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336 Extreme Carelessness: Why did it Take James Comey a Year to Clear Hillary Clinton?

🧠 Chapter Title: Extreme Carelessness: Why Did It Take James Comey a Year to Clear Hillary Clinton?

UPDATE: Comey’s Presser-palce in part that discusses July 5

FBI Director James Comey FULL STATEMENT on Hillary Clinton Email Investigation (C-SPAN)

📂 Emailgate: The Vanishing Emails and the Vanishing Accountability

The most curious dynamic of the 2016 election was the media’s obsessive fixation on Hillary Clinton’s emails—only to abandon the topic overnight once she was safely defeated. During the campaign, the mainstream press couldn’t stop talking about “Emailgate.” But post-election? Silence. The story evaporated, as if it had never mattered. The same outlets that had treated the emails as a national emergency suddenly lost interest the moment their coverage achieved its goal: Clinton’s defeat.

Then, in late 2016 and early 2017, the media finally began discussing Russian interference. But this shift hardly indicates bias against Trump. In fact, many outlets—and James Comey himself—knew key elements of the Russia story before the election and chose to suppress them. The silence wasn’t accidental; it was strategic.

📝 Footnote: The Curious Timing of MSM Introspection

Regarding Emailgate-cum-Comeygate, there were exactly three major media pieces published post-election. All three appeared in April–May 2017, coinciding with Comey’s firing. As Malcolm Nance notes, conspiracy requires planning—so how much planning explains this peculiar timing?

Why did the mainstream media, which had otherwise shown allergic resistance to introspection (especially regarding its role in weaponizing the email story), suddenly publish three deep dives just before or after Comey’s dismissal? It’s unlikely they were finally ready to own up to their monumental failure. More plausible is that these pieces were part of a coordinated reputational pivot—an attempt to distance themselves from the damage they helped inflict.

Even the Washington Post admitted in September 2016 that the email scandal was “minor.” Yet it helped decide a presidential election, installing a crypto-fascist colluder-in-chief as “President Trump.”

ProPublica also published a major exposé, but I don’t consider them MSM—I actually respect their work.

See Chapter A for more.

End of footnote.

🔄 Post-Election Whataboutism

After the election, the only people still talking about the emails were Trump and the GOP—a classic reverse diversion tactic. Whataboutism became their shield: deflecting scrutiny of Russian interference by resurrecting the email saga.

The GOP not only prematurely shut down the Russia probe (after a half-hearted investigation), they pivoted back to Clinton’s emails. But even then, they asked the wrong question about Comey’s infamous July 2016 presser. It wasn’t “Why didn’t he charge her?” but rather “Why did it take him so long to admit he wasn’t going to?”

🧠 ProPublica’s Revelations

“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.”

📝 Footnote: The FBI’s Obsession

So while GOPland was on a crusade to find Her Deleted Emails, the FBI recovered 17,448 of them? This is a good cross-reference for the future chapter on Joseph Schmitz.

End of footnote.

❓ Why Were They Looking?

Here’s the deeper question: why were FBI agents so determined to recover Clinton’s deleted emails? Her lawyers acted within protocol—government officials are allowed to delete personal communications. That’s standard practice under public records law. So why the forensic witch hunt?

If the target is Hillary Clinton, apparently the right to privacy doesn’t apply.

📝 Footnote: NYT and the Origins of the False Narrative

Quite interestingly, the same reporters who published the April–May 2017 pieces were also responsible for the original false stories in July 2015, claiming Clinton was under criminal investigation. See Chapter Criminal Investigation Without a Subject.

Also relevant: the IG report on what took so long, and key quotes from Lanny Davis.

End of footnote.

⏳ A Yearlong Investigation Without Probable Cause

As noted in the previous chapter, the FBI launched the Midyear Exam—aka Emailgate—without a single qualifying “articulable fact” to establish probable cause. Yet they spent a full year combing through 30,000 emails—and insisted on investigating the 32,000 deleted personal emails as well, despite the fact that deleting them was exactly what the rules called for.

Unlike Comey’s actions, Clinton’s deletion of personal emails was simply following protocol. Yet the FBI, like the Trump campaign, was obsessed with recovering them. The presumption of guilt was baked in. The rules didn’t matter. The law didn’t matter. Only the target did.

🕰️ The Missing Seven Months: When the FBI Knew, But Didn’t Tell

According to the DOJ Inspector General’s report, James Comey and his colleagues on the Midyear Exam team had concluded by January 2016 that Hillary Clinton was not guilty of a crime. Even this framing is generous. As we saw in Chapter: Probable Cause, the investigation itself was launched without a legitimate basis—there was no probable cause to begin with. But let’s start with the IG’s own words:

“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.” — DOJ OIG Report, pp. 164–165

So by January 2016, the FBI had determined Clinton was unlikely to be charged. Yet it would take seven more months before Comey publicly announced this. What were they doing in the meantime?

Call it the Missing Seven Months.

🔍 The Hunt for “Golden Emails”

One reason for the delay was the FBI’s obsessive search for what Comey later called the “Golden Emails”—a hypothetical smoking gun that might justify prosecution. But how fair was this to Clinton? She was left twisting in the wind for half a year, her campaign under siege, while the FBI chased a fantasy.

Imagine delaying a job search for seven months because you might win the lottery. Or denying someone their freedom for seven months on the off chance new evidence might appear. That’s not protocol—it’s persecution. But Comey, ever the moral dramatist, saw protocol as weak tea. He preferred heroic improvisation.

📝 See Chapter: Why the Comey Letter for more on the “Golden Emails.”

🛬 “Landing the Plane”

The other reason for the delay was bureaucratic dithering over how to “land the plane”—Comey’s metaphor for closing the investigation. Despite knowing by January that charges were unlikely, Comey didn’t begin serious discussions about ending the probe until April 12, 2016, when he met with Sally Yates, Rybicki, and Axelrod.

“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.” — DOJ OIG Report

So what happened during January, February, and March? Why did Clinton’s campaign remain in limbo while the FBI sat on its own conclusion?

📝 See McCabe’s The Threat for his version of these conversations.

📅 Timeline of Delay

  • December 4, 2015: FBI official John Giacalone asks, “Still don’t have much on the intent side, right?” Team agrees: no smoking gun.
  • January 29, 2016: Prosecutors meet with NSD supervisors. Notes read: “Don’t see prosecutable case at this point.”
  • April 12, 2016: First formal meeting to discuss ending the investigation.

That’s three months of silence after concluding Clinton was innocent. And seven months before Comey’s infamous July 5 press conference.

📉 Institutional Delay as Political Damage

This wasn’t just bureaucratic caution—it was institutional sabotage. Clinton deserved to be cleared promptly. Instead, the FBI allowed the media, the GOP, Assange, HA Goodman, and Chris Cillizza to weaponize “her emails” while the Bureau sat on its hands.

Even the Washington Post—which had helped amplify the scandal—admitted in a September 2016 editorial that it was a “minor email scandal”, warning that history would judge Americans harshly if they empowered a dangerous man over such a trivial issue. But by then, the damage was already done.

Ironically, Clinton herself noted that by September 2015, Chris Cillizza had written over 50 editorials about her emails—a full year before the Post’s editorial acknowledged the danger of their own narrative.

📝 Footnote: In a September 2016 editorial, the Washington Post warned that voters might empower a dangerous authoritarian over a “minor email scandal.” This admission came after months of saturation coverage—including over 50 email-focused editorials by Chris Cillizza by September 2015.

📝 “Landing the plane” takes on darker resonance in light of Rod Rosenstein’s inappropriate promises to Trump. How queasy is Comey over that?

🧩 Subsection: Optics Over Justice — How Clinton’s Rights Were Sacrificed to Appease Her Enemies

Even by December 2015, it was clear to FBI and DOJ officials that Clinton lacked the criminal intent required for prosecution. Yet the final two sentences from the January 29, 2016 meeting reveal something darker: while they agreed she wasn’t guilty, they were already strategizing how to manage the political fallout of a declination. In other words, they were preparing for the optics of not charging her—despite knowing she hadn’t committed a crime.

This underscores the central failure of the Emailgate investigation: under Comey’s leadership, the FBI conducted a deeply political investigation under the guise of neutrality. Clinton’s civil liberties, privacy rights, and due process were repeatedly violated—not to protect justice, but to reassure her political enemies that she wasn’t receiving special treatment.

📝 Briefly referenced in the previous chapter, the Andy McCabe anecdote is expanded here with more context.

📝 Footnote: McCabe’s Leak and Poetic Irony

On October 31, 2016, Andy McCabe leaked the existence of the FBI’s unjustified fishing expedition into the Clinton Foundation. Trump and his GOP allies later accused McCabe of trying to help Clinton, but in reality, McCabe—like Comey—was bending over backwards to treat Clinton unfairly in order to appear “balanced.” Trump used McCabe’s own mistreatment of Clinton as the pretext to fire him 26 hours before his pension vested—just as he used Comey’s sabotage of Clinton as the excuse to fire him.

End of footnote.

🧠 Ruth Marcus and the Birth of the Presser

The IG report documents a revealing exchange from March 30, 2016, when DOJ prosecutors discussed a column by Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Marcus argued that the public would be skeptical of a decision not to indict Clinton and suggested releasing a detailed investigative summary. She even floated the idea of FBI Director James Comey as the credible voice to deliver it.

“Read the Ruth Marcus column in the [Washington] Post if you haven’t yet,” one prosecutor wrote. “It is not dissimilar from some of the thoughts running through my head in the middle of the night,” another replied. — IG Report, pg. 178

So was Comey’s infamous July 5 press conference Ruth Marcus’ idea? Whether or not she originated it, her column reflected the broader media pathology: Clinton had no right to privacy or due process. Even if innocent, she had to be politically dirtied—anything less would be “suspicious.”

📝 Marcus had previously endorsed Trump’s deflection tactic in late 2015, arguing that Bill Clinton’s affairs were fair game in response to Hillary’s critique of Trump’s sexism. See Chapter A for more.

📝 Footnote: The Sexism Continues

The same sexist double standards that plagued Clinton resurfaced in the case of Congresswoman Katie Hill, who was forced out over revenge porn leaked by her abusive ex-husband. Though Hill denied rumors that Pelosi pushed her out, her feed was later hacked and flooded with abuse. Despite post-2016 gains for women, we remain far from “post-gender” politics—especially when Beltway journalists dismiss sexism as mere excuse-making.

End of footnote.

🧨 Comey’s Presser: A Decision Already Made

Regardless of how influential Marcus’ column was, Comey quickly made the presser his own. While he presented it as one of several options, he had already decided to go solo—misleading both DOJ and his own agents. This was classic Comey: performative moralism disguised as deliberation.

📝 See Chapter: Why Comey Wrote the Comey Letter for more on his management style—“free and open debate” masking predetermined decisions.

📊 The Fallout: Public Misperception and Media Collusion

Comey admitted to Congress that Clinton’s case wasn’t a close call. Yet 60% of the public believed she should have been indicted. This wasn’t a failure of evidence—it was a failure of narrative. The media, fed by anti-Clinton leaks from within the FBI, created a false expectation of guilt. Comey’s justification for the presser was “public education,” but his actions only served to confuse and mislead.

His delay in “landing the plane” built a crescendo of suspicion. By dragging out the process, he manufactured the illusion of a looming indictment—an illusion that became reality in the public mind.

🕰️ The Myth of Investigative Timelines

Let’s be clear: even the notion that Comey and his team only realized there was no prosecutable case by January 2016 is far too charitable. As Lanny Davis documents, it doesn’t take a year to review 30,000 emails—or even 62,000, if you include Clinton’s personal emails that her lawyer rightfully deleted.

“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.” — Lanny Davis, Location 943

The ICIG inspector confirmed that a full review was completed on June 26–27, 2015. Two days. Even if that review was cursory, the FBI had every opportunity to conduct its own thorough analysis. The idea that it took a full year is laughable—and deeply suspect.

💻 Technological Farce: The Weiner Laptop Delay

This same absurdity applies to the Weiner laptop delay. Comey claimed it would take months to review the emails found on Huma Abedin’s device. But how could he be this unaware of FBI tech capabilities?

  • The FBI’s Operational Technology Division routinely handles massive data sets with advanced forensic tools.
  • Their Regional Computer Forensic Labs are equipped to process hundreds of thousands of emails in hours, not months.

📝 Spoiler alert: I frankly believe Comey—and his Emailgate team—lied up and down and sideways about this missing month. The idea that anyone believed it would take this long doesn’t pass the laugh test.

🧠 Intent Was Always Absent

And here’s the kicker: they knew from the beginning that intent couldn’t be proven.

  • By September 2015, DOJ prosecutors had already concluded that the case would likely end in a declination.
  • Prosecutor 2: “We knew we’d need a ‘game changer’ to prove intent.”
  • Prosecutor 1: “This whole case turned on mens rea… Clinton and her staff didn’t display any counterintelligence indicators.”

Even Comey himself admitted in his book:

“We started the Clinton investigation aware that it was unlikely to be a case that career prosecutors at the DOJ would prosecute.”

That bears repeating: any case unlikely to be prosecuted is, by definition, without adequate predication.

📝 Footnote: In his memoir A Higher Loyalty, James Comey acknowledged that the Clinton case “did not appear to come anywhere near General Petraeus’s in the volume and classification level of the information mishandled.” He noted that everyone Clinton emailed “appeared to have both the appropriate clearance and a legitimate need to know,” and that the case was unlikely to be prosecuted from the outset.

This citation is drawn from , which align with the broader narrative in A Higher Loyalty. It reinforces your point: the FBI knew early on that the case lacked prosecutorial merit, yet chose to drag it out—strategically

🧵 What If Comey Had Acted in October 2015?

Lanny Davis asks the fateful question:

“What would have happened if Comey had announced on October 5, 2015—or December 5—that there was no prosecutable case?”

We’ll never know. But it’s safe to say:

  • You wouldn’t have had 60% of Americans believing Clinton should be indicted.
  • The email narrative would have been de-weaponized before Cillizza, Dean Baquet, and the rest of the media echo chamber could run wild.

🧨 Epistemological Irony

It’s rich that the GOP—allegedly libertarian—suddenly believes the government does email security better than the private sector. In reality:

  • State Department email systems were notoriously dysfunctional.
  • FBI investigators privately admitted Clinton’s private server was likely more secure than State’s own systems.

📝 FN: Of course, just like the GOP’s alleged ethics and principles, its ‘libertarianism’ is situational.

 

⚖️ Probable Cause and the Original Sin

Let’s be clear: Comey’s grand declaration that “we were not going to prejudge the result” is not noble—it’s legally incoherent. You’re supposed to prejudge the result to the extent that if indictment isn’t likely, the case shouldn’t be opened. That’s called probable cause. If you don’t have it, you don’t open the case.

“That might change, of course, if we could find a smoking-gun email… or if we could prove she obstructed justice… It would all turn on what we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.” — Comey, A Higher Loyalty, p. 125

📝 Footnote: Comey’s “smoking-gun email” fantasy—his so-called “Golden Emails”—never materialized for Clinton. But as we show in Chapter A, they did exist for George W. Bush. Everything they accused Clinton of was projection.

📝 Footnote: Speaking of obstruction, Mueller never compelled Trump—or Donald Jr.—to testify in the Russia investigation. Nor did he require grand jury testimony from Jr. or Don McGahn. Had Trump testified, he would have lied repeatedly, but the GOP—aka the Party of Treason—would have dismissed it as a mere “process crime.” The media wouldn’t have bothered pointing out the hypocrisy either.

🧩 The Case Was Never There

By early May 2016, Comey was already drafting his public statement. The Midyear team had long known that evidence of intent was lacking.

“I have cases where people have thousands of classified documents in their home and we don’t prosecute them… There needs to be nefarious intent or actual harm.” — FBI Attorney 1, IG Report

“Agent 2 told the OIG: You were hard-pressed to find the intent of anyone to put classified information on that server… Sloppy security practices, yes. But intentional? We just never found clear-cut evidence.”

Even Comey admitted:

“Everyone Clinton emailed appeared to have both the appropriate clearance and a legitimate need to know… We started the Clinton investigation aware that it was unlikely to be a case that career prosecutors at the DOJ would prosecute.” — A Higher Loyalty

📝 Footnote: That bears repeating. If a case is unlikely to be prosecuted, it lacks adequate predication. Opening such a case is not just improper—it’s a violation of DOJ standards.

🔚 Closing the Chapter, Opening the Reckoning

So while Michael Flynn claimed, “If I’d done 10% of what she did, I’d be in jail,” the truth is the opposite. Few, if any, would be treated like Clinton—unless their last name was Clinton.

If the FBI knew from the outset that proving intent was remote, then the investigation itself was illegitimate. As we argued in the last chapter: opening an investigation you know lacks probable cause is a crime. The longer it’s milked, the deeper the criminality.

July 10, 2015 was Comey’s original sin. October 1, 2015 added to it. July 5, 2016 compounded it. October 28, 2016 weaponized it.

 

 

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