536
Like I discussed in the media chapters, the most curious dynamic is that during the election all the MSM wanted to discuss was the damn emails but once it was over and that woman was safely defeated the media stopped talking about them overnight and has never discussed them again.
Then at the end of 2016-beginning of 2017 the media-finally-began talking about Russia. This hardly shows bias against Trump-they knew much of the basic elements of the story prior to the election and yet gave it radio silence.
FN: Regarding Emailgate cum Comeygate there have been exactly three major media pieces post election: what’s so curious is all three articles came out in May, 2017 around the time Comey was fired. Like Malcom Nance says conspiracy takes a lot of planning-how much planning explains this very interesting coincidence? Why did the MSM which has been otherwise allergic to any of the introspection they demand of Hillary Clinton publish three deep dives just before or after Comey was fired? Probably not to finally own up to the depth and breadth of their monumental failure and the blood they have on their hands in so weaponizing what the Washington Post itself in September 2016 called a minor email scandal that it decided a Presidential election electing the crypto fascist colluder in chief ‘President Trump.’
If you have to guess perhaps it was TrumpWorld who was behind these three deep dives on Comeygate-the NYT, Vanity Fair and ProPublica all coming out then.
Chapter A for more.
End of FN.
Post election the only folks who still want to discuss the emails is Trump and the GOP-the classic diversionary tactic of whataboutism.
Indeed, the GOP not only shutdown the Russia probe prematurely-after doing a half ass job at it when it was running-they went back to investigating Hillary’s emails. Yet while they talked about the emails they asked the wrong question regarding Comey’s presser. It’s not why didn’t he charge her but why did it take him so long to admit he wasn’t going to charge her?
(I believe this is from the Pro Publica piece).
“Much of their time was taken up trying to find and examine all of the roughly 62,000 messages from Clinton’s four years as secretary of state, which began in January 2009; two of Clinton’s lawyers had deleted about half of the emails, deeming them purely personal. This had sent the FBI on an often frustrating hunt for the missing emails. Agents fanned out to locate, examine and reconstruct scattered hardware and data backup systems from Clinton’s private network, as well as all the BlackBerrys, iPads, computers and storage drives that Clinton, her aides and her lawyers had used. Forensic recovery would eventually help the FBI to find 17,448 deleted emails, including thousands that agents deemed work-related.”
Here’s another question: why were the agents looking for the missing emails? Didn’t Clinton’s lawyers act within protocols in deleting personal emails? That’s what the law surrounding disclosure of public records calls for: a government official has the right to keep personal emails or communications private-so why were they looking for these?
Also IG report on what took so long.
Relevant Lanny Davis quotes
As noted in the previous chapter, the FBI begun the Midyear investigation-aka Emailgate-despite not having a single qualifying ‘articulable fact’ needed to establish probable cause.
In this chapter we’re asking the question that-seeing as they did decide to investigate her emails even though they lacked probable cause-why did it take them a whole year to go through 30,000 emails-or 62,000 emails as they insisted on investigating the 32,000 deleted personal emails though deleting them was what the rules called for?
Totally unlike Comey’s actions, Clinton’s deleting of the personal emails was simply doing what the rules proscribed. Yet the FBI-like the Trump campaign-was obsessed with somehow recovering her personal emails-what right to privacy?
According to the IG report, Comey and his colleagues at the Emailgate investigation knew by January, 2016 there was no there there-Clinton was not guilty of a crime. As we will see even this is too charitable but let’s begin with the IG report as our starting point.
ENDGAME” DISCUSSIONS AND FORMER DIRECTOR COMEY’S PUBLIC STATEMENT
“Our review found that the Midyear team concluded beginning in early 2016 that evidence supporting a prosecution of former Secretary Clinton or her senior aides was likely lacking. This conclusion was based on the fact that the Midyear team had not found evidence that former Secretary Clinton or her senior aides knowingly transmitted classified information on unclassified systems because (1) classified information exchanged in unclassified emails was not clearly or properly marked, and (2) State Department staff introducing classified information into emails made an effort to “talk around” it. Although the Midyear team continued its investigation, taking the investigative steps described in Chapter Five and looking for evidence that could change their assessment, they also began discussing what witnesses referred to as the “endgame” for the investigation—ways for the Department and FBI to credibly announce the closing of the investigation.”
So ‘at the beginning of early 2016’ the Emailgate team had concluded she was likely innocent. Yet it would take six more months until Comey decided to let the world know.
What were they doing in the mean time-call this period the missing six months? Later there’d be another missing month give or take between when the NY FBI ‘found’ Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop and when Comey again put his thumb on the scales against Clinton and for Trump with his memo-evidently, he hadn’t done enough damage with the press conference.
As indicated in the paragraph above, one reason for the delay is they continued to obsessively search for some sort of ‘smoking gun’ that would change their mind about not indicting Clinton. But how fair is this to Hillary Clinton for her to continue twisting in the wind for an additional six months-an awful long time in campaign terms just on the remote chance some kind of ‘smoking gun’ could show itself? I mean I think I’ll delay getting a job for six months as I totally could win the lottery during this time and let’s just deny a man his freedom for six months-we don’t have any evidence he’s the killer but heck in six months maybe we wil. Is that FBI and DOJ protocol? Probably not but then again Comey sees following protocol as weak tea, as somehow lacking in moral courage and unheroic.
(There are a few quotes in the IG report that demonstrate Comey’s ‘moral vanity.’)
The other thing they did in the six months was obsessively go back and forth on how to execute the endgame-or land the plane if you like.
While Comey and his fellow Midyear agents knew by the start of the year it’s unlikely there would be charges they didn’t even begin their conversations about ‘landing the plane’ until April of 2016. So for three more months the investigation-and Clinton’s campaign -sat in limbo as her opponents-the GOP, Assange, Chris Cillizza continued to foment what the Washington Post editorial page would itself later call a minor email scandal.
In early April Comey begun initial discussions about finally winding down the email probe.
“Comey said that beginning in March or April 2016, he began to think of ways to announce a declination. Comey said that during this time he had a meeting with Rybicki, Yates, and Axelrod to discuss how the FBI and Department could credibly close the investigation. Based on Yates’s description of the circumstances of the meeting (described below) and FBI emails, we determined that this meeting likely took place on Tuesday, April 12, 2016.”
(Find the page number).
This yet again underscores Comey’s general lack of urgency in winding this down, of landing the plane. Though clearly Clinton deserved, as any subject deserves, to be promptly cleared if the facts can’t support conviction. He started thinking about announcing no charges in March, 2016 but didn’t have the first meeting on doing so until another month went by.
This was after there’s already been two lost months-January and February-when Comey and his fellow Emailgate agents knew there were no charges. What was going on then, in the the first three months between when they had all concluded there were no charges and April 12 when Comey had his first meeting with Sally Yates?
And let’s be clear this is not hperbole-it was clear by January, 2016-to be generous; as we will see it’s likely they knew, Comey certainly knew, long before that Clinton wasn’t guilty-that she was very unlikely to be charged.
“Notes obtained by the OIG from a meeting between Toscas and then EAD John Giacalone on December 4, 2015, confirm that the lack of intent was the subject of ongoing discussions. According to the notes, Giacalone asked the team, “Still [do not] have much on the intent side, right?” The notes show that the team members present at the meeting agreed with him. Giacalone, who retired from the FBI in February 2016, said that there were “no smoking guns” showing intent when he left.
“Similarly, other notes show that prosecutors met with NSD supervisors on January 29, 2016, to discuss the lack of evidence supporting prosecution. The notes state: Don’t see prosecutable case at this point. A lot of stuff done from Ops Center [lower level State Department staff] —> up. HRC is receiving. Want to insulate DOJ from criticism about how we did this work. No daylight [between] FBI management and investigative team agents re: view of criminal liability.”
pg. 164-165.
Note that even in December, 2015 it was clear there was no evidence of intent-. Yet the last two sentences from the January, 29. 2016 meeting give a sense of foreboding-while it was clear she wasn’t guilty, the FBI and DOJ were worried about the political reaction to a not guilty finding-even though she was not-uh, guilty.
This highlights how big the failure was, under Comey, to conduct the investigation in a nonpolitical way. Throughout the entire Emailgate fiasco you see Comey and friends politicizing the investigation in ways that hurt Clinton to reassure her haters in the GOP, and to an extent on the Bernie Left-a la HA Goodman-and in the Chris Cillizza cum Dean Baquet MSM that the investigation was not being politicized to help her. Essentially her basic rights and due process were trampled on to assure her political opponents that she wasn’t getting special rights.
Essentially the FBI bent over to prove she wasn’t being treated especially well by treating her especially badly.
FN: Here you also have to think of Andy McCabe’s leaking the fact of the FBI’s-wholly unpredicated and unjustified-fishing expedition into the Clinton Foundation on October 31, 2016-perhaps there’s a certain poetic justice for McCabe to end up being hoisted by his own petard. Trump and his GOP co-conspirators-many of them no doubt continue to reside at the FBI aka Trumpland-accused McCabe of trying to help Clinton. In fact McCabe was doing the same thing Comey was-treating Clinton grossly unfairly to reassure the GOP Right that she wasn’t getting special treatment. Trump would use what McCabe did to Hilary as the excuse to drum him out 26 hours before his pension just as he used Comey’s unfair and wrongheaded treatment of Hilary as a pretext of firing him.
But then just yesterday Speaker Pelosi acceded to GOP co-conspirator demands that there be a public vote for the impeachment inquiry though a federal judge just ruled it wasn’t needed.
So how did the GOP respond? With a thank you to the Speaker for her good faith response to their criticism and concerns? Hardly:
Man who except everyone in America would have thought the GOP would pull a Lucy-and-the-football on this https://t.co/6vHXYdjCeg
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) October 29, 2019
But as Pelosi shows to this day the elite class never tires of making good faith efforts to respond to bad faith demands of Trump and the GOP co-conspirators-which is how Trump ‘won’ in the first place.
Indeed we see this in the latest orgy of false equivalence.
The idea that those who-rightly-chant 'Lock Him Up' are denying this fake 'President' due process miss the fact that Mueller gave him better than mere 'due process' but unlimited immunity for both him as well as his children https://t.co/ThCTOzbuv3
— Expand the Court (@ProChoiceMike) October 29, 2019
“On Friday, Donald Trump’s White House admitted it had overseen 1,556 more family separations than previously acknowledged. Of these, more than 1,000 were carried out after a federal court had ordered the administration to keep migrant families intact. The total number of asylum-seeking families broken up by our government now sits at approximately 5,500. Many of these parents and children have yet to reunite. Some never will.
Two days after this disclosure, the president attended a baseball game. When his image flashed above the outfield in Nationals Park, the crowd’s cheers turned into boos, which then — in some sections of the stadium — turned into chants of “Lock him up.”
On cable news Monday morning, one of these developments registered as an attack on American ideals so obscene, it demanded bipartisan condemnation; the other, a banal event that scarcely merited a mention.
“Even at a time when there is a lot that our president does that I find disturbing, offensive, unconventional, I have a hard time with the idea of a crowd — on a globally televised sporting event — chanting ‘lock him up’ about our president,” Democratic senator Chris Coons said on CNN. “I frankly think the office of the president deserves respect, even when the CNN. “I frankly think the office of the president deserves respect, even when the actions of our president at times don’t.”
What Senator Coons misses is that Trump ‘won’ his election through illegitimate means and so very presence in the Oval disrespects the Office daily neigh hourly.
This is-of course-a classic case of false equivalence run amok-is calling for a guilty person to go to prison the equivalent of calling for a guilty one to go? But there’s this sad sack elite ‘institutionalist’ madness for responding to Trump’s abuse by once again turning the other cheek-that worked so well in 2016.
In this context, is a “Lock him up” chant really a more harrowing sign of creeping authoritarianism than a display of polite tolerance for the tyrant-in-chief would be? The former involves citizens ironically repurposing their abusive leader’s own demagoguery to protest his lawlessness. The latter assures that leader that he is not only above the law but also immune from social sanction.
To conclude that the “Lock him up” chant was an affront to democratic values rather than an expression of them, Victor and Scarborough must ignore most of the relevant context, impute the darkest possible intention to the chanters, and wildly misconstrue their relationship with Trump. Nationals fans are not the president’s political opponents; they are his constituents. And their conflict is not rooted (solely) in disagreements about policies and values; Trump enjoys extraordinary power over the chanters’ lives, a power he routinely abuses, in Victor’s and Scarborough’s own estimations.
A stronger version of the anti-chant argument would focus on its potential consequences, rather than its moral character: Chanting “Lock him up” at Trump may be a worthy expression of democratic dissent in the abstract, but in our hyperpolarized polity, it risks eroding norms of partisan toleration and emboldening the reactionary right.
And yet, while this argument at least does not require misrepresenting Sunday night’s events, it rests more on faith than evidence. After all, what in the past three years (or past two decades) of American politics suggests that the center-left’s good faith and performative respect for institutional traditions will constrain the right’s illiberalism and abuses of power? (Did Nancy Pelosi’s painstakingly slow, deliberate approach to impeachment prevent Republicans from casting her inquiry as a “Soviet-style witch hunt?” Did Barack Obama’s refusal to publicly disclose the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign before Election Day 2016 prevent Republican leaders from accusing him of orchestrating that investigation for electoral purposes?)
The indiscriminate “respect for the office of the president” that Coons counsels has done little to arrest our republic’s descent into lawlessness. If anything, it has hastened that regression: What, other than such “respect,” enabled the DOJ to insist, without controversy, that Donald Trump can’t be held legally accountable for federal crimes until he leaves office? Or the Obama administration to insist, with self-righteousness, that George W. Bush must not be held legally accountable for his abuses of power upon returning to private life?
But the alleged adults in the room have yet to figure this out.
End of FN
Among the many violations of rules and her rights from the July 5 presser, it also clearly violated her privacy rights for someone not charged with any crime to be publicly ripped to shreds by the FBI Director a couple of weeks before the party conventions.
The IG report documents a particularly arresting conversation over ‘optics’ in late March, 2016.
On March 30, 2016, Prosecutor 1 sent an email to Prosecutor 2 stating, “Read the Ruth Marcus column in the [Washington] Post if you haven’t yet.”132 The column referenced in the email discussed the public skepticism that would result from a decision not to indict former Secretary Clinton and recommended that the Department consider releasing a detailed investigative summary. It included a hyperlink to a public report released by the Department in 2010 that summarized the investigation into the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. The column also highlighted the need for a credible government official to provide the public with information about the investigation, noting, “Senior Justice officials will be mistrusted whatever they say, but what about FBI Director James B. Comey, who served in the Justice Department under George W. Bush?” Apparently after reading this column, Prosecutor 2 replied, “It is not dissimilar from some of the thoughts running through my head in the middle of the night…or what I tried expressing at that disastrous meeting we called with Toscas a couple months ago.”
Pg. 178
So was Comey’s presser originally Ruth Marcus’ idea?! Marcus like most of the MSM in 2016 exhibited a good deal of Hilary Derangement Syndrome-she had thought Trump made a good point in late 2015 when his response to Clinton’s criticism of him as a sexist was to change the subject by blaming Clinton for her husband’s affairs. Yes, Marcus pronounced primly, Bill’s past is fair game.
Of course, because it’s on Hillary to make up for what her husband’s affairs did to her. Because Bill had extramarital affairs this lets Trump off the hook on the matter of sexism. In any case, it’s rather stunning that Comey’s indefensible press conference may have been the brainchild of Ms. Marcus.
FM: The outrageous sexism in American politics continues as Congresswoman Katie Hill was forced out-with Pelosi shoving her through the door-based on the revenge porn of her former abusive husband.
Let's be clear this is not a win for #MeToo but the opposite a very qualified and competent bisexual Dem woman was bullied into resigning by revenge porn and I don't feel good about Pelosi's role in pushing her out https://t.co/YPmKxRKKQf
— Expand the Court (@ProChoiceMike) October 28, 2019
https://twitter.com/SallieAlbright/status/1188949068032155648
End of FN
As for Comey, wherever the idea of him doing a presser to-finally-announce Clinton wasn’t guilty came from, he quickly made it his own while misleading both his fellow FBI agents as well as the DOJ over the next three months. While he presented his doing a lone presser as just one of a number of options, in truth he’d already decided he was going to do it no matter what.
(Find quotes in IG about his conversations with others in Midyear investigation).
More on that later. First, let us just be very clear-there was no intent, it wasn’t a close call as he himself told the GOP Congress in July, 2016 after the presser. Yet, most of the public believed the opposite-60% believed she should have been indicted.
Comey had justified his hamhanded intervention as necessary for the education of the public. Yet his words and actions had the opposite effect: they only served to further confuse and mislead people.
No doubt a big part of why there was expectation of a Clinton indictment, was the irresponsible way Comey dithered and delayed the landing of the plane-he had built the false expectation of a Clinton indictment by dragging out and milking the process for all those months when he knew the chances of indictment were remote.
And let’s be clear, as I noted above, even the notion that Comey and friends only figured out that there was no there there as far as convicting in January, 2016 is far too charitable. As Lanny Davis documents, it simply doesn’t take anywhere near a year to go through 30,000 emails or-if you for some reason include her personal emails that her lawyer rightfully deleted-62,000 emails.
“Even if the FBI claims that it had a reasonable suspicion it would find marked Clinton emails if it took more time to find them, including a few thousand that seemed not to have been transferred to her private server from her BlackBerry in her first few months as secretary, why did it take Comey and the FBI a full year to complete the investigation? In fact, it could have taken no more than two days to review all thirty thousand of Clinton’s State Department–related emails to determine whether any had classified markings. How do we know this? As already noted above, in the FBI’s interview of an ICIG inspector on July 23, 2015, the third document referenced above, the inspector is quoted as saying that on June 26–27, 2015, a review of all the thirty thousand emails was completed. That’s right: two days to inspect thirty thousand emails. A source close to McCullough claimed that this review was cursory and the ICIG inspector was “kicked out” after two days. Even if that is true, the State Department would not have refused to allow FBI agents in the middle of a criminal investigation full access for as long as they needed to confirm that not one of those thirty thousand emails was appropriately marked as classified.”
Location 943.
No more than two days. This is a point that is also germane on the question of what took Comey so long to release his memo after being informed of Abedin’s emails that had been ‘found’ on Weiner’s laptop. It’s not clear how Comey ever believed it would take so many months to go through the emails on Weiner’s laptop-how could he be this unaware of current FBI technology?
But that’s for a future chapter.
For now, let’s dwell on Lanny Davis’ fateful question:
“What would have happened if Comey had done this and announced on October 5, 2015—or December 5, for that matter, five months after the fact—that there was no prosecutable case against Clinton, rather than waiting till the following July? We will never know.”
Going out on a limb you wouldn’t have 60% of people thinking she should have been indicted; it certainly would have de-weaponized the damn emails as the election issue according to Cillizza-Dean Baquet and friends.
But, Comey and friends knew perfectly well there was no there there. Indeed, they had known this from the beginning.
“As early as September 2015, FBI and Department officials realized that they were unlikely to find evidence of intent. Prosecutor 2 stated that within a month of first obtaining criminal process, they had seen no evidence of intent. This prosecutor told the OIG that the team realized that the case likely would lead to a declination after they had reviewed the classified information in former Secretary Clinton’s emails and heard the explanations for including that information in unclassified emails. Prosecutor 2 said that there were a number of other investigative steps they needed to take to complete their due diligence, but that by September 2015 they knew that they would need a “game changer” to be able to prove intent.”
Pg. 165.
As early as September 2015. As they realized this in September, 2015, it’s certainly reasonable of Davis to discuss what might have happened had Comey announced this on October, 5, 2015 rather than nine months later.
But it’s even worse than that.
“From early in the investigation, the investigative team said they knew that proving intent would be a challenge.” Pg. 124?
“Prosecutor 1 told the OIG: [T]his whole case turned on mens rea [guilty state of mind]…. I’ve run a lot of mishandling cases. The issue is usually that people are taking things home or they’re communicating them to someone for, to set up a business outside or to do something that’s like, what we don’t tend to prosecute criminally anyway are people who are communicating things for work purposes…. Usually to people who are already cleared. So, those are the kinds of things that when we’re talking about mens rea, were sort of instructive for us…. This prosecutor explained that Secretary Clinton and her staff did not display any of the counterintelligence indicators that prosecutors typically see in mishandling cases, such as unreported foreign contacts or “weird” meetings with foreigners.”
Unlike the Trump campaign who-unlike Clinton, Comey didn’t believe was a ‘once in in 500 years’ situation-he sure didn’t act like it was.
“This prosecutor said that evidence of intent was lacking for other reasons as well, including that numerous witnesses testified that the State Department had terrible information technology (IT) systems and that its remote email system did not work when employees were traveling and sending emails in different time zones.”
As an aside, it’s rich that the only thing that the allegedly ‘libertarian’ GOP thinks government does hands down better than the private sector is email security. And in this case that is far from the truth-the government email systems used at State and other agencies have all kinds of problems.
“As a result, the investigative team said they could not infer bad intent from the use of personal email accounts as they might in other cases. Prosecutor 2 similarly stated that mishandling cases generally involve “people who have an intent to give classified information to others, people who have an intent to…take documents home and…do nefarious things with them, or sometimes hoarders of classified information.” This prosecutor told the OIG that, unlike the typical mishandling case, the State Department employees who introduced classified information into the unclassified system were trying to “talk around” it in the course of doing their jobs. This prosecutor stated, “And looking in terms of some of the times when the classified information appeared on [un]classified systems in this case, we see, we see problems, you know, late at night, weekends, the time between Christmas and New Year’s when no one is in the office.” FBI officials agreed with the prosecutors that the need to prove intent was problematic from the outset. In his recent book, Comey stated: …Hillary Clinton’s case, at least as far as we knew at the start, did not appear to come anywhere near General Petraeus’s in the volume and classification level of the information mishandled. Although she seemed to be using an unclassified system for some classified topics, everyone she emailed appeared to have both the appropriate clearance and a legitimate need to know the information. So although we were not going to prejudge the result, we started the Clinton investigation aware that it was unlikely to be a case that career prosecutors at the Department of Justice would prosecute. ”
So her reputation was sullied though indictment was very unlikely.
“That might change, of course, if we could find a smoking-gun email where someone in government told Secretary Clinton not to do what she was doing, or if we could prove she obstructed justice, or if she, like Petraeus, lied to us in an interview. It would all turn on what we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt[.] Pg. 125?
FN: Speaking of lying in the interview Mueller didn’t make Trump-or Donald Jr-do an interview in the Russian Collusion investigation-Mueller also didn’t make Jr-or Don McGahn-testify at the Grand Jury. Of course, had Trump been compelled to testify he would have lied many times over but the GOP AKA the PARTY OF TREASON would have dismissed it as a mere process crime-without admitting like the the one they impeached Clinton over. And the MSM wouldn’t have bothered pointing this out either.
End FN.
Bottomline:per the IG Comey said that by early May 2016, when he wrote the first draft of his public statement, the Midyear team was aware that evidence of intent was lacking. Others on the Midyear team agreed. FBI Attorney 1 stated, “I have cases where there [are] people with thousands of classified documents in their home and we don’t prosecute them…. [T]his is not something we prosecute lightly or we do regularly. There needs to be, usually, some either nefarious intent or some…actual harm that has happened because of it.”
So while Michael Flynn claimed that ‘If I’d done 10% of what she did, I’d be in jail’ this couldn’t have been more false. Few if any would be treated like this without the last name Clinton.
“Agent 2 told the OIG: [F]rom like my level looking at it…you were hard-pressed to find the intent of anyone to put classified information on that server. And again, sloppy security practices, for sure. Right? But, and, and preventable? Yes. But somebody intentionally putting classified on it, we just never found clear-cut evidence of somebody intending to do that.”
If they knew from the outset that finding intent was unlikely, this brings us full circle to the last chapter: was there ever probable cause in the first place? If they knew going in that proving intent was remote, the answer is clearly NO.
Endgame discussions around pg. 163
Lanny Davis