The FBI investigation that "ended" in July

Want to read something substantial? Sharyl Attkisson provides us with

The Clearest (No Spin) Summary of FBI Report on Hillary Clinton Email.

She provides us with

The Takeaways. The Players. The Timeline.

The Takeaways:

The FBI could not review all of the Hillary Clinton emails under investigation because:

The Clintons’ Apple personal server used for Hillary Clinton work email could not be located for the FBI to examine.

An Apple MacBook laptop and thumb drive that contained Hillary Clinton email archives were lost, and the FBI couldn’t examine them.

2 BlackBerry devices provided to FBI didn’t have their SIM or SD data cards.

13 Hillary Clinton personal mobile devices were lost, discarded or destroyed. Therefore, the FBI couldn’t examine them.
Various server backups were deleted over time, so the FBI couldn’t examine them.

After State Dept. notified Hillary Clinton her records would be sought by House Benghazi Committee, copies of her email on the laptops of her attorneys Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were wiped with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn’t review them.

After her emails were subpoenaed, Hillary Clinton’s email archive was also permanently deleted from her then-server “PRN” with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn’t review it.

Also after the subpoena, backups of the PRN server were manually deleted.

Even though the FBI did not have a complete record of Hillary Clinton’s emails on three unclassified personal servers, it found:

2,093 emails State Dept. currently classifies as Confidential or Secret. (State Dept. did not address what their classification was at the time they were sent.)

193 emails (81 separate email conversations) that were classified at the time they were sent, ranging from “Confidential” to “Top Secret/Special Access Program.”

68 of the 81 email chains remain classified today.
8 were Top Secret.
37 were Secret.
36 were Confidential.
7 were Special Access Program.
3 were Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.
36 were Not Releasing to Foreign Governments.
2 were Releasable Only to Five Allied Partners.
12 of the suspect email chains were not provided by Hillary’s attorneys. The FBI found them other ways.
The email chains contained classified information from 5 other agencies: CIA, DOD, FBI, NGA and NSA.

Read about the players and a detailed timeline here.

It's about Wikileaks!

In a poorly written post, Sean Hannity argues that the reopening of the FBI investigation into Hillary's emails hd nothing to do with Huma Abedin or Anthony Weiner. Hannity believes the FBI Director acted because he knows Julian Assange and the Wikileakers have more damning evidence to come in the days leading up to November 8. Try to read more here.

Good question

One of Instapundit's readers emails him:

“You need to put out there the real scandal: how did FBI not seize laptop used by Clinton’s top aide until now? Suggests DOJ obstructionism/hamstringing.”

Glenn Reynolds replies, "Yes, yes it does."

Trained like Pavlov’s dogs

Bookworm writes, like nobody else can,

Charlie Kirk’s hypothesis about millennials forces one to reach much the same conclusion about them that Adams reached about women: The young Bernie supporters who cannot get excited about Hillary have been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to get excited about accusations of men engaged in sexual misconduct. While they wouldn’t vote for Hillary, now that she fits into their hardwired victim algorithm, they will turn out in droves to punish Trump.

Two other things lead me to believe we’re in the last half-hour of an opera that ends with all the good people scattered about dead on the stage:

The rampant voter corruption across America, which includes everything from hundreds of thousands of dead people voting, and not just in Illinois; to the fact that illegal aliens are being welcomed into polling spots; to the fact that states such as Colorado no longer even require a verifiable address as a predicate to voter registration, making it impossible to weed out those who are voting illegally.

The fact that FBI agents are whining that Comey sold them out but they’re too cowardly to come forward and tell the American people that, in their professional opinion, Hillary is guilty of gross violations of American security law and should be rotting in prison even now.
The fix is in. The soprano is already dead. She just doesn’t know it.

The next four years will set us on a path the effects of which will last decades and from which we may never recover:

The Supreme Court will be hard Left, meaning that the Constitution is a dead letter. A dead letter Constitution means no more religious freedom, no more free speech, no more freedom of assembly, no more Second Amendment rights, no more due process rights . . . all of it will be gone. America will be under a totalitarian rule that melds the worst American college campuses, where speech, assembly, religious rights, the right to bear arms, and due process are gone, with the South Side of Chicago, where the early death of the Second Amendment has already established criminal control over the streets. Sometimes the criminals will be employees of government agencies such as the IRS, EPA, FDA, DOE, etc., all of whom Obama has conveniently armed more heavily than the Marines, and sometimes the criminals will be your ordinary street psychopath. Regardless of their origin, we’ll be just as dead or cowed.

The fact that a corrupt FBI and DOJ gave Hillary a pass for gross, explicit, intentional violations of America’s national security laws, and that she then got rewarded with a all-expenses paid trip to the White House, means that the rule of law is dead in America. Absolutely nothing distinguishes us anymore from a banana republic.

Our medicine will be socialized. Moreover, because we’re $19 trillion in debt, and there’s no other American government to provide additional funding as America did for Europe during the Cold War, we won’t pass through the pleasant French or English experience in which people boasted about their access to doctors (never mind that they had consistently worse outcomes than in America). With our debt, we’re going straight to Venezuela. Stock up on those vitamin pills, people. You’re going to need them.

Euthanasia will become official government policy. When your medicine is Venezuela-level, it’s much cheaper and more effective to kill people than to try to treat them. An added benefit is that dead people don’t complain.

The rich and the upper middle classes, and then the middle classes, will be taxed into oblivion (with careful exemptions cut out for the people and corporations, such as the social media giants and Goldman Sachs, who provided the ideological muscle and the funding for Hillary’s ascendancy). In the first year those taxes are in effect it will look sweet, because America’s coffers will get a temporary boost. After that, the money will be gone. The taxed people will be wrung out, and there won’t be enough wealth left in the economy to trigger the creation of new wealth. And again, unlike the Cold War era, when American cash absorbed the worst of Europe’s socialized tax rates for forty-plus years, there will be no America to make up the difference. Again, hello, Venezuela!

The La Raza crowd will probably get what it wants: The entire American Southwest, and California of course, will once again revert to being extensions of Mexico.

Our military will continue on its path to rid the world of climate change and to ensure social justice for all except white people, especially white males. Within a few years, the US military won’t be able to take out Tonga should Tonga decide to attack.

Iran will go nuclear. Israel, if she’s unlucky, might just go altogether. Poof. (On second thought, looking at the worldwide awfuls a Hillary presidency ushers in, maybe I should say, “Israel, if she’s lucky, might just go altogether.” Living in a post-apocalyptic world isn’t fun.)

Europe, without an America on which to rely, will go two ways: Either full Muslim or it will fall into violent religious wars of the type that devastated huge swaths of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As Russia is already demonstrating, without an American deterrent, it will control the entire Middle East, including Middle Eastern oil. Moreover, even though Middle Eastern oil is becoming more expensive to unearth, Hillary’s administration will put the kibosh on all American fossil fuel drilling. Thus, despite sitting on oil reserves that can last for generations, we will be more dependent than ever on Islamic theocracies, with the added punch that Putin will get a cut. Russia will also extend its control once again over Eastern Europe and perhaps Central Europe. Western Europe, either a Caliphate or a battlefield, will not be worth Russia’s effort.

China, too, will go to town without an American deterrent and will control the entire Asian Pacific. Citizens of the Asian Pacific region will not be happy.

Things will get really interesting if China and Russia end up in a hot war for world domination. I don’t think either would have second thoughts about total warfare of the type moral nations such as Israel and America have avoided since WWII.

The fact that the sane constitutionalists among us will have “I told you so rights” will be scant consolation. At the end of the day, all we can do is echo Candide: “All that is very well . . . but let us cultivate our garden.” (With said garden possibly providing the only food available to us.)

I am not sanguine.

UPDATE: A good night’s sleep helped reset my mood, and I am ready again to berate people into voting for Trump regardless of his sins. This may well be the last chance traditional, patriotic Americans (no matter their race, creed, country of national origin, sex, sexual orientation, whatever) can make their voices heard, and they should do it loudly and clearly. When we do so, we’re electing, not a man, but a set of core American values that we want to see in our lives and in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

"Co-conspirator Mills was laundered into lawyer Mills."

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...The FBI was not required to treat a conspiracy to obstruct justice as if it were good-faith assistance of counsel. Nevertheless, co-conspirator Mills was laundered into lawyer Mills. When Mills lied to agents about not knowing of the Clinton homebrew server while at State — a story that doesn’t pass the laugh test — this false account was shrugged off as one of those innocent, unresolvable failures of recollection.

Read more here.

Did someone restrain the FBI?

Judge Andrew Napolitano believes someone restrained the FBI. He writes in the Washington Times,

The FBI did not ask Mrs. Clinton aggressive follow-up questions. Her interrogators just blithely accepted her answers. They failed to present her with documents she had signed that would have contradicted what she was telling them — particularly, an oath she signed on her first day in office promising to recognize state secrets when she came upon them and to keep them in secure venues. And agents violated Department of Justice policy by not recording her interrogation when her lawyers told them she would not answer questions if her answers were recorded.

...It is apparent that some in FBI management blindly followed what they were told to do — exonerate Hillary Clinton. There is no other explanation for the FBI’s failure from the outset to use ordinary law enforcement tools available to it. Yet some in the FBI are not professionally satisfied by this outcome. They know that a strong case for prosecution and for guilt is being ignored for political reasons.

What else do they know?

Incompetent...and the Democrat nominee

h/t 90 Miles from Tyranny

Reckless disregard of American security

Austin Bay writes at Observer,

Comey called this careless. Sir, it is reprehensible. It is reckless disregard of American security.

...This is beyond outrage. Everyone who has carried a Top Secret clearance and had access to Top Secret information knows that Clinton has criminally violated the laws protecting classified information. These laws serve a purpose. Protecting security secrets is essential to protecting America.

Read more here.

Gross negligence!

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed. It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged.

It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we’ve decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.

Finally, I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey’s claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton’s conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.

Read more here.

The fix was in, and has been all along.

The Clintons are not criminal, just sloppy! Michael Walsh writes in PJ Media,

And so once again the leading crime family in America skates, thumbing its nose at the rule of law as an earnest but politically clueless FBI director stands before the nation to repeat the well-worn Clinton mantra of "insufficient evidence," and to attribute to Hillary another shopworn cliche that the Clintons habitually use in their defense: sloppiness.

Never mind that the woman was Secretary of State, for God's sake, not some pencil-pushing bureaucrat toiling away in the bowels of Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State is the most distinguished cabinet position in the government, a honor generally bestowed by responsible presidents on their most trusted and able advisors. But, as it turns out, for Mrs. Clinton it was simply a resume-enhancer and if she had to let four Americans die at Benghazi at her boss's behest in order to get her ticket punched, well, politics ain't beanbag.

...Hillary and Obama, all smiles, out campaigning together this very day. The events of the past week would give any rational person sufficient grounds to believe that the fix was in, and has been all along.

Above the law!

There is only one news story today. Hillary Clinton has been cleared by the FBI! Politico has the story:

FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday announced the agency is not recommending the Justice Department bring charges against Hillary Clinton, while also denouncing the former secretary of state and her colleagues for the way they handled classified information through private email servers.

"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is information that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," Comey told reporters in Washington, D.C., noting that the probe has found that the former secretary of state used several different email servers and numerous devices during her time in office.

“The system is rigged. General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning, making reference to the disgraced former CIA director who resigned in the wake of an extramarital affair with his biographer with whom he had shared classified information.

Trump reiterated his claims of a rigged system in a subsequent tweet. “FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem,” he wrote.

...Comey announced that 110 emails in 52 separate chains had been determined to contain classified information “at the time they were sent or received.”

...“But even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” Comey said.

The FBI’s investigation is only the latest probe into one of the Clintons’ alleged wrongdoings, following multiple investigations into Clinton’s response to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and an array of scandals that dogged President Bill Clinton during his time in the White House.

...But even the integrity of the FBI’s investigation was called into question when Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting that same day with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. On Friday, Lynch said their meeting "cast a shadow" over the investigation and asserted that she "certainly wouldn't do it again."

...“The FBI decision shows once again how the Clintons and others at the top get to live by a different set of rules from everyone else,” tweeted Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the former chairman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Read more here.

More to come on this

What a summer this is going to be...for both parties!

Rigged?