Hillary Clinton’s postmortem on her failed presidential bid has led her to conclude everyone was responsible for her defeat but her.
Even more troubling than the blame game Clinton is playing is the utter lack of contrition from her.
FBI Director James Comey’s recent testimony to Congress reinforces just how lucky Clinton is not to be in jail.
Comey ignored mountains of evidence and hastily concluded Clinton was not guilty of wrongdoing based on an incorrect legal standard.
From the National Review:
To the (debatable) extent that there was a need to notify Congress in late October that the investigation had been reopened, it was precisely because the director, in early July, had made a highly unusual, highly public pronouncement that the investigation was complete and the case too weak to charge.
You may recall the unrestrained Democratic glee over that particular breach of protocol. Of course, smarter Democrats perceive this incongruity. Thus, rather than ignore the Comey press conference, they bowdlerize it, choosing to remember only the first three-quarters of Comey’s bravura performance.
That, you’ll recall, is the part in which the director rebuked Clinton for her inappropriate conduct, her “extreme carelessness” in handling highly classified information, the cavalier culture that prevailed during Clinton’s State Department tenure regarding the need to safeguard intelligence, and so on. What Democrats choose to forget, and hope you will too, is the closing section of Comey’s remarks.
That was when he seized the power of the Justice Department to render legal conclusions about both the prosecutorial merits of the case and the interpretation of the relevant criminal statute. In this conclusion, not only did Comey claim that Clinton’s conduct did not warrant an indictment, he gratuitously added the declaration that no “reasonable prosecutor” could disagree with his assessment.
This was a specious claim, but it commanded a respectful hearing, having come from an official who was not just the nation’s top investigator but had been a highly accomplished, top-ranking prosecutor in his own right.
And remember (even if Dems prefer that you forget), Comey’s “lack of criminal intent” theory swept aside not only the classified information felonies but also Clinton’s willful destruction of tens of thousands of government records — more felonies. By the time the press conference ended — poof! — it was as if someone had taken BleachBit to the thought of filing such charges.
The Director of the CIA, David Petraeus, was criminally prosecuted for a similar crime; he provided classified information to his mistress, Paula Broadwell, a journalist.
However, his breach was arguably less damaging.
From Politifact:
Clinton’s use of a private server would have been apparent to people who had her email address, Clifford Neuman, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Computer System Security, said. Sensitive information was transmitted digitally, and Neuman said Clinton would not have been able to sustain the IT expertise necessary to protect her emails. On the other hand, Petraeus gave classified information to Broadwell privately and in hard copies.
For these reasons, Neuman said that he thought it was more likely that “foreign actors” had accessed classified information in Clinton’s case than Petraeus’s. Neuman concluded that Clinton’s treatment of classified information was “likely more damaging.”
It strains credulity to suggest a seasoned political operator like Hillary Clinton––former First Lady of the United States and Secretary of State––was unaware of any illegality with regard to setting up a private email server containing classified information.
Nevertheless, Clinton expects a pity party for how the election played out. She should thank her lucky stars Comey didn’t have the stomach to pull the trigger on seemingly obvious criminality.