* I call it the “John Roberts’ Solution.”
* Comey said that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case. He is right about that. Hillary wouldn’t be prosecuted unless they had video of her running someone down in her car, and even then, only if she backed over the guy a couple of times.
* In most cases of people sending classified information over unsecured channels, they lose their job and their security clearances. Only in rare cases do they face criminal charges.
The Petraeus case was unique because they actually have a taped interview showing that he knew that the information he was giving his mistress was classified.
It was pretty unlikely that they would find evidence that Clinton was intentionally leaking classified information, and wasn’t just incompetent.
* “‘extremely careless’ in her handling of ‘very sensitive, highly classified information.’”
Trump should write that down on an index card and use it as a prop in the debates. In fact, he should carry it with him from now until the polls close on election day, and he should make a show of pulling it out and reading from it every time he talks about Hillary. The idea being, that these are Hussein’s FBI director’s words, and he wants to make sure he gets the quotes right every time.
He should call her “extremely careless” Hillary from now on. His catchphrase can be “Obama’s FBI director said she was extremely careless with very sensitive, highly classified information.” Then he can say, “wait, here, let me quote Obama’s FBI director, to make sure I’ve got that right,” and read from the card. Then wrap up with “Secretary Clinton is too crooked and incompetent to be PotUS. She’s too crooked and incompetent to be the president of Venezuela.”
* The Dark Enlightenment is not a worldview that people can be talked into or convinced to be believed purely abstractly or rhetorically. It takes events and circumstances making people ask themselves WTF. And there have been a lot of those in the last 14 months. The only reason they haven’t begat more converts to the Dark Enlightenment and #NRx is because Trump came along and temporarily gave some of us the impetus to give this voting thing one more chance.
* Can we all please stop pretending now that the FBI is competent and uncorrupt?
Seriously, after Orlando and San Bernadino, the FBI’s reputation should have been on extremely shaky ground. Unfortunately, the news media wasn’t smart enough the notice that the FBI should have nipped those thugs in the bud—they even had the suspects on their radar, but didn’t bother following up. And the public—especially the right wing/Trump wing—is too enamored of the cops/law enforcement to admit the gross incompetence displayed.
This non-indictment for her crimes is just proof how much the FBI is nothing more than a controlled entity of the political hacks in Washington. Historically, this will mark a point where future scholars will say that the FBI officially became merely a secret police organization without any fidelity to principles or law, only to their political leaders.
And Comey’s reputation is truly trashed—he will come out extremely poorly in terms of how historians note his character. He’s now a known yes-man for the power brokers and the money men.
After the Whitey Bulger revelations—where the FBI was working hand in glove with organized crime and allowing it to get off scot-free—the FBI should have become a distrusted organization and looked at skeptically. But there is a profound disconnect in this country between the massive fuckups and corruption of the G-Men–stretching at least back to Hoover refusing to investigate or even admit organized crime existed, on the fear of being outed as a homosexual—and the public/media perception of them.
The FBI guys are hacks.
* This really is an irrelevant distraction to me, and not in the way that Steve means it. Hillary is bad because she’s in the pocket of neocons and banksters, not because of anything that happened to any e-mails or, to take another distraction, to ambassador Stevens.
The policies she supports, the crowd that’s gathered around her, will kill thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners if she wins. This will increase the incidence of terrorism and refugee flows. THAT’s what’s important.
Her computer illiteracy or carelessness are utterly irrelevant. I bet that no foreign intelligence service learned anything new from this, but even if they did, that would also be irrelevant next to the policies which Hillary supports.
* I worked for the intelligence community (as a technical person, not a “spook”) in the late ’80s and much of the ’90s.
Had I done what Hillary did, I am quite certain I would have gone to jail.
I was in fact present at a meeting when an intelligence breach occurred. Although the breach was not my fault, I pointed it out immediately, and the meeting was immediately ended. I had a clear legal obligation to point out the security breach — again, even though I was not the cause of that breach.
One of my co-workers in fact went to jail for security violations.
I agree with other commenters here that Hillary’s unbridled militarism is a much serious crime than her malfeasance concerning classified information.
On the other hand, Comey does nicely demonstrate how corrupt the system is: he admits massive breaches on her part, but she gets away scot-free.
Any ordinary American should feel like throwing up. We’re not citizens; we’re just peasants serving the elite.
