FBI Director James Comey could have resigned. Instead, he stood at the podium, outlined in some detail the crimes that Hillary Clinton had committed and then said that he wasn’t recommending she be indicted. It didn’t make any sense.
Comey is reportedly a smart man but he made the illogical argument that he wasn’t going to recommend for indictment because no prosecutor would bring the case to court. So he wasn’t going to recommend Hillary Clinton be indicted because no prosecutor would prosecute the case, and no prosecutor will prosecute her because he didn’t recommend her for indictment.
Could he have meant that he had already been told that the attorney general didn’t care what he found and the case was not going to be prosecuted? That would have made a lot of sense.
What Comey didn’t say was that Hillary Clinton didn’t break the law.
So he said in summary that Hillary Clinton violated the law on handling confidential and top-secret documents while secretary of state, but despite that fact, the FBI is not recommending prosecution.
When the things that government officials say don’t make sense, it is invariably because politics is involved. (And in this case we know politics was involved because it included Bill Clinton, who is a consummate politician and met with the Attorney General Loretta Lynch last week. Despite what Lynch says, they didn’t meet to talk about grandchildren.)
Comey’s statement did go into some detail about all the lies that Hillary Clinton has told about her use of a private server:
There were classified documents on her server, some were classified at the time and some were marked classified.
Hillary Clinton used a variety of mobile communication devices to access her email, so it wasn’t that she used the server against regulations for the convenience of carrying only one phone.
She didn’t turn over all of the government related emails to the State Department when ordered to do so and her lawyers didn’t read every email. They also deleted emails so that they could not be fully retrieved, but fragments were recovered that were not about yoga, her mother’s funeral or her daughter’s wedding but were about State Department business.
Those emails that were government related are by law to be kept in government archives, which is another law she broke.
It is likely that foreign countries hacked into her private email server and gained access to top-secret government documents.
And those documents are so top secret that the American people can’t be told anything about them, but the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans and certainly the Israelis have them. It seems they might as well release them since the only people who don’t have access are law-abiding American citizens.
The statement by Comey proves that we are not a country of laws. There is one set of laws for us common folk, but people like Hillary Clinton don’t have to obey them.
Gen. David Petraeus was prosecuted and pled guilty to keeping classified information in an unlocked drawer at his home. He was also accused of allowing his biographer and girlfriend, who had security clearance, to view classified documents, but he was not tried or convicted of that.
Which is worse, keeping classified information in an unlocked drawer at home with no evidence that it was ever seen by anyone other than his girlfriend or putting top-secret information on an unprotected server for the world to see?
According to the US Justice Department, the former is a serious crime and the latter not a crime at all.
It’s a sad day for the United States of America.
*****
I’m beginning to think that political pundits can’t learn. The glitterati of the political pundit class are saying exactly the same things about the Trump campaign they were saying a year ago, which is that Trump is going to lose because he doesn’t have an expensive and extensive national campaign organization, doesn’t have the support of the Republican hierarchy and isn’t spending all his time raising money.
In state primary after state primary, Trump proved the political pundit class doesn’t know squat about current politics.
Remember back when the political pundits said that because Trump didn’t have well-organized state organizations that Sen. Ted Cruz was going to steal his delegates on the second ballot and win the nomination? It turned out Cruz spent too much time and money on building statewide organizations when he should have been concentrating on winning primaries.
This is in no way a traditional presidential election. For the first time in modern history we have one presidential candidate who was under criminal investigation by the FBI during the campaign and another who doesn’t have the support of his own party establishment.
Trump has enormously high negatives, but they aren’t as high as Hillary Clinton’s.
Even though she wasn’t indicted, you can bet that information about the investigation is going to leak out from FBI agents who are furious that because she is Hillary Clinton she was allowed to endanger the lives of US operatives all over the world and walk away unscathed.
*****
What the political pundits should be considering is the Brexit referendum in Great Britain. The leadership of both major British political parties was against leaving the European Union. London voted against it.
But the people of Great Britain paid no attention to the political leaders or the city slickers. The people of Great Britain don’t trust their political leaders anymore than the people of the US trust theirs. The people decided that they knew what was best for their future and the politicians were telling them to vote according to what was best for the future of the politicians, not the country.
It’s not much different than what you have here in the US with the leadership of both political parties, plus politicians in both political parties, being against Trump.
What Trump knows and what the political leadership in this country forgot long ago is that on Election Day, President Barack Hussein Obama, Gov. John Kasich, Reince Priebus, Mitt Romney and Joe the Plumber each get exactly one vote. Obama’s vote on Election Day doesn’t count one whit more than an out-of-work coal miner who can barely breath and has to be assisted to the polls.
Trump knows that if enough regular Americans will go vote for him, it doesn’t make any difference whether the people who are currently running this country vote for him or not. All 100 US senators could vote against him and that is just 100 votes.
And Trump continues to speak to the voters in language voters understand. The mainstream media, hate the language that Trump uses. He isn’t politically correct and he doesn’t parse every phrase or use focus groups to find out which words move people. He simply says what’s on his mind and so far it has worked.
Wouldn’t it be a better world if more people running for office did the same thing?
*****
One of the significant points about the attack on the Istanbul airport is that it appeared better organized than previous attacks.
First there was a bomb in the parking lot to distract security, then an attack on the people waiting to go through security.
So while the airport security officers were strip searching grandmothers with artificial hips and babies with full diapers, the terrorists were taking advantage of the crowd of people waiting to be searched and killed 50 of them.
The US is fortunate that ISIS didn’t try this type of attack in a US airport when the Transportation Security Authority was involved in a work slow down to get more money and lines for security were over an hour long. If ISIS had chosen to attack during that mess caused by the TSA, the terrorists might have been able to kill hundreds.
ISIS is getting smarter about its attacks and the airport security forces are still operating as if the only threat was from a 9/11-style attack to take over commercial aircraft. ISIS is learning and adapting and the world’s security forces are not.
*****
As noted, Lynch held a private meeting with former President Bill Clinton last week and, according to Lynch, it was to talk about their grandchildren.
If Lynch were going to meet privately with Clinton, the only elected president ever impeached, she should have at least gotten some pointers on lying.
Clinton is a consummate liar; Lynch not so good.
One key to telling a good lie is that the lie itself is believable. Nobody with a dollop of common sense believes that, with the Justice Department engaged in an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and her relationship with the Clinton Foundation while she was serving as secretary of state, Lynch and Clinton got together in private to talk about their grandchildren. She might as well have said they sat silently on the same plane for half an hour and neither one said a word.
Clinton did not ask for the meeting because he wanted to show Lynch the latest photos of his grandchildren and Lynch did not agree to the meeting because she was dying to see photos of Clinton’s progeny.
What this says about Lynch is that she has no personal ethics and will do whatever she is told to do.
The mainstream media should ask Bill Clinton what the two talked about every time he pokes his face out in public and do the same for Lynch, who should know better. Lynch has been around long enough to know that you don’t meet privately with the husband of a high profile subject of a Justice Department investigation.
If all they were going to do was talk about grandchildren and golf, they had no reason to met privately. But the fact that the meeting was in private guarantees that it was not simply a social visit. They could talk about grandchildren and golf in front of the press. The two didn’t need to hide on a private plane protected by the FBI and Secret Service to do that.
It’s not simply Hillary Clinton who is under investigation. The State Department relationship with the Clinton Foundation, headed by none other than Bill Clinton, was also being investigated. There is a lot of evidence that countries that made large donations to the Clinton Foundation and paid Bill Clinton exorbitant sums for speaking got preferential treatment from the State Department run by Hillary Clinton.
The Clintons are infamous for hiring private detectives to get information about their opponents. Maybe Bill Clinton wanted to show Lynch some of the information they had about her or her family, which if not handled properly could end up in the hands of the press.
There are almost endless possible scenarios, but one that is not possible is that the two talked about grandchildren and golf for 30 minutes.
*****
Anyone who thinks Lynch saying that she was not going to interfere in the investigation of Hillary Clinton and would allow the career professionals rather than political appointees to make the decision on whether or not to indict Hillary Clinton is so naive about politics, they rate somewhere far below the low information voters.
What public officials like Lynch say in public and what they do in private are two entirely different things. There were a thousand ways for Lynch to influence the outcome of that investigation behind the scenes.
In the end, Hillary Clinton would have been indicted if Obama wanted her to be indicted and wasn’t because he didn’t want her to be indicted. It’s that simple. Anyone who believes otherwise doesn’t understand our political system.
*****
The 800-page report on Benghazi leaves at least one major question unanswered: Where was president Obama during the long night when the American consulate in Benghazi was under attack and four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, were killed?
Why wasn’t Obama in the situation room or wherever presidents go to get real time information on terrorist attacks?
Obama has refused to answer that question. If the White House Press Corps were not full of sycophants, he would be asked that question on camera, but there is little chance that will ever happen.
*****
Liberals completely miss the boat on the message that Brexit was sending. It’s not about economics. It’s more about leadership. What the people of Great Britain were saying to the establishment is, we don’t trust you to do what is in our best interest.
*****
It is difficult to overcome the constant liberal ideology from the liberal news media. Look how far left the Obama administration has pulled this country.
President Ronald Reagan is always credited or condemned for taking the country right, but Obama has driven the country so far left that I don’t think we can see the right side of the road anymore.
When Obama was elected in 2008, gay marriage was not an issue, nor was it an issue when he was reelected in 2012. It wasn’t an issue, not because gay activists weren’t lobbying for it, but it wasn’t an issue because everyone in politics was against it. Hillary Clinton, Obama, Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain, everyone was in agreement that a marriage could only exist between one man and one woman.
Now, in 2016, if you question the right of two men or two women to marry, you are a homophobe and deserve to be shunned by society.
That is a remarkable transformation.
Now North Carolina has become a pariah among states because the legislature passed a law against gender-neutral bathrooms and locker room facilities. It is an incredible turn of events.
*****
I read somewhere that Social Security was not in trouble and was an issue invented by Republicans. Were that it was so.
There is a Social Security trust fund, but it is filled with over $2 trillion of IOU’s from the federal government.
When the Social Security tax was generating more revenue than was being paid out, Congress took the money and spent it, giving the Social Security trust fund IOU’s.
If Congress were even close to balancing the federal budget it wouldn’t be a problem, but since this is money the federal government owes to future retirees, it should be added to the national debt of $19 trillion.
And since the federal government owes $19 trillion and that figure is rising, there is not much chance that the federal government is going to have $2 trillion left over any time in the next 20 years to pay back the Social Security trust fund what it owes.
So what actually happens with your Social Security tax is not that it goes into a trust fund, it’s that it is immediately paid out in benefits to people who have already retired, and the huge looming problem is that Social Security is paying out more than it is taking in.
With people living longer and the baby boomer generation retiring at an amazing rate, this problem gets worse every year.
*****
Obama’s massive miscalculation with ISIS may prove to be far more dangerous than it appeared at the time. Back when Obama thought ISIS was the jayvee team, it was on the verge of taking over Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Now ISIS is giving up territory, in part due to Russian involvement. The Russians actually drop bombs on ISIS locations; Obama has our military drop leaflets.
And this may be a case where Putin saves Obama from an extremely embarrassing defeat. If Putin can destroy the heart of ISIS, the world will be a safer place.
However, If the leadership of ISIS realizes they can’t win against Russia and the US and they scatter, things could get much worse.
We’ve already had a taste of what ISIS terrorists can do in a free society. If the ISIS leadership gives up on the idea of a state and decides its purpose will be to wreak as much havoc on the rest of world as possible, we are in for a rough ride.
The ISIS leaders are impressive. They came out of nowhere and took over an area of Syria and Iraq bigger than a lot of countries. And for a time they were holding their own against the US, Iraq, Syria and the Kurds.
The US refused to fight or aid those fighting ISIS with heavy weapons. The other three didn’t have the firepower to fight ISIS, which had all the US weapons the Iraqi army left on the battlefield in the first battles with ISIS when the Iraqi army ran as fast and as far as they could.
ISIS, however, can’t stand up to Russia, with its vast military superiority and a willingness to use that military power that the US doesn’t have.
This is one case where rooting for Russia makes sense. If the leaders escape instead of being killed, the west is in real trouble. They are smart, ingenious and horrific. They also have all the fake passports they want, so if they escape there is no reason to think some of them won’t decide to immigrate to the US and cause as much death and destruction as possible.
Nobody wants to fight a war in the Middle East, but it is far better to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq than in New York and Chicago.
*****
An article in The Washington Post explores the fact that fake bomb detectors are still in use all over Iraq, even though the British man who sold them to Iraq has been convicted of fraud and is in prison.
The bomb detection wands don’t actually detect anything. According to The Post article, the device is “little more than an aerial attached to a plastic handle.”
It was originally sold as golf ball finder. It doesn’t find golf balls any better than it finds bombs, but not detecting golf balls doesn’t kill anybody.
It does make you wonder if the Transportation Security Administration is using the same device. Since the TSA detected only 5 percent of the bombs, guns and weapons that government agents attempted to get through security check points, and it seems that by pure dumb luck you could find 5 percent, maybe the TSA got duped just like the Iraqi government. It would explain a lot.
*****
The word is that Donald Trump is going to fill the stage at the Republican National Convention with celebrities instead of politicians.
Let’s see, would the American people be more likely to tune in to see a celebrity or to listen to some old, unattractive, boring politician they have never heard of drone on about some arcane point of federal tax policy? It’s a tough call.
Trump is no dummy and he learned what makes people tune in on his reality show. You can bet the Republican National Convention will be the most entertaining in decades.
Certainly no one is going to mourn the absence of Kasich, who could bore tax accountants to sleep. I’m pleased that he won’t be attending the Republican National Convention because if I had to listen to him talk one more time about how he singlehanded balanced the federal budget I was likely to throw something at the screen.
We also won’t have to watch McCain – who can be a funny and entertaining extemporaneous speaker – try to read something some speechwriter wrote for him that evidently he didn’t bother to go over before he reached the podium, like he did when he was running for president.
*****
For all you Trump haters out there, here is something to think about. Why do Trump’s kids like him so much?
It’s not because he’s rich. I know plenty of people with rich fathers who can’t stand them. In fact, my experience is that it is far easier to get along well with parents if they aren’t rich.
Trump’s kids certainly don’t get along with him because he was so good to their mother, because he dumped their mother.
But his kids, who know him well, seem to not only love him but respect him, and the feeling appears mutual.
