Clinton Emails: Comey Lied and the Scandal Died

 

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FBI Director James Comey said that no reasonable prosecutor would take up the case against Hillary Clinton for her private email server. (AP)

Corruption: When FBI Director James Comey dismissed the case against Hillary Clinton he said it was because no reasonable attorney would take the case. Now we learn that there were plenty who would have done so.

When Comey made his statement about the case in July, he painted a devastating portrait ofHillary Clinton's reckless use of a private email server while Secretary of State.

Clinton knew little to nothing about handling classified material. She sent and received top secret information on an unsecured private email system and was otherwise extremely careless with national security secrets. She likely exposed sensitive material to enemies, and hid thousands of work emails that were supposed to have been turned over. And she or her top staff probably broke the law.

Then, Comey simply shrugged his shoulders and said that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."

"Reasonable" is the operative word there. This implication is that, while a partisan hack might bring such a case, no legitimate prosecutor would.

But it turns out that this was an utterly false claim. Fox News reported on Wednesday that there were many "reasonable" attorneys who would have done so. "Career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged," Fox reports.

It quotes a source who worked on the case as saying that "no trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute." The decision not to came from above, he said.

This adds more weight to the troubling claim that Comey's investigation was never serious.

Since Comey's statement in July, for example, we've learned that the FBI granted unusually wide-ranging immunity deals to key witnesses, in exchange for which the FBI got little or nothing of value.

One of his immunity deals, for example, included an agreement that the FBI wouldn't review any emails between Cheryl Mills and Paul Combetta — the computer technician at Platte River Networks who wiped Hillary Clinton's private email server clean with BleachBit — from late 2014 to early 2015, despite the fact that this was the time-frame in which Combetta started deleting Clinton emails from the server. The FBI knew that when it signed those deals.

Comey has repeatedly insisted — including in sworn testimony before Congress — that there was no evidence of obstruction of justice. But in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the chairmen of four House and Senate committees charge that "the facts of this investigation call these assertions into question." Translation: Comey may have lied to Congress as well as the public.

In early September, Comey felt the need to defend his decision to FBI employees with a lengthy staff memo in which he said that "despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn't a prosecutable case."

Now it appears that this was just another lie, one that adds to the already-enormous pile of prevarications uttered by Clinton and her defenders to protect the would-be president from accountability.