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United States News Title: DAVE NEESE: A foul smell at the FBI in Clinton email case James Comey, we’re talking about here. Director of the vaunted FBI. Dick Tracy was introduced to comic strip fans in 1931. He was a square-jawed, tough, fearless, incorruptible cop, created by cartoonist Chester Gould. Then, in 1942, cartoonist Al Capp created a parody of Dick Tracy, Fearless Fosdick. He was a square-jawed Tracy look-alike — but a clueless bumbler. Comey, a nominal Republican appointed by President Obama to head the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, was initially hailed as the real-life embodiment of Dick Tracy. Now, after the Hillary Clinton email probe, critics are grumbling that he’s Fearless Fosdick. Scoffs the Boston Herald’s Howie Carr: “Comey has left no stone unturned, except the one Hillary is hiding under.” True, many of the grumblers are Republicans. But Democrats have been rendered silent due to an utter lack of any facts to offer in Comey’s defense (or Clinton’s). There were large, glaring gaps in the FBI investigation that let Clinton scuttle off scot-free, without being held accountable under the nation’s classified-information laws — as hapless lower numbers in the federal pay grades and in military service have been, and for far lesser lapses. There’s a national wisecrack going around: “America has banks too big to fail. And now there’s Hillary — too big to jail.” An increasingly vociferous chorus of critics is pointing to a trail of clues that Comey stumbled over without noticing, Fosdick-style, say the director’s detractors. The email case overflows with indications of what lawyers call “mens rea,” a guilty state of mind on Clinton’s part. These include destruction of evidence, contradictory statements and patently false claims, emphatically repeated. Not least among the guilty-mind tidbits is a 2011 notice Clinton sent to State Department personnel warning them “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts” because of “targeting” of such accounts “by online adversaries.” In other words, “Avoid doing what I’m doing.” Yet Comey declared there was no intent on her part to violate or evade law, rendering the case all but impossible to prosecute, he said. Knowledgeable lawyers rolled their eyes at this assessment, including former federal lawman Andrew C. McCarthy, who prosecuted and convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing. McCarthy — a friend of Comey — notes that contrary to his buddy’s assertion, the applicable law in the case requires no intent, only “gross negligence.” Comey himself said Clinton was “extremely careless in handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” including ultra-top-secret “special access program (SAP)” material. McCarthy and others well versed in the law wonder: How’s “extremely careless” different from “grossly negligent”? Comey’s response: silence. In his testimony before Congress about the email probe, Comey himself devastatingly acknowledged Hillary Clinton’s numerous false — not just inaccurate, false — statements regarding her unsecure, off-the-federal-grid email system. For example, as Comey himself acknowledged, some of the most sensitive communications that were sent or received by Clinton’s email system were classified at the time — contrary to Clinton’s emphatic, repeated statements otherwise. Comey, in his statement summarizing the email probe, noted that Clinton’s power-house Washington law firm deleted thousands of emails without individually reading them to make sure they contained only personal, not official information. In unilaterally deleting these emails — destruction of potential evidence — the law firm used extraordinary erasure methods to thwart recovery of any of the material. Or in Comey’s very own damning words: Clinton’s lawyers “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.” Yet, Fosdick-like, as his critics see it, Comey declared — without explanation — that there was nothing amiss in this activity. It now turns out that Comey didn’t even attend the FBI interview of Clinton at the end of the probe. One of the biggest interviews in FBI history — certainly biggest in Comey’s career — and he shrugs it off? Arousing public suspicions all the more, there was neither any voice recording nor any video of the interview. There was not even a stenographer’s transcript. Just notes taken by the agents. And those notes indicate Clinton was given an accommodating pass on her many memory lapses regarding key details. No pesky skeptical followups, so far as the notes indicate. She also was given a pass on her assertions that might have made a polygraph go up in smoke had she been connected to one. She declared that she had mistaken the classified “(C)”s on many of her emails as mere paragraph markings, as in (A), (B), (C) and so on. As derisive skeptics ask, didn’t it ever occur to this supposedly brilliant Wellesley and Yale Law alumna to wonder why there was never a paragraph (A) or (B) preceding all those paragraph (C’s)? Again, the FBI notes indicate, no pesky, skeptical followup inquiries. No perked-up ears. Yawn. Next question. Now Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is holding up to the TV cameras Clinton documents to which he says she herself had affixed the (C) denoting classified material. Thereby revealing yet another lie in Clinton’s lengthening saga of mendacity. The FBI probe, by Comey’s own admission, ignored legally problematic statements Clinton made under oath to congressional investigations. Didn’t consider such statements, Comey lamely alibied, because they hadn’t been forwarded to the agency. Say what? Maybe most egregious of all, the FBI probe ignored her activities regarding the Freedom of Information Act, even though her email system seemed designed to evade the provisions of that law — to cheat history, you might say, by hiding official information. Now new questions are arising about the destruction of Clinton emails after congressional probers had given notice for the emails to be preserved pending the issuance of subpoenas. Such activity,if proved to have had an evasive purpose, is called “spoliation of evidence.” That’s an obstruction-of-justice offense. In certain establishment circles where elites hold sway — in Washington and state capitals — Dick Tracys aren’t necessarily held in high value. And Fearless Fosdicks aren’t necessarily held in low value. For those who are willing not to rock the boat, who are willing not to be fastidious about holding the establishment elites to troublesome standards like the peons are, the rewards are anything but stingy. For them there’ll likely be a spot found in the leading law firms, with six- or eight-figure paydays. Has James Comey now done what he could for Hillary Clinton and that’s as far as he’ll go? Or is he now all in for her? What’s it gonna be, Mr. Director? Dick Tracy or Fearless Fosdick? Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#2. To: buckeroo (#0)
Why is there any debate about this? Comey's corrupt.
There are no replies to Comment # 2. End Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
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