RUTHFULLY YOURS

FBI director James Comey really stepped in it.  He should have known that cleaning up one of Hillary Clinton’s messes would be just like wiping that proverbial dog poop off your shoe.  You think you’ve got it, but there is always some left over in the tread that you track into the house.  The wife yells, and then you’re on your hands and knees with the carpet cleaner while your oversized Rottweiler puppy tries to eat the filthy rag.   Welcome to my life…but I digress.

Over a long career, Comey carefully cultivated a reputation for smarts and probity.  Perhaps it was truly earned, more likely the result of basic competence combined with clever politicking and strategic sycophancy.  Either way, it earned him his current job and, as standing in D.C. goes, an enviable combination of power and respect on both sides of the aisle.

Comey was no stranger to Hillary’s machinations.  He was part of the team that investigated Whitewater only to recommend that no charges be filed.  Confronted with Hillary Clinton’s email corruption, Comey tried to be too clever by half.  He accompanied his legally and bureaucratically inappropriate exoneration of Clinton in July with a public tongue-lashing intended to preserve his Boy Scout image while letting Clinton, himself, and his agency off a sharp political hook.  He rather spectacularly failed.

Comey’s letter to the Senate last Friday announcing that the FBI was reopening the email investigation that he closed so confidently in July has placed the nation into a constitutional crisis regardless of what the emails actually say, or the outcome of any further investigation or criminal proceedings.  The mere fact that FBI agents found problematic emails on at least one computer owned by Huma Abedin (Hillary’s closest aide) and her estranged pederast husband, former Democrat New York congressman Anthony Weiner, after voting in the election has begun, ensures that regardless of outcome, the result will not be accepted as legitimate by a significant portion of the American public.

The political and media hyperventilation over Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the November result now appears doubly hypocritical and misplaced.  Hillary and her allies are already lambasting Comey – their erstwhile former hero – for inserting himself into the race less than two weeks before Election Day.  Are Hillary and her supporters now prepared to accept the election result if Trump pulls out a come-from-behind win thanks in part to public misgivings over the renewed investigation?  And should Hillary win, it goes without saying that Trump and Republicans in general will have legitimate reasons to question a result that makes a person under active criminal investigation President-Elect.

Given all this, it is a disaster no matter what the emails found on the Abedin-Weiner computer(s) actually say.

The best case for Hillary, implied to some degree in Comey’s letter, is that the emails are just more of the same, which in typical Clinton form will dismissed just like that.  Comey has already put Clinton in the clear for disseminating the most highly classified material over her home-brewed server, including Special Access Protocol (code word level) documents.  Further classified emails might look bad, but based on Comey’s and Loretta Lynch’s prior determinations, Clinton will not be in legal jeopardy.  This is clearly what Clinton and her team believe (no doubt Abedin has assured them there is nothing more incriminating), which is why they are pushing for disclosure of the documents.  Just as certainly, this will not satisfy Trump or Republicans who disagreed with Comey’s and Lynch’s actions in the first instance.

In the worst case, the emails may contain information more obviously incriminating than those produced so far.  That would mean not merely more classified documents, but rather some of the 30,000-plus documents Hillary thought she’d destroyed.  These documents may prove active criminal conspiracies regarding influence-peddling at the State Department, obstruction of justice, or who knows what Hillary, her cronies, or her husband got up to.  This seems unlikely, given Hillary’s call for the documents’ release, but perhaps she and her team are just playing chicken with Comey, calling for release but figuring it can’t happen before November 8.

Something in between is Huma Abedin’s criminal liability.  She’s far more exposed than Hillary.  It’s highly likely that when the FBI interviewed Abedin, they asked her for all the devices (or at least an accounting of the same) that might have contained any classified information.  The devices just uncovered obviously were not turned over to the FBI and almost certainly were not accounted for by Abedin.  At a minimum, she appears to have lied to the FBI, which supposedly is the one thing you cannot do – ask retired Marine general James Cartwright or David Petraeus.   I don’t doubt that Huma would happily take a fall for Hillary – to be handsomely recompensed later – if it came down to that.  But that still means that Hillary would enter office with her top aide under felony indictment.  Even Nixon had breathing space of a couple of years before that happened.

What is plainly obvious is that this election will never be accepted by a substantial portion of the American electorate.  The chief malefactor is Hillary Clinton, who placed the country in this position thanks to her insatiable ambition, mendacity, and unrepentant criminality.  But Comey had a chance to obviate that situation and incredibly made it worse.

Comey took it upon himself, stepping into a politically charged situation he could have avoided simply by doing his duty as a federal policeman.  Comey could have referred the case to Justice for Loretta Lynch to take the embarrassing step of refusing to empanel a grand jury, or simply resigned on principle if he was pressured to do otherwise.  Instead, he tried to have it both ways, trying to accommodate Clinton, Loretta Lynch, and the president by finding clever excuses to overlook Hillary’s obvious criminality while excoriating her ethically.  For a time, at least on the left, he looked like a Solomonic hero.  Now that baby has come back to bite him and the country he supposedly serves.  He is a victim both of his own hubris and of that destructive machine called Clinton.

Count one more under the Clinton bus.  It’s getting crowded down there.