FBI Director Comey Is Wrong: The Case for Prosecuting Hillary Clinton Is Strong
by SHANNEN W. COFFIN July 5, 2016 4:50 PM
The FBI built a solid case for prosecuting Hillary Clinton’s criminal misdeeds — but then inexplicably decided not to recommend her prosecution.
Like Andy McCarthy, I worked with Jim Comey at the Department of Justice. Jim has always been very cordial and accommodating to me, including supporting some charity fundraising I have done. He is not a close personal friend, but he is someone I worked closely with at times, and have always regarded warmly. With that said, it is clear to me that Director Comey blinked under pressure.
Comey’s Tuesday morning press conference read like the opening statement for the prosecution. He dismantled several of the lies that Hillary’s camp has propounded over the last 16 months. As to her claim that there were never any classified materials nor classified markings in her e-mail, he concluded that 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains contained information that was classified at the time they were sent. Eight of those e-mail chains were classified top secret and seven contained special-access (or “SCI”) material, the most sensitive secrets our government protects. Some of those classified e-mails — albeit a “very small number” (the exact number is undisclosed) — “bore markings that indicated the presence of classified information.” With respect to the SCI material, Comey reasoned that “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.” None of these e-mails “should have been on any kind of unclassified system.”
He all but concluded that Hillary had been hacked by foreign powers — or at least substantially increased the risk of such hacking with her reckless handling of her e-mail system. The FBI did not find “direct evidence” of successful hacking, but given the nature of the system and the sophistication of the hackers, it was “unlikely to see such direct evidence.” Nevertheless, the FBI knows that “hostile actors gained access to the private commercial accounts of people” — such as Sidney Blumenthal — “with whom the Secretary was in regular contact from her personal account.” That risk, of course, would have existed with an official account as well. But the director also noted that her use of a personal e-mail account to conduct foreign business “was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent,” which substantially increased that risk. Finally, and most damningly, she “used her personal e-mail extensively while outside of the United States, including sending and receiving worked-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” This merely confirms what was already public, including e-mail chains in which her aides talked of security incidents while traveling in China. As a result, the FBI determined it “is possible that hostile actors gained access” to her official e-mails.
Comey also debunked the notion that Hillary had turned over all of her official e-mails to the State Department when requested. “Several thousand” undisclosed e-mails were identified by the FBI, culled either directly from her server or from other sources such as other State Department employees’ e-mails. As we’ve discussed in these pages, federal law makes it a felony for the official custodian of a federal record to intentionally and unlawfully conceal, alter, or delete that record. Comey concluded there was nothing nefarious in those deletions, reasoning that there was “no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way.” But the very existence of the server evidences deliberate concealment. Comey provided no explanation for Clinton’s reasons behind the server itself. Nor did he seek to address the legality of Clinton’s exclusive use of that server to conduct official business out of the gaze of public scrutiny. More at Source
