© Reuters/KJN
The former deputy director's FBI coddled Clinton and addled Trump.
Now he seeks clemency . . . even as he sues the Justice Department.
Hillary Clinton checked every box for a violation of the Espionage Act. So much so that, in giving her a pass, the FBI figured it better couch her conduct as "extremely careless," rather than "grossly negligent."
The latter description was stricken from an earlier draft of then-director James Comey's remarks
because it is, verbatim, the mental state the statute requires for a felony conviction. It wouldn't do to have an "exoneration" statement read like a felony indictment.
In point of fact, the careless/negligent semantic game
was a sideshow. Mrs. Clinton's unlawful storage and transmission of classified information had been patently willful. In contemptuous violation of government standards, which she was bound not only to honor but to enforce as secretary of state, she systematically conducted her government business by private email, via a laughably unsecure homebrew server set-up. Her Obama administration allies stress that it was not her purpose to harm national security, but that was beside the point.
The crime was mishandling classified information, and she committed it. And even if motive had mattered (it didn't),
her purpose was to conceal the interplay between her State Department and the Clinton Foundation, and to avoid generating a paper trail as she prepared to run for president. No, that's not as bad as trying to do national-security harm, but it's condemnable all the same.
While Clinton's mishandling of classified information got all the attention, it was just the tip of the felony iceberg. Thousands of the 33,000 emails she withheld and undertook to "bleach bit" into oblivion related to State Department business.
It is a felony to misappropriate even a single government record. The destruction of the emails, moreover, occurred
after a House Committee investigating the Benghazi massacre
issued subpoenas and preservation directives to Clinton's State Department and Clinton herself. If Andrew Weissmann and the rest of the Mueller probe pit-bulls had half as solid an obstruction case against Donald Trump,
the president would by now have been impeached, removed, and indicted.And that dichotomy is the point, isn't it?
Comment: A subtle point being made in this article is that cyber-attacks are just fine if they are being done by the West to its enemies. But when countries that aren't favored by the US engage in the same kind of warfare, they are demonized. Such is the nature of journalism in the West - grovel to the West so that access to "intelligence sources" remains intact and paint countries like Iran or Libya as evil for even considering defending themselves from Western aggression. There is no objectivity left in the MSM, they exist purely as PR departments for Western imperialism.