It’s Friday, July 8th, 2016…but before we begin, one quick question: how long will it take…
…before an equally-deserving criminal defendant actually under indictment uses Comey’s capitulation as a defense?!?
This reminds us of the cheating scandal which enveloped the Naval Academy Class of ’76 during their Youngster year (“sophomore” to you landlubbers!) Navigation final. An instructor had given out the gouge for the test, and a significant number of Mids were caught red-handed with the answers in their reference books in the test room.
Faced with the prospect of enforcing the Honor Code and eliminating close to 1/3 of the class, the powers-that-be, in a stroke of inspiration strikingly similar to what must have motivated Comey, sacrificed their principles for political expediency, and only separated the 7 or 8 Midshipmen honest enough to admit they’d cheated. Those who claimed, “I had the answers but didn’t intend on using them” were given a walk, giving rise to what we’ve since considered the ’76 Codicil to the Brigade Honor Code: “Cheat until caught…then lie!”
By the way, if you want a different, far more accurate picture of the real James Comey than what you’ve been served by either his Conservative “friends” (who obviously didn’t know him or deliberately ignored his faults) or B. Hussein and his slavish sycophants in the MSM, Kimberly Strassel provides it:
“…Mr. Comey wasn’t ready to go it alone and impose accountability on Mrs. Clinton. That would have been tough. That would have been brave. He instead listed her transgressions in detail and left it to the public to pass judgment at the ballot box in November.That isn’t how the system is supposed to work. But Mr. Comey is no John Adams.“
Far more like Benedict Arnold…though we’re proud to state we had him pegged from the git-go.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the last edition of the week, additional reaction to a decision so blatantly based in putrid politics (as the WSJ editors detail) we can smell the stench from our front porch. First up, writing at the WSJ, former Attorney General Mike Mukasey observes how Comey conspired to confirm…
Explaining why he wasn’t recommending prosecution, Director James Comey instead showed that charges would have been justified.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey opened and closed his statement to the press Tuesday with expressions of gratitude and pride to be associated with the bureau. His description of FBI agents’ work on the Hillary Clinton email investigation showed why he feels that way. Whether the rest of his statement—explaining why he wasn’t recommending prosecution of Mrs. Clinton—should make the feeling mutual is an open question.
It is a felony for anyone entrusted with lawful possession of information relating to national defense to permit it, through “gross negligence,” to be removed from its proper place of custody and disclosed. “Gross negligence” rather than purposeful conduct is enough. Yet Mr. Comey appears to have based his recommendation not to prosecute on the absence of “clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information”—though he did say in the same sentence that there was “evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
…To be “extremely careless” in the handling of information that sensitive is synonymous with being grossly negligent.
And what of the finding that the investigation did not disclose “clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information”? Even the felony statute requires no such evidence, and no such intent.
The misdemeanor involves simply the knowing removal of classified documents to an unauthorized location.(Like Hillary’s home-brewed servers!) That is the statute to which David Petraeus, the former U.S. Army general and Central Intelligence Agency director, pleaded guilty in 2015. (He had disclosed classified documents to his biographer/mistress, who also had top-secret clearance, returned the information to him and never disclosed it in his biography or elsewhere.)
Mr. Comey mentioned three considerations prosecutors weigh in considering charges: the strength of the evidence, “especially regarding intent”; “the context of a person’s actions”; and “how similar situations have been handled in the past.”
Criminal intent of the usual sort, as noted, is not a requirement of either statute.
Mr. Comey didn’t explain why, with evidence clearly fulfilling the requirements of the two statutes involved, no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case—except for the director’s inaccurate assertion that it had never been done before…”
“Inaccurate assertion” our ass; when are Conservatives going to call a spade a spade?!? As The Daily Caller‘s Christian Datoc reports, like everything Hillary claimed about her emails, Comey’s claim is an outright lie:
A full description of the Nishumura case direct from Comey’s own website.
“…Less than one year ago, Assistant US attorneys Jean M. Hobler and Lee S. Bickley successfully prosecuted Naval Reservist Brian Nishimura in a strikingly similar case.
Back in 2012, Nishimura admitted to handling “classified materials inappropriately” while deployed to Afghanistan from 2007-2008. Nishimura served as a Regional Engineer and, according to the FBI’s investigation into the incident, “had access to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and viewed on authorized government computers.”
“Nishimura, however, caused the materials to be downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic devices and storage media,” wrote the FBI. “He carried such classified materials on his unauthorized media when he traveled off-base in Afghanistan and, ultimately, carried those materials back to the United States at the end of his deployment.”
Like Clinton, Nishimura admitted to destroying “a large quantity of classified materials.”
Like Clinton, the FBI investigation into his actions “did not reveal evidence that Nishimura intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel.”
Unlike Clinton, he was sentenced to two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. He was also “ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance.”“
“…He began by saying intent didn’t matter under the law. But even so, do we believe that she didn’t intend to set up the server? Do we believe that she didn’t intend to put her privacy and political security above national security?She’d been warned about the server and did it anyway. I’m obviously no lawyer but that looks like intentionality and willfulness to me. As for the strength of the evidence . . . what more evidence do you need?There were not one but apparently several unsecured servers set up and paid for by Mrs. Clinton to house and transmit classified information. Comey said she was “extremely careless.”Is that just a tick below “gross negligence”?What am I missing?
Putin already has them!
I don’t think she was disloyal to the United States, I just think she was more loyal to herself – and she got away with it. Comey strongly suggests that if she’d been some staffer at the State Department she’d probably be fired or otherwise sanctioned. But that’s not an option now. Instead, she gets the green light for her party’s nomination for president of the United States. You can be sure that in a future Clinton administration she would impose such sanctions on the peons who worked for her. Comey has played his part in putting Clinton above the law. Maybe he had no choice for reasons I don’t completely understand. But that doesn’t mean this whole spectacle isn’t disgusting.“
“There is a classic Latin epigram about double standards that resounds in the aftermath of the FBI’s surrender this week to the corruptocracy: “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.” Translation: “What is permissible for Jove is not permissible for an ox.”
Jove is the Roman god Jupiter, untouchable ruler of the skies, wielder of the lightning bolt. The ox is a servile beast, sacrificial animal for elites in power, bearer of the heavy yoke.
FBI Director James Comey told us Monday what many of us have already known and long suspected: Hillary Clinton serially lied about her homeland security-jeopardizing homebrew email server, and the Obama administration is letting her get away with it…”
The Clintons remind us of one of our favorite scenes from Ghostbusters:
Just substitute “public service” for “science”. The only thing the Clintons serve is themselves.
At this point, it’s worth remembering what Hillary’s use of private email servers was all about in the first place:
So to you, Jim Comey, we offer Doyle Lonigan’s highest praise:
Since we’re on the subject of diseased organisms, moving from what he described in our Quote of the Day above as gonorrhea to what he termed syphilis, though he wrote it before Comey’s capitulation, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson is still solidly on the NeverTrump bandwagon:
“…Trump is out whining like the spoiled little princess he is and always has been that his fellow Republican presidential contenders, having been vanquished, are not making good on their promise to support the GOP nominee, presumably himself. Trump is of course absolutely correct that Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, et al. did make that promise, and that to withhold their support now would constitute violating a solemn promise made in public to their supporters.
Breaking that promise is absolutely the right thing to do.
We allow for a certain amount of cynical calculation in politicians — politics ain’t beanbag, as Dooley says. It may be that Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich made that primary-debate promise to support the eventual nominee in the hope — in the idiotic, forlorn hope — that the Republican primary electorate would not be so backward and malevolent as to choose an imbecilic game-show host to the left of Hillary Rodham Clinton on most of the relevant issues of our time over a slew of solid and impressive if imperfect conservatives.I can see Ted Cruz reenacting the final scene of Planet of the Apes: “You maniacs! You did it!” Of course he didn’t think that Sean Hannity’s tangerine dream would become America’s Creamsicle nightmare, but here we are.
It would be perfectly defensible — and honorable — for Ted Cruz to say: “I made that promise thinking that the chances were remote that Donald Trump would become the nominee, and without fully appreciating what manner of man he was, which really began to dawn on me around the time he suggested my father was somehow mixed up in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and putting out explicitly racist theories about how Mexican-American judges can’t fairly preside over cases involving fraud allegations against Trump. I shouldn’t have made that promise, and I regret having done so, but there is no way in hell that I am supporting Trump. I care too much about the future of my country and my immortal soul to climb into that particular snake-pit just to avoid the appearance of having made a mistake in judgment, which I clearly did.”
Of course, Senator Cruz et al. should have known well before the grassy-knoll and eek-a-Mexican-judge stuff that Donald Trump is unfit for the office of the presidency. And that is what he is: morally, intellectually, and politically unfit for office.Is Hillary Rodham Clinton actually Satan in the flesh?Of course Hillary Rodham Clinton is actually Satan in the flesh; Donald Trump is still unfit for office.It isn’t Ted Cruz’s fault, or John Kasich’s, or Marco Rubio’s, or Jeb Bush’s, that the American public in free and fair elections chose two major-party candidates whose preening self-regard, dishonesty, moral cowardice, and incompetence is in each candidate’s case the best and only argument for the other candidate.
“…In his mind, Mr. Trump may still envision a populist prairie fire carrying him to the White House. This is not his best plan to win, he may also admit to himself, but the one he’s willing to pay for.
Here resides the problem all along for those hoping for a Trump-to-the-middle move. Such moves are expensive. Base-broadening campaigns require lots of paid TV to reach non-engaged voters and Trump skeptics, pummeling them with reassuring images suggesting that a Trump presidency would be OK.
Mr. Trump not only is unwilling or unable to finance such a campaign.He evidently is unwilling to do what’s necessary to entice GOP donors to finance it on his behalf. This means GOP officeholders seeking re-election can expect a constant headwind of inflammatory Trump statements designed to stimulate the free media coverage that his asset-lite campaign requires. Republican candidates up and down the ballot therefore become unwilling sharers of a high-risk Trump electoral wager, a gamble more likely to end in a Hillary landslide than a Trump White House…”
In a similar vein, Tucker Carlson believes Team Trump is truly in extremis:
“…But Trump is still Trump, and he is as incapable of staying on message as he is of modesty, good manners, or consistent policy positions. A little bit of the robotic repetition of talking points for which Marco Rubio was justly mocked during the primaries would be in order for Trump. But he is too undisciplined and too eager to entertain audiences to do that. (More like he’s too eager to entertain himself!)
The fact that the lead of most stories about the speech was his praise of Saddam Hussein’s killing of terroristshas surely left the rational actors on his campaign in a state of despair. That Trump’s assessment of Saddam was absurd—since, as our Noah Rothman pointed out earlier, a man who pays bounties to Palestinians who killed Israelis and Jews was not a foe of terrorism—is beside the point. Trump shouldn’t have been talking about anything but Clinton, her lies, her paranoia about transparency, her sense of entitlement, and her attitude toward national security that makes it clear she can’t be trusted with the nation’s secrets. But instead, he was meandering all over the place, reminding us of his own problems.
Every time Trump opens his mouth it’s a reminder to independents, mainstream Republicans, and everyone else there are good arguments to be made that the only viable alternative to Clinton is just as, if not more, flawed than she.We’ve never before had a presidential election with two such unpopular and distrusted major party nominees. Both ought to be unelectable.But one of them is going to win, so the question is which of them can be portrayed as even more unsuited for high office than the other. Until now, that was clearly Trump. But Comey’s statement has objectively complicated that…”
There’s little reason to expect a seismic event that throws the election to Trump.
“The good news for Donald Trump is that the election won’t be held tomorrow. The bad news is there’s not much reason to expect a dramatic change in the political landscape between now and November.
…The early talk from Trump boosters that he would put New York, New Jersey, and California in play still seems deranged. Trump’s campaign began June with astonishingly little money in the bank, and out of “a dozen or so pro-Trump super PACs established so far, only a few have reported raising significant amounts of money or interest — for a total of about $4 million as of the end of May. And most of that has already been spent.” The Republican National Committee is in slightly better shape, but it’s still behind the pace of four years ago; the RNC raised $410 million in the 2012 cycle; it’s raised $150 million so far this cycle.
It’s conceivable that Trump’s vice-presidential pick might reassure certain wavering Republicans to jump back on board, or at least win him a week of positive media coverage, but it’s unlikely to be a game-changer. Will any significant number of previously neutral or Trump-verse voters start gravitating to the Republican nominee once they know that electing him would put Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich a heartbeat away from the presidency? It seems doubtful.
…There’s no reason to think Trump’s much-promised general-election “pivot” will ever occur. Veteran Republican campaign staffers continue to sign on to his campaign only to resign in record time. He has left the construction of a get-out-the-vote operation to the RNC. A surprising number of Republican senators and House members say they’ll skip the Cleveland convention and are keeping their distance from him, in a sign of how toxic he remains in their states and districts.
Maybe Trump could have an effective debate or two against Clinton, but would that really turn the tide?(Which also assumes Hillary will agree to debate The Donald.)Clinton could pick a running mate that excites liberals and unnerves the middle — say, Elizabeth Warren — but would that really be enough for Trump to overcome his own dismal favorability rating?
In just two weeks, Republican delegates will gather in Cleveland and either honor the rules and officially nominate Donald Trump as the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer, or vote to change the rules and suddenly nominate someone else. A sudden switch to someone else would be one of the biggest gambles in the history of American politics, and yet it remains an open question whether it would be a bigger gamble than nominating Trump.That, in itself, is amazing.“
Then again, desperate times call for desperate measures! We’re still committed to casting our ballot for anyone but Hillary in November; but that doesn’t mean we’re not pulling for a palace coup in Cleveland.
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, one which introduces us to Jim Comey’s long-lost brotha from anotha mutha:
Punching white woman after yelling ‘I hate white people’ not hate crime, judge rules
An indigenous woman in Calgary, Canada who yelled “I hate white people” before punching a white woman in the face and knocking her tooth out did not commit a racially motivated hate crime, a provincial court judge has ruled.
Judge Harry Van Harten’s written decision in the case argued that the motivation of the perpetrator, Tamara Crowchief, in the attack on the victim, Lydia White, was not related to racial bias. The judge disagreed with the prosecutor’s argument that the unprovoked assault, which occurred in November 2015, rose to the level of a hate crime.
Van Harten said there wasn’t enough evidence to establish the claim that Crowchief attacked White because of her skin color, despite the fact that the perpetrator, who had never met the victims before the attack, yelled “I hate white people” before throwing a punch.“There is no evidence either way about what the offender meant or whether … she holds or promotes an ideology which would explain why this assault was aimed at this victim,” the judge said.
This clown has a definite future in any future Clinton Administration…or Comey-directed FBI.
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