After Comey twisted the rule of law nothing
offends me. (see 1 below.)
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It is obvious Democrats are more than willing to roll the dice with our nation's security and rule of law. If they can roll dice accordingly then I can spin the roulette wheel and vote for Trump.
At least he knows not to use a personal server to protect classified information.
As for Comey, if he had a shred of integrity left he would resign.
Comey seems to have taken a page from Justice Robert's playbook ruling regarding Obamacare. If you twist the law to keep comity everything is ok even if unlawful. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1)FBI director: Hillary broke the law, but she won’t be prosecuted for it
Unbelievable.
At a hastily called press conference, FBI Director James Comey meticulously laid out the process for his agency’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private, unsecured email servers while serving as secretary of State. He revealed there was evidence information that was classified at the time of its transmission — both to and from Clinton — was on Clinton’s unclassified email servers, apart from information that was later “upclassified” as sensitive or secret. He said some of this information, including in messages Clinton herself sent, was at the “top secret/special access” level at the time she sent it. He dismissed the idea said information wasn’t really classified because it hadn’t been marked that way at the time, because “participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.” He opined that Clinton and her staff “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” He said “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that (kind of) conversation.” He said that, while no “direct evidence” was found that the private server was hacked, the FBI did find that “hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account” and that she used her private email even while in the territory of “sophisticated adversaries.”
In short, he not only demolished every single excuse Clinton and her team have offered during this entire episode. He also made a case for prosecuting virtually anyone in the United States under the legal standard he described, which is: a) for a felony, the mishandling of classified information “intentionally or in a grossly negligent way”; or b) for a misdemeanor, “to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.” He even said “there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.”
And then he said the FBI would not recommend prosecution.
Folks, this is not another “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a la those about the death of Vince Foster. The head of the FBI carefully explained how someone had done what the law says one cannot do, and then he shied away from recommending prosecution because “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Which means one thing: No “reasonable prosecutor” would try to prosecute the front-runner for the presidency. Period.
This is not vindication for Hillary Clinton. She broke the law, as Comey clearly explained. She just isn’t going to face the consequences of doing so — and neither will anyone else in her circle.But there was an indictment of sorts handed down today: that of a legal system that only pretends justice is blind.There will be time, soon, for discussing the politics of this. For now, just let it sink in that a powerful woman is getting away with law-breaking simply because she is powerful. And no one is even pretending otherwise.
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2) FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook
There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.
Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.
I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed.
It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged.
It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we’ve decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.
I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me.
Finally, I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey’s claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton’s conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.
2a) FBI: 'No Charges are Appropriate' in Hillary's Emails
WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed results of its "painstaking" investigation into multiple private servers and devices used by Hillary Clinton as secretary of State -- and has recommended to the Justice Department that charges not be brought against the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The investigation, he noted, began as a referral from the intelligence community's inspector general with a focus on "whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system."
"As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort," he added, comparing it to dumping pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the floor.
"The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014," Comey said. "We found those e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on servers or devices that had been connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, folks with whom a secretary of State might normally correspond. This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 that were produced to State. Still others we recovered from that painstaking review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server that was decommissioned in 2013."
2a) FBI: 'No Charges are Appropriate' in Hillary's Emails
WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed results of its "painstaking" investigation into multiple private servers and devices used by Hillary Clinton as secretary of State -- and has recommended to the Justice Department that charges not be brought against the presumptive Democratic nominee.
FBI Director James Comey acknowledged that there were emails containing top secret, secret and confidential information that were passed through Clinton's server, but told reporters today that "we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges."
Comey said he was taking the unusual step of publicly discussing the investigation and the agency's recommendations to the Justice Department, which will now decide whether to prosecute Clinton or not, in the interest of transparency.
"I'm going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest," the FBI director said at the outset of the announcement. "I have not coordinated this statement or reviewed it in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say."
The investigation, he noted, began as a referral from the intelligence community's inspector general with a focus on "whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system."
"Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system in violation of a federal statute that makes it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute, making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities," Comey said.
"And consistent with our counterintelligence responsibilities, we have also investigated to determine if there is evidence of computer intrusion by nation-states or by hostile actors of any kind."
The director stressed that Clinton "used several different servers and administrators of those server during her four years at the State Department and she also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read e-mail on that personal domain."
"As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort," he added, comparing it to dumping pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the floor.
FBI investigators read all 30,000 emails Clinton provided to the State Department. When they encountered information of a questionable status, they referred the email to the pertinent agency that was "an owner of that information" to determine if it was classified at the time of transmission or if it should be classified now -- also known as "up-classifying."
Comey said of those emails handed over to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains were determined to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Ranked from the highest to lowest level of classification, eight email chains contained top secret information, 36 contained secret info and eight contained confidential material.
In addition, 2,000 other emails were up-classified to make them confidential.
"The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014," Comey said. "We found those e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on servers or devices that had been connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, folks with whom a secretary of State might normally correspond. This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 that were produced to State. Still others we recovered from that painstaking review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server that was decommissioned in 2013."
Of that batch, three emails were classified at the time they were sent or received: one at the secret level and two at the confidential level.
"We found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way. Our assessment is that like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails or emails were purged from her system when devices were changed," he added, noting that "because she was not using a government account or even a commercial account like Gmail, there was no archiving at all of her emails."
Some could have been deleted as personal by her lawyers, he said, as that team did not individually read the content of all of her emails before deciding to submit or discard, yet relied on headers and search terms to find work-related content.
"It's highly likely that their search missed some work-related emails and that we later found them, for example in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server. It's also likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produced to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not produced to State, and the lawyers then cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery," Comey said.
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