http://www.nationalreview.com/node/437596/print No Charges but Plenty of Blame for Hillary
The server was the ‘smoking gun’ proving Hillary’s intent.
By Jonah Goldberg — July 8, 2016
It was clear from FBI director James Comey’s congressional testimony Thursday that he thinks Hillary Clinton lied to the American people, even if he was reluctant to say it in so many words.
But then he didn’t need to. We’ve known for over a year that Clinton has been lying about her server. She lied about the reason she set it up — she claimed she wanted the convenience of using just one device. She claimed she never sent or received any classified e-mail. She claimed she handed over all of her work-related e-mails. She claimed that her stealth system had been approved. She claimed that her lawyers read every one of her e-mails before opting to hand them over or delete them.
Except for that last lie, all of these — and there are many more — were proven to be falsehoods a long time ago.
Of course, lying to the American people is not a crime. If it were, most politicians would be waiting their turn to use the weights in the prison yard.
I do not buy Comey’s explanation for why he decided not to recommend prosecution to the Justice Department. He concedes that there is little difference between “gross negligence” — the standard in the relevant law — and extreme carelessness, his description of Clinton’s conduct. But Comey says that the DOJ does not prosecute cases of “gross negligence” unless there is criminal intent. The problem is that the whole reason there is a statute criminalizing gross negligence in mishandling classified information is to cover cases where there wasn’t criminal intent.
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