or show up at all in Wisconsin? Doubtful. But if she insists on blaming others, she doesn’t have to go nearly as far as Russia.