FBI investigation meets needs of Hill and Donald
It was a phrase that got repeated about a thousand times yesterday: After James Comey offered his assessment of Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio, pundits observed that although the FBI director did not indict Hillary, “he did convict her.”
So, into the space between the words “indict” and “convict” charged Donald Trump with his first reflexive tweet: “FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #Rigged System.”
Indeed, one of the strangest things about Comey’s analysis is that it managed to do the impossible. It met the needs of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, simultaneously.
It left Hillary scarred, but seemingly off the legal hook. And it gave The Donald a fresh serving of red meat to gnaw on.
Frankly, it’s too obvious to say the fix was in from the start, because Comey did quite a bit more than hold his nose with his verdict. He found that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
He also went on to blast her for using her private email server in areas where it most likely was hacked by what he called “hostile actors.”
But of course what drove the Hillary haters bonkers was that Comey also appeared to lean over his side of the Justice Department fence to surmise that no prosecutor would ever find a case in Hillary’s email transgressions.
That left former U.S. attorney and presidential washout Rudy Giuliani foaming at the mouth. He took to the cable shows to blast his friend, protege and fellow Republican, James Comey, going so far as to quote chapter and verse of the federal code which Giuliani insisted made clear that Hillary should stand trial … and perhaps go to jail for up to 10 years.
Embedded in Rudy’s voice was the seething disgust over that fabled Clinton voodoo. Last week it was the Big Dawg himself, Bubba, wandering across an airport tarmac to chat up his old buddy, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, even as Comey’s G-men were rummaging through his wife’s emails. Bill said he was just being sociable. No one believed that.
But the problem with Clinton conspiracy theories here is that they fail to adequately explain why Jim Comey, a guy who entered the upper echelons of government service via a George W. Bush appointment, arrived at the decision he did.
My guess, and it’s only that, is that what troubled Comey a helluva lot more than Hillary’s “careless handling” of her emails, was the far more harrowing thought of reporting one day to a President Donald J. Trump.