It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s

[Bigun]

It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s

Andrew C. McCarthy   September 2, 2017 4:33 PM

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots.

On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference.

The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham. Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

It shows, they cry, that the fix was in!

News Flash: This is not news.

Excerpt from http://amp.nationalreview.com/corner/451053/not-comeys-decision-exonerate-hillary-obamas-decision

[Bigun]

Response from a friend who works in Washington as an economist in response to my email linking to the article above.

EXCELLENT article by the great former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy -- a very smart guy -- and I hope everyone in here reads it. It well sums up the stench behind the fairly egregious malfeasance in play from Obama to Comey in "exonerating" Clinton in 2016.

The article describes a positively MASSIVE abortion of what it means to live in a 'rule-of-law'-based republic, and I continue to marvel at how this all played out coincidently with the prosecution of the US Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, who took a photo [2, actually, as I recall] of his sub's electronics (which are too secret and hence be broke a known stricture) on his cell phone and had an 11 year career in the submarine service trashed at end with a year in a Navy brig followed by a year of house arrest after being unceremoniously cashiered out of the US Navy.

His lawyers are pursuing legal action against the USG on his behalf and good for them -- they are demanding the Clinton standard be applied to him, too ....he certainly had no intention of harming the United States, either and was going to show these 2 photos to his kids one day when they were older and could understand.

The tragedy of the current moment is that our side has ZERO people that I can think of who can go out and talk about this the way McCarthy writes about it here. Sadly, certainly not Trump himself. Not the incompetent Sarah Huck Sanders -- nice kid, in way over her head.

Not the "pro" at communications, Kellyanne Conway. Not the moron from South Carolina, Hogan Gidley, or whatever his name is. Not the phony blonde yakker at the RNC, Kayleigh McEnany [though she is smart and articulate and has a future, she tends to memorize stale talking points and then go into auto-repeat, too much ...and now for the most part shys away from hostile media, meaning she is all-Fox echo chamber all the time ...[they all are now].

And last but not least, not the screaming Hannity, whose style now clouds whatever his message ought to be.

So here's the essential summary people need to understand:
1. Obama's Justice Department barred the FBI from asking Cheryl Mills -- who knows all -- questions that went to the heart of the e-mails investigation in the spring of 2016. Obama declared the fix was in in April.

2. The fix was in via the invention of a phony straw man crime (and Obama is the King of Straw Men arguments), that Clinton "did not intend to commit any crime or do any harm to the United States." DID NOT INTEND TO. And their storyline thus invented a phony straw man statute in the US Code: "It is a felony to give away top secret information in public comms media like email WITH THE INTENTION OF HARMING THE USA." And since Clinton did not intend to do this and it was inadvertent and long ago, it was to be buried.

3. So Mills, who oversaw the process of deciding which of Clinton's 60,000 e-mails to surrender to the State Department and which would be withheld (it ended up being about 33,000....that were then "lost" to us forever) as “private” info pertaining to yoga and Chelsea's wedding (a goodly percentage were, in fact, not private, of course), was never to be asked about this and indeed deemed as a cooperator and counsel to Clinton .....!!

4. So the US Justice Department proceeded to:
a. Cut off key areas of inquiry;
b. Offer inexplicable immunity deals;
c. Decline to use the grand jury to compel evidence;
d. Agree to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred);
e. Agree to, [UNBELIEVABLY], destroy physical evidence (laptop computers);
f. Fail to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements;
g. Allow subjects of the investigation [Mills] to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation [Hillary], in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege;
h. Etc. etc. etc.

It all adds up to a staggering misprision of justice. And what I do not understand are two things:
1. Why was there no energy on the part of Sessions -- and Trump -- to open this all up to scrutiny -- as well as all the malfeasance at the Clinton Foundation -- upon taking office? [Unless there is some probe that, amazingly, we have not heard about].

2. Why can't the GOP find someone -- ANYONE -- who can tell this story in 3 minutes the way McCarthy can? Hannity's screaming on TV won't get it done, Trump can't seem to sit still long enough to go through this, instead of lobbing incoherent bombs that dance around it at best. I think if the American people really understood all this there'd be a great deal of anger over it.