By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 02, 2016
The word of the weekend was “protocol.”
In deciding to tell Congress about a new trove of e-mails
that may or may not contain classified information and may or may not relate to
Hillary Clinton, FBI director James Comey broke Justice Department protocol
both by releasing information close to an election and by revealing details of
an ongoing investigation. It was a “stunning breach of protocol,” former
attorney general Eric Holder dutifully insisted.
Tim Kaine invoked protocol more than a half-dozen times
Sunday in his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “It is just extremely
puzzling,” the Democratic vice-presidential nominee said. “Why would you break
these two protocols?”
“Puzzled” was the runner-up word of the weekend; Kaine
used it repeatedly, as did Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook. “We are so
puzzled right now,” Mook told NBC’s Chuck Todd.
Well, let’s try to solve this riddle. Comey’s regrettable
decision is much easier to understand once you realize it is one small piece of
the larger puzzle. He made a bad choice — though probably the least bad choice
of those available to him — precisely because all of the relevant actors in
this sordid mess have been breaking protocol for years.
Clinton broke all kinds of protocol by setting up her
stealth server and then lying about it not only in public but also, I would
argue, to Congress. She broke protocol when her aides smashed phones with a
hammer and erased e-mails — official government records — after they were
subject to a congressional subpoena.
Bill Clinton broke protocol when he met with Attorney
General Loretta Lynch in secret while his wife was still under investigation by
the FBI. Lynch, smarting from her breach of protocol with the former president,
widened the breach by refusing to recuse herself and investing instead in the
FBI director the authority to decide whether or not to prosecute Hillary
Clinton.
President Obama broke protocol when he told 60 Minutes that Clinton — with whom he
had corresponded over an unsecure e-mail channel — did nothing to endanger
national security long before the investigation was even concluded.
And, of course, the Democratic party broke not a formal
protocol but one hell of a rule of thumb by nominating a woman who carries more
baggage than the cargo hold of the Queen Mary.
“There is a very good argument — I would say, an
irrefutable argument — that Comey should never have pronounced that the Clinton
e-mails investigation was closed (in fact, it would have been appropriate if he
had made no public statement about the investigation at all),” Andrew McCarthy,
a former federal prosecutor, writes in National
Review. “But having made that pronouncement — which, again, Mrs. Clinton
was thankful to have and which she has ceaselessly exploited — he was obliged
by law-enforcement principles to amend it when it was no longer true.”
And that gets to the heart of it. Comey by his own hand,
as well as with the encouragement of the Obama administration, the media, and
the Clinton Industrial Complex, found himself perched atop an enormous mountain
of crap. Any effort to get off the fetid summit was bound to leave him soiled.
That is what Clintons do. They do not care about the
breach of protocol, only the reach of protocol. Everyone should be sticklers
for the rules, except the Clintons and their henchmen. That was the story of
the Bill Clinton administration, from the firing of the White House travel
office through the numerous money-raising scandals, the impeachment drama, and
the president’s disastrous last-minute pardons.
They force their allies to sell off bits and pieces of
their credibility defending the indefensible, while insisting their critics are
the only ones with bad motives. Already, the word has gone forth that Comey’s
reputation must be destroyed to protect what’s left of Clinton’s, even though
she is the author of her own travails.
We knew it was coming when Clinton said Friday night that
Comey sent his letter to the “Republican members of the House.” That was a
distortion. He sent it to the relevant chairs, plus the relevant ranking
Democrats. But that is standard protocol in Clinton world: Destroy the
messenger.
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