The FBI has cleared Hillary Clinton (again) from any criminal wrongdoing related to her private email server, but James Comey already did his damage and should resign once Clinton is inaugurated. It’s obvious that he made an effort to sabotage her campaign and he stalled her momentum and caused people who voted early to have a false and negative impression of Clinton. He should not expect her to trust him, nor for Democratic partisans to have any faith in his impartiality.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
But “The Cokie Roberts Rule” did its work, to perfection.
Mission accomplished. It’s the go-to Republican tool. They can count on it working for them every time, especially when it involves a Clinton. The media is always happy to oblige.
You know how mush you have to review. You know how long that takes.
If they knew there was a chance they could get the e-mail completed before election, saying anything to te public is inexcusable.
33,000 emails took Comey’s staff eight or nine months to review, but he should have known they could sort through 650,000 emails in seven days? Yeah, we’ll be hearing all the “explanations” for why this review could be expedited at warp speed. Doesn’t matter if any of it’s true. 90% of Americans will use their partisanship to determine what they believe or disbelieve. The remainder attempt to use critical thinking skills, but are derided and denigrated by one side or the other and often both sides.
We don’t actually know how many of those 650,000, if that figure is even correct, pertains to HRC. From that number that are found to be client-side (not on the cloud) copies of emails from HRC it would be fairly easy to determine if they are duplicates of emails that the FBI already has.
Once the FBI determined that they were duplicates no further investigation is needed into classification concerns as was the case in the first investigation.
Software programs could go through 650,000 emails to determine which ones are duplicates in, I’m guessing, less than an hour.
The ratfucking comes with the announcement being made before they went through any of them.
Far less than an hour.
And that would have been clear to everyone as soon as the cache was found. No reason to go to congress until importance or lack thereof of the cache was established by this simple software check. An hour or less to write a script and a few minutes to run the check for unique emails.
The fact that Comey or his underlings must have known how easy it would be to check this and yet went ahead with their charade is damning.
Mission accomplished.
Time for Comey’s lucrative career in the private sector.
Or a nonprofit legal foundation making well over 6 figures. He wins either way.
The whole upper echelon of the Trump campaign cut its teeth on the Clinton ‘scandals’ of the 90’s and they are ready to continue their ‘work’. There are suckers to fleece. Comey will join that group as their ‘Legal Advisor’.
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Comey, though certainly not the hero of this piece, is not the real villain of it either. He handled the situation poorly, but the actual perpetrators are a rogue element within the FBI. The following piece shows the way into this cesspool:
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2016/11/youll-be-amused-to-know-who-in-media.html
Notice how Tim Kaine chooses his words here:
“He probably felt pressured to do something because he felt like subordinates were going to do it if he didn’t,” Kaine said.
“In the aftermath, there’s going to be a lot of questions about why the FBI turned into a body where some were trying to put their thumb on the scale in an election. I don’t think he (Comey) was, but I think there are clearly people in the organization that trying to do that. It’s very troubling.”
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/05/politics/tim-kaine-fbi-hillary-clinton-email/index.html?eref=mrss_igoo
gle_politics
Note that Obama also has refused to throw Comey under the bus.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/10/31/white-house-comey-is-a-man-of-integrity-n223961
9
I would suggest several reasons for this:
I think I asked this in the last Comey-thread, so I will try again: if Clinton fires Comey, Comey sues (since he can only be fired for cause) and if he wins, does he get the job back or just money?
Though I guess it is pointless to fire him unless the Democrats wins the Senate, or it might prove hard to appoint anyone better.
Yeah, remarkable how clunky the mechanisms of a plural democracy are compared to the well-oiled machinery of a strongman autocracy. Putin for example! What a guy.
Nobody’s firing Comey. Comey knows where the bodies are vuried, and he wasn’t the one that buried them. Obama and Clinton nay have been initially pissed off at Comey, but they understand that what’s need now is not a scapegoat (Comey) but full exposure of this putrid mess, and a thorough house cleaning. They can’t play around, it’s too serious.
If (don’t know)
Then Putin!
Now not just for emails anymore.
The NY FBI office needs to be swept clean then take Rudy & Comey with them as they exit.
This is a blatant Hatch Act violation. AG Lynch has ample reason to nail Kallstrom and others in the NY Office for violations. They should lose their jobs and maybe their pensions too. If there ends up being any connection with Russia, we’re talking treason.
For all the certainty some have about how the fix is in… here’s an example of the deep state intervening to help the GOP retain control of Congress, if not help Trump win. Those types are silent when it comes to someone they hate.
If the Democrats win the Senate it is imperative that they shine a bright light into what’s happening at the FBI. If not, they’ll keep getting screwed over. Imagine what Trump would do with access to that kind of power.
And it’s pretty obvious that there are plenty of FBI agents that would be fine to do whatever Trump would want.
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There are two things I hate about this:
Totally admire your sense of civics on this point…
And find it utterly charming and pleasant to consider such a world. But that ship so sailed in the first Reagan administration. Remember ‘shining city on a hill’ as they picked our pockets? It has been a race to the bottom since and the list of enablers and participants includes just about everybody except the victims.
I’m fairly certain that some of the “progressives” will be posting diaries about how Comey is a phony and we all know Hillary is a manipulator.
a little nervous about having a female prez, are you? engaging in a little projection? [or a lot?]
New around here?
Intentionally oblivious?
They will be along in a few minutes to explain how what Comey did because it pales in comparison to what they did 40 years ago.
Then we will get a discussion of how many angels could fit on the head of a needle, if only needles had heads.
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Do you post these because you’ve had your ability to rate comments taken away?
for me would be a more accurate way of stating it. booman had no solution. Already explained couple times before.
mustache of understanding III: why did it take the weekend to get the letter out? ran into some HRC young women campaign workers [I know, they don’t exist] getting take out at noon on frday. they said all the emails were AW’s or HA’s on the computer. so if it was known on Friday at noontime ….
That fact was known once the circumstances behind the letter leaked on Oct 28th. The FBI sat on this for ~4 weeks. They wasted all of that time in order to run a search query that would have taken all of ten minutes to determine the emails were duplicates.
that they were personal, not work related [i.e nothing pertaining to HA’s work with Hillary]
Ah, I’m not sure that they were personal and/or work-related. Haven’t read that information yet although not sure that it matters as long as it wasn’t restricted classified information. Seeing that the FBI has released this statement then it likely wasn’t as that would become an issue for Huma Abedin. We’ll see.
I’m just saying it looks like they were cleared some days ago; otoh who knows?
Caught this last paragraph in an article on a different subject:
Assuming Comey saw that too.
○ Trump would stay ‘neutral’ on Israeli-Palestinian conflict | The Times of Israel |
○ Adelson to Republican Jewish leaders: Support Trump | JPost |
Unabashed Israel supporters of the illegal West Bank occupation, etc. often use the anti-semitic J’accuse when losing the argument …
If the Trump campaign wanted to go anti-semitic, it would not have been Yellen’s photo, but her deputy’s Stanley Fischer, former head of the Israel Central Bank.
In fact, it quotes Zola accusing the Faure government of anti-semitism dans l’affaire Dreyfus.
You could have found any combination of J’accuse as I have used it as a headline a few times for social injustice …
I think this letter is part of the same ratfucking continued. CNN is all over it of course. Clinton and her surrogates want to talk about her closing arguments, not James Comey.
Trump isn’t changing his stump speech and Trump surrogates are happy to say Comey is wrong, Hillary put national security at risk, lied and yada, yada, yada. It is all bullshit of course, but it is bullshit the Republicans want dominating the news coverage. Tomorrow will all be about emails again.
Comey hurt Clinton when he editorialized rather than just announce the case was closed without charges. He hurt her when he released the FBI files. He hurt her when he sent the letter two weeks ago and he hurt her today.
I say he should be fired on Wednesday.
Missed this originally but a compelling read:
Pierce reminds us of the original deal between the NYT and the Clinton Cash author and “veteran GOP ratfcker Peter Schweizer” back in 2015:
Probably the most alarming thing in the campaign given our previous mythology on the ethos of the institution.
Hoover’s FBI.
Maybe more like Hanssen’s, though.
I’ll grant Comey partial credit for seeming to realize just how badly he’d fucked up.
Only partial because
The fact that they sat on them, made an announcement about “new emails”, when they could have sat for an extra few days and not wrote the letter, makes this a ratfucking operation.
Comey has inflicted yet another blow to confidence in our institutions of governance. He needs to resign , and tithe new head needs to do some house cleaning.
Comey won’t have to resign if he helps with the house cleaning. The revolting agents are no friends of Comey.
As for Giuliani, he’s as revolting as ever.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/03/meet-donald-trump-s-top-fbi-fanboy.html