By David French
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
This weekend, the New
York Times scraped the fresh scabs off Democrats’ wounds from 2016. In an extended
piece, the Times provided us with
the best account so far of the deliberations inside the FBI as it investigated
Hillary Clinton and debated how best to announce the results of that investigation
to the public. It should surprise no one that there wasn’t exactly a playbook
for handling a serious criminal investigation of a major-party nominee for
president, and neither the Department of Justice nor the Federal Bureau of
Investigation observed standard operating procedures.
At the beginning, the DOJ toned down its public
statements on the Clinton probe, calling it a “matter” rather than an
investigation, even as the FBI possessed a document by a Democratic operative
that implied that Attorney General Loretta Lynch wouldn’t allow the
investigation to derail Clinton’s campaign. When Bill Clinton turned up in
Lynch’s airplane, it caused understandable dismay inside the FBI, and Comey
became convinced that he should
announce the results of the investigation rather than the attorney general.
Later, when potentially relevant e-mails were
unexpectedly discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, the FBI faced an agonizing
choice: Should it disclose that it had re-opened the investigation?
The question consumed hours of conference calls and
meetings. Agents felt they had two options: Tell Congress about the search,
which everyone acknowledged would create a political furor, or keep it quiet,
which followed policy and tradition but carried its own risk, especially if the
F.B.I. found new evidence in the emails.
“In my mind at the time, Clinton is likely to win,” Mr.
Steinbach said. “It’s pretty apparent. So what happens after the election, in
November or December? How do we say to the American public: ‘Hey, we found some
things that might be problematic. But we didn’t tell you about it before you
voted’? The damage to our organization would have been irreparable.”
Comey chose to disclose, and the rest is history. Here’s FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver making the
succinct case that Comey’s letter to Congress could have turned the election:
Not complicated. Clinton was up by
a lot. Comey letter hits. Treated as massive story. Suddenly she was up by
not-a-lot. She loses narrowly.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538)
April 24, 2017
In an election this close, it seems foolish to argue that
the Comey letter didn’t make some
difference, but it’s equally foolish to pretend that lots of other things
didn’t make an equal or bigger difference. As for blame? Well, that’s easy:
It was all Hillary Clinton’s fault. All of it.
She made the
decision to flout standard practice, sound policy, good sense, and the law by
setting up a homebrew server and using a private e-mail for official business,
including the sending and receiving of classified information.
She made the
decision to lie, repeatedly, about what she’d done.
She made the
decision to press forward with her campaign and pressure Democratic leaders
(including superdelegates) to join her team while misleading them every step of
the way.
She led the
Democratic party off the 2016 cliff.
In all these things, of course, she was merely imitating
the master manipulator, her own husband. Remember how skillfully Bill Clinton
transformed the public debate over his own perjury? Remember how he and his
team coaxed a sympathetic press into making the propriety of the investigation
the main story, rather than the underlying tawdriness and corruption of his
conduct?
This is the Clinton way. This is what they do. They do
what they want, when they want, how they want, and then indignantly demand that
everyone else conduct themselves with maximum restraint and with complete
consideration of the Clinton family’s political goals. In other words, they
embrace vice while demanding compliance and cooperation from everyone else,
including law enforcement.
In reality, vice tends to leave virtue with a dilemma.
Hillary Clinton’s misconduct put the DOJ and the FBI in an impossible position:
What do you do when a presidential candidate herself is under known criminal
investigation, and when the public is broadly aware of extraordinarily damaging
facts about the candidate’s conduct? Do you quietly close it with minimal
comment, or do you address the facts? What do you do when you re-open an
investigation you publicly closed? These are the choices Hillary forced on the
FBI and the DOJ.
There may come a time to more fully evaluate the FBI’s
conduct toward the Trump team, but we don’t have nearly enough facts to make
the kind of judgments we can make regarding the investigation of Clinton’s
e-mail scandal. Clinton evaded prosecution on the strength of her name and
through the horrible precedent set by the DOJ’s deal with David Petraeus. She
should be grateful that she’s not in prison, not outraged that she’s not
president. She brought this all on herself.
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