Call Hillary Clinton’s Bluff The FBI director and the Democratic nominee are getting what they deserve.By William McGurn

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/call-hillary-clintons-bluff-1477956829

Here are four words this columnist never thought he would type: Hillary Clinton is right.

Mrs. Clinton is right, at least, to this extent: When an FBI director links a presidential candidate to a criminal investigation 11 days out from the election, he owes the American people more than a vague promise to get back to us down the road.

Mrs. Clinton has responded by calling on Mr. Comey to release the emails the bureau has discovered on a home computer used by her aide, Huma Abedin. She demands this only because she is confident it will never happen.

 Certainly there exist many practical obstacles to releasing the emails uncovered, including the inadvertent disclosure of classified information. Nevertheless, as unlikely as release may be, the case for more public information has become crucial now that the Justice Department has indicated this Clinton investigation, like the one before it, will go nowhere.

How do we know this? Mr. Comey may speak of going forward. But the objections of Justice suggest that it will again ensure that any investigation will be hindered by a lack of search warrants and subpoenas—and that whatever the FBI may turn up will never be put before a grand jury.

Justice inadvertently gave us a sign of just how important these tools are in a press release earlier this month touting the guilty felony plea by retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright for lying to the FBI in connection with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. In it, Justice boasts about using all the tools at its disposal to get the general, including “subpoenas, search warrants and document requests”—tools the FBI mostly lacked while investigating Mrs. Clinton.

A truly independent press corps might help here if it were not bent on validating Donald Trump’s complaints about a rigged system. In the dominant media narrative, not only is Mr. Comey now derided as “political,” his decision to investigate this newly discovered batch of emails is said to have been forced by “conservative” FBI agents.

Mr. Comey may indeed be in the thick of a huge battle within the bureau. But the main objections from FBI agents and former FBI agents have little to do with electoral politics and everything to do with investigative procedure.

FBI agents are professional investigators. In a case involving a former secretary of state who is now a candidate for president, they would expect their director to be telling his agents to make sure every “i” was dotted and every “t” crossed. And doing the same himself.CONTINUE AT SITE

 

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