There’s still a smell over at the FBI regarding Clinton

There were large, glaring gaps in the FBI investigation that let Hillary Clinton scuttle off scotfree, without being held accountable under the nation’s classified-information laws — as hapless lower numbers in the federal pay grades and in military service have been, and for far lesser lapses.

There’s a national wisecrack going around: “America has banks too big to fail. And now there’s Hillary — too big to jail.”

An increasingly vociferous chorus of critics is pointing to a trail of clues that FBI Director James Comey stumbled over without noticing, say the director’s detractors.

The email case overflows with indications of what lawyers call “mens rea,” a guilty state of mind on Clinton’s part. These include destruction of evidence, contradictory statements and patently false claims, emphatically repeated.

Not least among the guiltymind tidbits is a 2011 notice Clinton sent to State Department personnel warning them “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts” because of “targeting” of such accounts “by online adversaries.” In other words, “Avoid doing what I’m doing.”

Yet Comey declared there was no intent on her part to violate or evade law, rendering the case all but impossible to prosecute, he said.

Knowledgeable lawyers rolled their eyes at this assessment, including former federal lawman Andrew C. McCarthy, who prosecuted and convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 oth- ers in the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing.

McCarthy — a friend of Comey — notes that contrary to his buddy’s assertion, the applicable law in the case requires no intent, only “gross negligence.”

Comey himself said Clinton was “extremely careless in handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” including ultra-top-secret “special access program (SAP)” material. McCarthy and others well versed in the law wonder: How’s “extremely careless” different from “grossly negligent”? Comey’s response: silence.

In his testimony before Congress about the email probe, Comey himself devastatingly acknowledged Hillary Clinton’s numerous false — not just inaccurate, false — statements regarding her unsecure, off-the- federal-grid email system.

For example, as Comey himself acknowledged, some of the most sensitive communications that were sent or received by Clinton’s email system were classified at the time — contrary to Clinton’s emphatic, repeated statements otherwise.

Comey, in his statement summarizing the email probe, noted that Clinton’s power-house Washington law firm deleted thousands of emails without individually reading them to make sure they contained only personal, not official information.

In unilaterally deleting these emails — destruction of potential evidence — the law firm used extraordinary erasure methods to thwart recovery of any of the material. Or in Comey’s very own damning words: Clinton’s lawyers “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”

It now turns out that Comey didn’t even attend the FBI interview of Clinton at the end of the probe. One of the biggest interviews in FBI history — certainly biggest in Comey’s career — and he shrugs it off?

Arousing public suspicions all the more, there was neither any voice recording nor any video of the interview. There was not even a stenographer’s transcript. Just notes taken by the agents.

And those notes indicate Clinton was given an accommodating pass on her many memory lapses regarding key details.

Dave Neese is a columnist for The Trentonian in Trenton, N. J. He can be reached at davidneese@verizon.net