Comey Tries To Justify Giving Hillary Clinton Get Out of Jail Free Card

From: Conservative HQ

by - CHQ Staff | 9/8/2016 


You know things are bad at the FBI when Director James Comey releases a memo to all employees justifying his decision not to file charges against Hillary Clinton, but that’s exactly what happened yesterday. 

In the memo Comey said the decision to not recommend charges against the now-Democratic nominee wasn’t a close call. “At the end of the day, the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case,” he claimed in the memo. 

Comey claimed at the beginning of the memo that he was writing, “Because it is generating a lot of interest, I thought I should update you on where we are with our commitment to transparency in the wake of the Clinton email investigation.” 

The FBI has been criticized for releasing the Clinton emails on the Friday before Labor Day, so Comey explained that he wrestled with the idea of waiting until after Labor Day Weekend to release the documents, but in the spirit of transparency, he released them as soon as they were ready. 

“I almost ordered the material held until Tuesday because I knew we would take all kinds of grief for releasing it before a holiday weekend, but my judgment was that we had promised transparency and it would be game-playing to withhold it from the public just to avoid folks saying stuff about us,” Comey told the FBI staff. 

“We don’t play games. So we released it Friday. We are continuing to process more material and will release batches of documents as they are ready, no matter the day of the week,” Comey wrote. 

He ended his memo by reiterating that this decision was not politically motivated. 

We are not sure to whom Director Comey was specifically referring to when he wrote, “…despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case,” but Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano laid out the “prosecutable case” quite clearly in an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Times. 

As Judge Napolitano observed, by examining the contents of an email to see whether it contained state secrets, which it clearly did not, Mrs. Clinton demonstrated an awareness of the law — namely, that it is the contents of a document or email that cause it to be protected by federal secrecy statutes, not the denomination put on it by the sender. 

This added to the case against her because she later told the FBI that she had never paid attention to whether a document contained state secrets or not. In the strange world of espionage prosecution, this denial of intent is an admission of guilt, as it is profoundly the job of the secretary of State to recognize state secrets and to keep them in their secure government-protected venues, and the grossly negligent failure to do so is criminal, noted Napolitano. 

The FBI notes of the interrogation recount that Mrs. Clinton professed serious memory lapses 39 times, said Judge Napolitano. She also professed ignorance over what “C” means in the margin of a government document. “C” in the margin means “confidential,” which is one of the three levels of federal state secrets. The other two levels are “secret” and “top secret.”  

Under federal law, Mrs. Clinton was required to keep in secure government venues all documents in those three categories. The FBI, said Napolitano, found that she had failed to do so hundreds of times. 

But here is Judge Napolitano’s most damning observation about the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton and Director Comey’s decision not to prosecute her:

The records released last week also reveal that the FBI must have been restrained from the outset from conducting an aggressive investigation. It did not present any evidence to a grand jury. It did not ask a grand jury for any subpoenas, and hence it didn’t serve any. It did not ask a judge for any search warrants, and hence it didn’t serve any. The data and hardware it gathered in the case were given to it in response to simple requests it made. 

I counted five times in the report where the FBI lamented that it did not have what it needed. This is the FBI’s own fault. This tepid FBI behavior is novel in modern federal law enforcement. It is inimical to public safety and the rule of law. It is close to misconduct in office by high-ranking FBI officials. 

Someone restrained the FBI. 

The FBI did not ask Mrs. Clinton aggressive follow-up questions. Her interrogators just blithely accepted her answers. They failed to present her with documents she had signed that would have contradicted what she was telling them — particularly, an oath she signed on her first day in office promising to recognize state secrets when she came upon them and to keep them in secure venues. And agents violated Department of Justice policy by not recording her interrogation when her lawyers told them she would not answer questions if her answers were recorded. 

Now the FBI has interjected itself into the presidential campaign by releasing these documents. Hillary and the FBI Notwithstanding the mountain of evidence pointing to Mrs. Clinton’s guilt, it is highly improper and grossly unfair to release evidence gathered against a person who will not be prosecuted. Moreover, it is tendentious to release only part of the evidence — only what agents want the public to see — rather than the complete file. Yet all this evidence is secret under Department of Justice regulations. Had any of it been intended for or presented to a grand jury, the release of it would have been criminal. 

What happened here? The FBI seriously dropped the ball, and Mrs. Clinton was more concerned about being indicted than she was about losing the race for the presidency. 

It is apparent that some in FBI management blindly followed what they were told to do — exonerate Hillary Clinton. There is no other explanation for the FBI’s failure from the outset to use ordinary law enforcement tools available to it. Yet some in the FBI are not professionally satisfied by this outcome. They know that a strong case for prosecution and for guilt is being ignored for political reasons. 

No wonder Director Comey was forced to issue a memo to the entire staff of the FBI and that reports of plummeting agency morale are all over the media.


God bless,
JohnnyD