Forced to do the right thing

Back in July, I gave FBI director James Comey the benefit of the doubt. I suggested that he held his press conference to explain why Hillary Clinton wasn’t being indicted because it was the only viable way to put the evidence of her abuse of government security protocols before the public. I thought then that the Justice Department under Loretta Lynch would never bring a conviction against Hillary, regardless of the evidence. That would, of course, have allowed her to claim that she’d been exonerated.

While that is still one possible explanation, Judge Andrew Napolitano has a better understanding of the way Washington works, and he offers another scenario:

When Clinton herself was interviewed on July 2 — for only four hours, during which the interviewers seemed to some in the bureau to lack aggression, passion and determination — some FBI agents privately came to the same conclusion as their former boss: The case was going sideways.

A few determined agents were frustrated by Clinton’s professed lack of memory during her interview and her oblique reference to a recent head injury she had suffered as the probable cause of that. They sought to obtain her medical records to verify the gravity of her injury and to determine whether she had been truthful with them. They prepared the paperwork to obtain the records, only to have their request denied by Director Comey himself on July 4.

Then some agents did the unthinkable; they reached out to colleagues in the intelligence community and asked them to obtain Clinton’s medical records so they could show them to Comey. We know that the National Security Agency can access anything that is stored digitally, including medical records. These communications took place late on July 4.

When Comey learned of these efforts, he headed them off the next morning with his now infamous news conference, in which he announced that Clinton would not be indicted because the FBI had determined that her behavior, though extremely careless, was not reckless, which is the legal standard in espionage cases. He then proceeded to recount the evidence against her. He did this, no doubt, to head off the agents who had sought the Clinton medical records, whom he suspected would leak evidence against her.

In other words, Comey’s decision to look at Hillary’s emails again may have been forced by the possibility that frustrated agents in the bureau were ready to leak even more evidence about Hillary’s use — and President Obama’s knowledge — of her illegal personal email server.

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