It was quite the spectacle, and quite the damning litany of charges against Hillary Clinton. And after sharing them for several minutes, formerly respected FBI Director James Comey told us that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
I am familiar with several reasonable prosecutors who would have been glad to do it if the lifting is a little too heavy for Comey, who started his remarks as a straight-arrow law-and-order figure and a quarter-hour later earned his card in the Hillary Clinton protection racket.
To be clear, since the FBI Director seems a little fuzzy: Hillary Clinton knowingly mishandled documents of varying sensitivities. There are no mind-readers immediately available to affirm criminal intent, but this is why we have trials and juries, a route that is now closed by the protective wall erected by Comey and his new cover-up partner, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
But we know what she did. We know she crafted an e-mail pathway that routed government materials, some classified, through her private server. We know that server was then placed into the care of a private company, and then the server’s contents were transferred to her private lawyers.
By Comey’s own admission in his own statement, before he revealed his willingness to run interference for her, the FBI will never know the full contents of willfully deleted e-mails because of their time in the custody of Hillary’s paid advocates: “It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”
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But again, no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
We know that Secretary Clinton did not have the authority to remove classified material from secure locations, but she did it anyway. She has refused to reveal who on God’s earth might have ever told her this was permitted. The absence of an answer is due to the fact that it is not permitted.
But we are told no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
Comey gladly shepherded reasonable prosecutors to an indictment and eventual conviction of former CIA Director David Petraeus, based on many of the same sins of commission and omission. Both came under the microscope because of what they did and what they did not do.
Petraeus' is an admittedly easier case in view of the ability to divine intent based on certain known personal matters ancillary to his actions. But with Mrs. Clinton, all we have is a historically secretive figure with a record of decades of scandal leaving trail after trail of wonderment as to whether she has skated on several episodes of wrongdoing. An indictment in the server matter should not be based on retroactive curiosity or bad blood, but no one was looking for the FBI to convict, or even to indict. Shoot, we didn’t even need Comey to actually recommend an indictment. But by the measure of all that is right in a just and ethical system, he should not have dissuaded one.
It would have been acceptable for him to share the powerful list of Hillary Clinton's misdeeds, concluding by saying, “This is what we have found, but the FBI does not bring charges. We find facts. We hereby place these facts into the proper hands at the Justice Department, and await their judgment along with the rest of the public.”
Of course, the hands at DOJ are far from proper. They belong to Loretta Lynch, and they were last observed clasping the hands of Bill Clinton in a tarmac powwow so brazenly stupid that it could only occur among people who consider themselves untouchable.
So now it is time to prove them wrong. Now it is time for American voters to take up the duty the system has chosen to shirk.
Hillary Clinton will beam this week as she runs countless victory laps at the news of this judicial stonewall. But there is a day of reckoning coming on November 8. And the question now becomes: Will voters deliver the accountability we have been denied from our justice system?
No jury will see the case of Hillary Clinton’s reckless endangerment of national security. But we are empaneled as a nation to deliver a verdict on Election Day that could be even more resounding.
A jury trial may well have leaned in her favor. We must make sure the election does not. It is mightily frustrating to see justice corrupted. I have come to expect it from the Obama White House. Even if Comey had said this has indictment written all over it, that would have been no guarantee that Lynch would have pursued it. But this incoherent moment from Comey should not dispirit those who care about consequences. Let it energize us.
Let us use Comey’s own words to hand Mrs. Clinton an indictment for the ages. Let us memorize the text of his statement, with its stunning evidence of her unfitness for the presidency, and use it in arguing before the court of public opinion.
This actually falls within the realm of arguments Donald Trump has made effectively, free of some of the unforced errors that have dogged his path. Let’s encourage our nominee, from the campaign trail to the debate stage, to wield with strength and skill the revelations Comey has seen fit to provide us, even on the day of the FBI director’s devaluation as a man of principle.
Those principles now shift to us, the American electorate. It is in our power to deliver a message on November 8 that is intended not just for Mrs. Clinton, but for Barack Obama and his Attorney General as well.
That message: We are done with you. All of you. The last eight years of Obama White House politicization of justice, and the last quarter-century of the stench of scandal from both Clintons. Be on your way in the private sector, where you can no longer screw up our country and our lives.
Every day between now and November 8 is our jury deliberation on Hillary Clinton. We will report our decision on that day. FBI Director Comey is entitled to his view that the Clinton server nightmare and its attendant damage to our national security is not the stuff of technical indictment.
So it is up to us to be the “reasonable prosecutors,” making the argument for Hillary Clinton’s disqualification using the valuable information that noble investigators working under James Comey have provided.
He dishonored their work by failing to see a sufficient basis for recommending formal charges. So be it. But an attentive nation should be willing to see a sufficient basis for making sure that Mrs. Clinton’s transgressions and corruptions keep her from becoming President of the United States.
The headline this week is no indictment. But we can have one if we deliver it ourselves, in four months.
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