RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton supporter, Fox News contributor, and former pollster Doug Schoen told FNC’s Harris Faulkner Sunday night that the newly renewed FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton is forcing him to “reassess” his support for the Democratic candidate.

DOUG SCHOEN: As you know, I have been a supporter of Secretary Clinton… But given that this investigation is going to go on for many months after the election… But if the Secretary of State wins, we will have a president under criminal investigation, with Huma Abedin under criminal investigation, with the Secretary of State, the president-elect, should she win under investigation.

Harris, under these circumstances, I am actively reassessing my support. I’m not a Trump —

HARRIS FAULKNER, FOX NEWS: Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You are not going to vote for Hillary Clinton?

SCHOEN: Harris, I’m deeply concerned that we’ll have a constitutional crisis if she’s elected.

FAULKNER: Wow!

SCHOEN: I want to learn more this week. See what we see. But as of today, I am not a supporter of the Secretary of State for the nation’s highest office.

FAULKNER: How long have you known the clintons.

SCHOEN: I’ve known the clintons since ’94.

FAULKNER: Wow! But their friend here has said he’s reconsidering.

SCHOEN: I have to, because of the impact on the governance of the country and our international situation.

FAULKNER: So the news in that is are there other people, I would imagine, like Doug Schoen.

We need not worry unduly about the factual void at the center of the FBI director’s announcement on Friday that the bureau had found emails—perhaps thousands—“pertinent” in some unspecified way to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails while she was secretary of state.

True, we don’t know what is actually in the emails of Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s close aide, but we can nonetheless draw some conclusions about how FBI Director James Comey came to issue his Delphic notice to Congress, and what the near-term future course of this investigation will be. Regrettably, those conclusions do no credit to him, or to the leadership of the Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part.

Friday’s announcement had a history. Recall that Mr. Comey’s authority extends only to supervising the gathering of facts to be presented to Justice Department lawyers for their confidential determination of whether those facts justify a federal prosecution.
Nonetheless, in July he announced that “no reasonable prosecutor” would seek to charge her with a crime, although Mrs. Clinton had classified information on a private nonsecure server—at least a misdemeanor under one statute; and although she was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information such that it was exposed to hacking by hostile foreign nations—a felony under another statute; and apparently had caused the destruction of emails—a felony under two other statutes. He then told Congress repeatedly that the investigation into her handling of emails was closed.

Those decisions were not his to make, nor were the reasons he offered for making them at all tenable: that prosecutions for anything but mishandling large amounts of classified information, accompanied by false statements to investigators, were unprecedented; and that criminal prosecutions for gross negligence were constitutionally suspect.

Members of the military have been imprisoned and dishonorably discharged for mishandling far less information, and prosecutions for criminal negligence are commonplace and entirely permissible. Yet the attorney general, whose decisions they were, and who had available to her enough legal voltage to vaporize Mr. Comey’s flimsy reasons for inaction, told Congress she would simply defer to the director.

That July announcement of Mr. Comey, and that testimony by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also had a history.

When the FBI learned that two of the secretary’s staff members had classified information on their computers, rather than being handed grand-jury subpoenas demanding the surrender of those computers, the staff members received immunity in return for giving them up. In addition, they successfully insisted that the computers not be searched for any data following the date when Congress subpoenaed information relating to its own investigation, and that the computers be physically destroyed after relevant data within the stipulated period was extracted.

The technician who destroyed 30,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails after Congress directed that they be preserved lied to investigators even after receiving immunity. He then testified that Clinton aides requested before service of the subpoena that he destroy them, and that he destroyed them afterward on his own initiative.

Why would an FBI director, who at one time was an able and aggressive prosecutor, agree to such terms or accept such a fantastic story? CONTINUE AT SITE

“Donald Trump is reacting to this with his usual overkill, asserting without evidence that the new emails may be those missing 33,000. But the legal and political blundering at Justice and FBI feed his message that the executive branch needs to be swept clean to end a culture of corruption. Mr. Comey is no hero, but neither is he responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s potential legal jeopardy. She has built her own career monument of deception and public mistrust.”

All of a sudden Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign have discovered the virtues of transparency. And all of a sudden FBI Director James Comey, formerly Eliot Ness in the eyes of Democrats and the press, is J. Edgar Hoover. Such are the miraculous political transformations caused by Mr. Comey’s announcement Friday that the FBI has found more emails that may be relevant to Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.

“It’s not just strange. It’s unprecedented, and it is deeply troubling, because voters deserve to get full and complete facts,” Mrs. Clinton said Saturday about Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress. That wasn’t her line when she created her personal email server to hide her correspondence from public-records laws, or when she claimed not to have sent classified information or did as little as possible to cooperate with Congress and the FBI.

Mrs. Clinton could still help voters out by coughing up her 33,000 missing emails. Or she could let her aide Huma Abedin explain to the press what she may have sent to estranged husband Anthony Weiner, whose laptop contains the new-found emails. But that kind of genuine transparency might be hard to contain. And with eight days until Nov. 8 the Democrats need someone else to blame for all of their previous lack of political transparency.

That means Mr. Comey, who over the weekend became the latest stand-in for the vast right-wing conspiracy. “By providing selective information, he has allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate in order to inflict maximum political damage, and no one can separate what is true from what is not because Comey has not been forthcoming with the facts,” said a clearly agitated Clinton campaign chief John Podesta in a media call Saturday.

Look for more to come as Democrats attempt to mobilize their supporters to vote by turning Mr. Comey into Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr. This won’t be easy since Mr. Comey was appointed by President Obama, and Democrats have spent so many years praising Mr. Comey as St. James of the Beltway.

Maybe they should have listened to our warnings about Mr. Comey when he let his buddy Patrick Fitzgerald prosecute Scooter Libby on dubious charges; when he overreached against financier Frank Quattrone; or when he threatened to resign if the Bush Administration didn’t follow his orders on surveillance. Democrats hailed those events.

Mr. Comey’s original sin in the Clinton investigation was not demanding that Justice empanel a grand jury. He compounded that with his July soliloquy to the media exonerating Mrs. Clinton when that is the job of Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mr. Comey’s friends are leaking that he felt he had to go public then because Ms. Lynch had compromised her credibility by meeting only days earlier with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac.

Mr. Comey’s public declaration undercut political accountability. And sure enough, Ms. Lynch responded by saying she would defer to Mr. Comey, essentially ducking her legal and political responsibility. Democrats and the media hailed Mr. Comey for his judgment.

Mr. Comey also told Congress at the time that the investigation was closed, and so he felt he was obliged to update the oversight committees when there was more information. No doubt he believed he had to do that before the election lest he be accused of participating in a cover-up if the new evidence later became public.

Ms. Lynch’s team is now leaking, and the Clinton campaign is amplifying, that Mr. Comey sent his Friday letter over the objections of Justice officials. But then why didn’t Ms. Lynch simply order him not to send the letter? The AG has clear line authority over the FBI director. Our guess is that she feared that Mr. Comey might then have resigned, which would have created an even bigger pre-election firestorm than an ambiguous letter. CONTINUE AT SITE