It’s Wednesday, July 6th, 2016…but before we begin, courtesy of Balls Cotton, a little advertisement advice for The Donald:
And this was before James Comey’s avarice and/or utter gutlessness armed The Donald with more firepower than the 1st Marine Division…assuming Trump knows how to employ it.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
You can well imagine we were going to begin today’s column with items like these from the WSJ and Commentary Magazine detailing not only the impropriety of…
The Attorney General should formally recuse herself from the case, or take responsibility.
…but emphasizing her choice to purposefully perpetrate acts encompassing the most blatantappearance of improprietyimaginable, memorialized by what Noah Rothman termed the Attorney General’s inexcusable indiscretion in Phoenix:
That was then; now, in what Paul Ryan described as an announcement which “defies explanation”, James Comey’s act of deception and political cowardice renders the import of those stories moot; and more importantly, serves to confirm, as James Taranto concludes, when it comes to Progressive politics…
“The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross wrote a clever lead for a piece yesterday: “On Tuesday, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting American president will campaign with a presidential candidate who is the subject of an FBI investigation.”
But it was overtaken by events. This morning FBI director James Comey announced the investigation was over. He detailed its findings, which are damning and in many cases new, and which prove that most of Mrs. Clinton’s public statements about her private email server were lies. Lying to the public isn’t a crime, but handling classified information in a “grossly negligent way” is.
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended(So what?!? The applicable law does not require intent!!!) to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless(i.e., “grossly negligent”!) in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey said. Would that be a synonym for “grossly negligent”? Apparently not. Comey’s bottom line is that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” (Again, so what?!? Comey isn’t a prosecutor!!! Seriously, has he never seen Law & Order?!?)
That even though he also said—in reference to seven email chains concerning “matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level”: “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
After announcing his no-charger recommendation, Comey added:
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences.To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. (Really?!? If not you, Mr. Comey, who? And if not now, when; after she’s President?!?)
In other words, laws are for little people…”
Though Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Loretta Elizabeth Lynch and James Brien Comey, Jr. have amply demonstrated they truly are little people.
“…For our money, the most revealing words in FBI Director James Comey’s statement Tuesday explaining his decision not to recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information were these: “This is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.”
So there it is in the political raw: One standard exists for a Democratic candidate for President and another for the hoi polloi.We’re not sure if Mr. Comey, the erstwhile Eliot Ness, intended to be so obvious, but what a depressing moment this is for the American rule of law.No wonder so many voters think Washington is rigged for the powerful…”
Because it so manifestly is!
Consider the following timeline: After lying repeatedly about what was so blatantly an intentional violation of federal law (despite no requirement for establishing “intent”) meant to shield her shake-down of corporations and countries for contributions to the Clinton Retirement Foundation from public scrutiny:
Barack Hussein Obama, a sitting President, questions the validity of the on-going investigation into Hillary’s email, the details of which he’s supposedly not privy.
William Jefferson Clinton, the former-President who first appointed Loretta Lynch a U.S. Attorney and husband of the subject of said investigation, “just happens” to meet with the AG in his private jet on the tarmac at Sky Harbor Airport.
Hillary announces Lynch may well stay on as Attorney General in her Administration.
Hillary flies to North Carolina…ON AIR FORCE ONE…to campaign with the same sitting President who questioned the validity of the on-going investigation into her email on…
…the same day FBI Director James Comey, a man of supposedly unimpeachable integrity (hired by a man known never to appointanyone not fully-committed to his pogroms) who, after listing ad nauseam irrefutable evidence of Hillary’s undeniable guilt, decrees while there’s enough smoke to conclusively establish the criminal nature of the subject’s conduct without evidence of fire, avers he cannot pursue charges against her without personally finding any flames.
Yeah…
…right!
As Andrew McCarthy relates at NRO, what happened is the…
FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook
There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.
Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.(No, James Comey rewrote the statute!) The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.
I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed.
It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. (But Comey isn’t a defense lawyer; Hell’s bells, he isn’t even a prosecutor!) The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged.
It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we’ve decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.
I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me. (Forget before; anyone who still thinks highly of Jim Comey, either personally or professionally, is either willfully blind or in on his scam.)
Finally, I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey’s claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton’s conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.
As Noah Rothman notes at Commentary Magazine…
“No amount of cynicism could have prepared Americans for what they witnessed on Tuesday morning, and 2016 has not been short on cynicism.
Viewers who tuned in to watch FBI Director James Comey update them on the status of the investigation into Clinton’s email server witnessed him rattle off a scathing litany of ostensibly criminal offenses. Only after he issued what can only be described as a serious if qualified rhetorical indictment of Hillary Clinton did Comey reveal that a formal indictment was most likely not forthcoming.More damningly, the FBI director only made the most perfunctory effort to conceal the fact that Hillary Clinton’s status had afforded her a level of deference no ordinary mortal would have received.
…Comey’s reputation cannot mask the stench of politics surrounding his decision. At a time in which illiberalism is on the rise around the world and authoritarian checks on self-rule are a vogue response to economic instability, it would be fair for anyone to view today’s development as an abuse of the public trust that will only further erode the public’s confidence in the capacity of their political class to manage national affairs competently.”
In other words, Jim Comey’s character was tested…and found woefully wanting.
Here’s the juice: Comey just sacrificed not only his entire store of personal credibility, but what little the federal government had left with a significant segment of America. Which makes him either a self-serving sycophant or a craven coward. We’re of the opinion it’s the former.
Either way, though disappointed, we’re not surprised. It’s not America’s immigration system that’s broken; it’s the entire federal government! Washington stinks like a whorehouse at low tide. The only question is whether the Republican Party is willing…or even able…to clean it up.
One other thought: though dumbfounded by his duplicity, McCarthy’s Comey’s friend, and he was being kind. We find Comey utterly beneath contempt; and we’re sick to death of those saying they respect Comey personally and professionally, but can’t understand what’s he’s thinking. SERIOUSLY?!? Like…what; you need a roadmap?!? He’s thinking the same damn thingthese two contemplated…
…when they sold out their country: personal profit, power and prominence.
As is so often the case, we’ll leave the last word to Hope ‘n Change:
“…Granted, we all knew that Hillary was going to get away with this. Satanic deals simply work that way. But still, this is more than just a disappointment.This is the end of the rule of law.
The connected and powerful can do whatever they wantand get away with it, while the rest of us are likely to get an ass-reaming if we can’t decipher 15,000 pages of IRS instructions – or if we simply have been identified as political conservatives.
And while we still think Trump is an annoying bobblehead, this incident has redoubled our resolve to vote for him in November. Because the current system must be utterly destroyed.A lawless nation can not survive – and that means from the bottom to the top.
Make no mistake based on Comey’s scurrilous absolution: Hillary Clinton is a criminal and quite likely a traitor.She set up her email server with the specific goal of avoiding legally mandated public scrutiny of her wheeling and dealing.Her “gross negligence” was by intent.
And yet she’s flying to campaign appearances at taxpayer expense on Air Force One, with her buddy Barack Hussein “Death to America” Obama at her side and, importantly, covering her ass. And all the while, Putin thumbs through her hacked emails and plots the many new victories he’ll enjoy (and blackmail schemes he’ll hatch) if she is elected president – despite an FBI declaration of near-criminal ineptitude.
This is a sad day for America and American justice. It is also, in an entirely legal and peaceful manner, a strong call for revolution.“
And if Donald Trump has half a clue, he’ll beat her about her ugly head and hulking shoulders with the truth ’til she’s bruised, battered…and beaten.
All of which confirms what we’ve believed for years, and which Kurt Schlichter echoes at Townhall.com:
“Sometimes in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. It is high time to declare our personal independence from any remnant of obligation to those who have spit upon the rule of law. We owe them nothing – not respect, not loyalty, not obedience.
Think about it. If you are out driving at 3 a.m., do you stop at a stop sign when there’s no one coming? Of course you do. You don’t need a cop to be there to make you stop. You do it voluntarily because this is America and America is a country where obeying the law is the right thing to do because the law was justly made and is justly applied. Or it used to be.
The law mattered.It applied equally to everyone. We demanded that it did, all of us – politicians, the media, and regular citizens. Oh, there were mistakes and miscarriages of justice but they weren’t common and they weren’t celebrated – they were universally reviled. And, more importantly, they weren’t part and parcel of the ideology of one particular party. There was once a time where you could imagine a Democrat scandal where the media actually called for the head of the Democrat instead of deploying to cover it up.
People assumed that the law mattered, that the same rules applied to everyone. That duly enacted laws would be enforced equally until repealed. That the Constitution set the foundation and that its guarantees would be honored even if we disliked the result in a particular case. But that’s not our country today.
The idea of the rule of law today is a lie.There is no law. There is no justice.There are only lies…”
Sorry, but we wouldn’t piss on ’em were they fully engulfed in flames…though we’d happily set them alight if only to test our resolve! 😉
“…Writing for the majority in the Hellerstedt case, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that the Texas statute was unnecessary because “determined wrongdoers” like Gosnell wouldn’t be deterred by new laws given that he was willing to violate existing laws.
Maybe so. But isn’t that exactly the NRA’s position on gun laws?Murderers, never mind terrorists, by definition don’t care about the law.
It gets even crazier. President Obama, who hailed the court’s decision, desperately craves the unilateral power to keep a list of people to whom he wants to deny guns without due process. But he also insists that known terrorists, particularly those held at Guantanamo Bay, have a constitutional right to due process (though presumably not to buy a gun).
Yes, there’s a lot of deviltry in the details, but the basic truth is undeniable: Those on the left — in all three branches of the federal government, along with their cheerleaders in the media — believe that the rights they like are sacred and the rights they dislike are negligible inconveniences at best and outrageous cancers on the body politic at worst. As Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his Hellerstedt dissent: “The Court employs a different approach to rights that it favors.“
By the way, based on the Founding Fathers’ own statements, there’s no question as to the original intent or meaning of the 2nd Amendment:
And we’re pretty sure abortion-on-demand…
…wasn’t contemplated in the remotest degree, let alone on equal footing.
Then there’s this little bit of politically-correct-inspired insanity recorded by Leah Barkoukis and Townhall.com, as the…
“As part of its plan to combat migrant sex crimes, the Swedish police are gearing up to hand out wristbands to young women that read, “don’t touch me.” They will be passed out over the summer at events and festivals. “By wearing these wristbands,” Sweden’s police chief said, “young women will be able to make a stand.”
The wristbands are written in Swedish, however, while the vast majority of those perpetrating the sexual assaults are thought to be migrants, who are unable to read Swedish…”
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with a little Brexit humor, courtesy of Balls Cotton:
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