Jim Geraghty: ‘Picture Comey’s Office When the Complete 68 Pages of the FBI Investigation Comes to his Desk’

Jim Geraghty writes:

…Picture Comey’s office when the complete 68 pages of the FBI investigation comes to his desk. It’s a mess for her:

1. Despite many public denials, 110 of her e-mails contained classified information. This, by itself, is a crime.
2. She and/or her team destroyed e-mails that were under congressional subpoena.
3. Her team used BleachBit to erase e-mails that were required to be preserved under public-records laws.
4. She had not turned over work-related e-mails as she claimed; several thousand work-related e-mails were not given to the State Department, as required by law.
5. Despite her continued insistence that her system was secure, an unknown individual using the encrypted privacy tool Tor to hide their tracks accessed an e-mail account on a Clinton family server.
6. The evidence pointed to a deliberate, ongoing effort to keep all of her communications off of the secure State Department system, which would be subject to subpoenas and Freedom of Information Act requests. She used several different e-mail servers on her private system, as well as 13 mobile devices and five iPads.
7. At no time did she get permission, as required, to do official work on her mobile devices. Clinton frequently lost her phones — which included her e-mails with classified information — and she and her staff could not account for them. An assistant to former president Bill Clinton lost a laptop holding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Again, as secretary of state, she swore an oath to protect that information. As Comey declared in his statement, “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”
8. Either she or her staff lied to the FBI; Clinton said she never had a computer in her Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (basically, a room that is nearly impossible to bug or eavesdrop). Huma Abedin said she did.
9. During the interview with the FBI, Clinton said she “couldn’t recall” more than three dozen times. One portion of the report suggests Clinton could not remember whether or not she received security briefings. But she had previously signed official documents declaring she had been properly briefed.

[Read the full text here, at National Review Online]

Comey looked at that report and saw plenty of potential reasons to recommend impaneling a grand jury. But had the FBI recommended seeking an indictment of Hillary Clinton, it undoubtedly would have created a political earthquake.

The entire Democratic Party would have exploded in rage at the bureau. Comey would have instantly been painted as worse than Ken Starr, worse than Inspector Javert, worse than Torquemada. Clinton defenders would charge that the FBI was torpedoing her presidential campaign, and they might just be right: At the time of Comey’s decision, the Democratic convention was just three weeks away.

If the FBI recommended seeking an indictment, Bernie Sanders might have made another push at the convention. Perhaps Democratic delegates would have panicked. Maybe Joe Biden would have suddenly changed his mind…(read more)

Source: National Review Online

Related articles

• Huma Abedin Lied to the FBI? (matrixbob.wordpress.com)
• Huma Abedin Told FBI She Didn’t Know About Hillary’s Private Server, She Lied (youngcons.com)
• Why House Republicans aren’t likely to find a smoking gun in the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email probe (washingtonpost.com)
• The Evidence the FBI Ignored (wsj.com)
• Huma Abedin Has Finally Had Enough of Anthony Weiner (everyjoe.com)