Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
James Comey,
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since 2013, really,
really, really doesn’t want Hillary
Rodham Clinton to be the next President of the United States. And he’s going to
use all the powers of his office to prevent it.
That’s the
inescapable conclusion from the events of the last four days, ever since Comey
released a letter he wrote to the Republicans in Congress in charge of the
committees that oversee his agency saying there were “new developments” in the
investigation of Clinton for allegedly jeopardizing national security by using
a private server to handle her e-mails during her term as U.S. Secretary of
State. The “new developments” were that the FBI had seized a laptop computer
belonging to Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a Clinton
adviser so personally close to her she’s been referred to as “Hillary’s other
daughter.”
Just about
everybody who’s heard of Anthony Weiner (whose last name would usually be
pronounced “Whiner,” but given what he’s most famous for “Wiener” has become
irresistible to TV reporters) knows that he lost his seat in the U.S. Congress
and was forced from political life in disgrace over inappropriate text messages
he sent women, including women he barely knew. The FBI got involved in Weiner’s
case because one of his alleged “sexting” targets was a 15-year-old girl in
North Carolina. So they sought a court order to seize his laptop, and when they
got it they found a number of messages from or to Abedin as well.
On October 28
Comey sent his letter and publicly released its contents. His letter didn’t
say, or even hint at, what was in Abedin’s e-mails because he didn’t know, and
neither did anyone else at the FBI. Comey didn’t obtain the necessary court
order to read them until October 30. There’s still no evidence that any of the
e-mails on the Weiner/Abedin laptop were sent either by or to Hillary Clinton,
and it’s not known how many of them are “duplicates” of e-mails the FBI already
has because Clinton turned them over last year in response to a subpoena.
In short, to
paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “there is no ‘there’ there” — and there won’t be
without months of further investigation to determine whether there’s anything
new relating to Clinton on Abedin’s hard drive, whether any of it contains
classified information, and whether any of it warrants reversing Comey’s
original judgment last July that, though Clinton and her staff had been
“extremely careless” in handling classified information, there wasn’t enough
evidence to charge her with a crime.
Ordinarily,
neither the FBI nor any other law enforcement agency would release this kind of
information against a candidate for public office less than two weeks before an
election. As New Yorker reporter Jane
Mayer wrote on the magazine’s Web site October 29 (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/james-comey-broke-with-loretta-lynch-and-justice-department-tradition)
“Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of
Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is
a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and
independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of
concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the
outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections.”
At first a lot
of Washington commentators were willing to give Comey the benefit of the doubt
and assume that he had just made a horrendous mistake. Then more information
turned up. It seems that Comey had declined to answer questions about whether
the FBI was investigating possibly illegal connections between Paul Manafort,
former campaign manager for Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump, and the
pro-Russian officials of Ukraine for whom Manafort used to work as a lobbyist.
Comey had also refused to talk about whether the FBI was investigating
allegations that Russia was behind the wholesale hacking and unauthorized
release of the Democratic Party’s internal e-mails via WikiLeaks, which has led
to several embarrassing stories about Clinton.
Why hadn’t Comey
been willing to talk about these
politically charged and sensitive allegations? Because, he said, he didn’t want
to risk influencing the outcome of the election. But he had no compunction
about embarrassing Clinton by writing a letter to Republican Congressmembers
about the possibility that Anthony Weiner’s laptop just might contain e-mails that might bolster a criminal case
against Hillary Clinton.
And Comey’s
motives seemed even more questionable on November 1, when the Washington
Post reported (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-release-of-documents-fbi-finds-itself-caught-in-a-partisan-fray/2016/11/01/9d466908-a068-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html)
about a “surprise tweet from a little-used FBI account … announcing that the
agency had published on its Web site 129 pages of internal documents related to
a years-old investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of a
fugitive Democratic donor.” The donor was Marc Rich, a well-heeled and
well-connected Clinton supporter whose pardon was announced in the final days
of Bill Clinton’s presidency in 2001.
“For the second
time in five days, the FBI had moved exactly to the place the nation’s chief
law enforcement agency usually strives to avoid: smack in the middle of
partisan fighting over a national election, just days before the vote,” Post reporters Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and
Sari Horwitz wrote. “The publication of the files related to the Marc Rich
pardon inquiry, which agency officials said was posted automatically in
response to pending public records requests, came as the Clinton campaign and
Democratic lawmakers continued to fume over FBI Director James B. Comey’s
decision with less than two weeks before the election to announce that he was
effectively resuming a review of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail practices.”
Though FBI
spokespeople said the timing of the release of the Rich documents was purely
coincidental — it was, they said, in response to a Freedom of Information Act
request and came through a Web site that had been down for months and was only
recently fixed — it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that James Comey is
willfully and consciously attempting to influence the outcome of the November 8
election and make it more likely that Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, will
be the next President.
It’s not a new
thing for the FBI director to try to influence a Presidential election. As
historian Jeff Kisselhoff reported on the Web site of The Nation October 31 (https://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-not-the-first-time-the-fbi-has-interfered-with-a-presidential-election/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DAILY_2016_11_1&utm_term=daily),
J. Edgar Hoover routinely manipulated the system to keep Presidents and
Attorneys General beholden to him so he could keep his job for 48 years, from
his initial appointment in 1924 to his death in 1972.
But even Hoover
never interfered with a Presidential election so blatantly and publicly as
Comey has this year. Hoover preferred to work in the shadows, assigning FBI
agents to dig up derogatory information on Presidential candidates and anyone
they might appoint as Attorney General so he could essentially blackmail them
into letting him keep his job. “He’s got a file on everybody,” then-President
Richard Nixon famously complained about Hoover on one of the White House tapes.
Hoover was too street-smart and too good a bureaucratic infighter to risk
pissing off a potential President by going public with derogatory information
or unfounded allegations against them. But Comey has.
Comey’s actions
just show how deep-seated the hatred of Hillary Clinton is in virtually all
sectors of the Republican Party. Another Nation reporter, Joan Walsh, posted an article to the Nation site October 31 (https://www.thenation.com/article/the-dangerous-cowardice-of-james-comey/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DAILY_2016_11_1&utm_term=daily)
alleged that Jason Chaffetz, head of the House of Representatives’ Oversight
Committee, may have had a behind-the-scenes role in Comey’s decision to go
public with the latest development in the Clinton investigation.
“Two days before Comey released his letter,” Walsh wrote,
“Chaffetz was boasting about the treasure trove of Clinton documents he already
controlled and promising more investigations after the election, telling The
Washington Post’s David Weigel: ‘Even before we get to Day One,
we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of
history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.’ That same day, Chaffetz
reversed his decision not to vote for Donald Trump.” Walsh said that when Comey
made his announcement last July that he wouldn’t recommend Clinton’s
prosecution, Chaffetz “hauled him before Congress … to interrogate him about
his failure to recommend charges against Clinton and even managed to get the
FBI director to hand over his team’s investigative files, including notes from
the bureau’s interview with Clinton herself.”
The Post article
exposing the FBI’s release of the Rich documents also noted that another
powerful Republican Congressmember, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina), is just
waiting to get his hands on more derogatory information about Clinton so he can
continue to investigate her. Gowdy led the multiple investigations into
Clinton’s alleged role in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya in
2011, which turned up absolutely nothing incriminating but have become such a
talking point among Republicans that at this year’s GOP convention, the widow
of one of the four U.S. officials killed in the attack said, “Hillary Clinton,
how could you do this to my husband?” If you didn’t know the story you could
have been forgiven for thinking Clinton had shot her husband personally.
Trump Surges
Ahead in Latest Poll
The allegations against Clinton and the public splash with
which Comey released his intention to investigate them further have had exactly
the effect Comey seems to have wanted. On November 1 the Washington Post and ABC News released a new national poll that showed the
race essentially dead even — Trump at 46 percent, Clinton at 45 — just 10 days
after the same poll showed Clinton with a 12-point lead.
Comey’s action, as New York Daily News reporters Meg Wagner and Cameron Joseph acknowledged (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/donald-trump-leads-hillary-clinton-new-poll-article-1.2853499),
“hasn’t fully been accounted for in recent polling, as it takes people a few
days to digest news and polling is a lagging indicator of how voters are
feeling. But it came at the end of one of the rougher weeks for Clinton in
months, with news of Obamacare rate spikes, new questions from
WikiLeaks-released hacked e-mails of her top campaign staffer about how the
Clinton Foundation operated all dogging her campaign.”
The news wasn’t all bad for Clinton, since even if she’s
falling behind in the national poll she’s still leading in a number of the key
“swing states” that, according to our creaky system for electing our national
leader, could determine the outcome. The name of the game is the Electoral
College, whose votes are allocated on a state-by-state basis, and it still remains
entirely possible that Trump could win the popular vote but Clinton could win
enough states to gain the needed Electoral College majority of 270 votes or
more. (It could also happen the other way, too; election guru Nate Silver of
the fivethirtyeight.com Web site says it’s actually more likely that Clinton
could win the popular vote and Trump could win the election: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-odds-of-an-electoral-college-popular-vote-split-are-increasing/?ex_cid=2016-forecast.)
But an election
in which Trump wins the popular vote but Clinton becomes President would be
almost as dangerous for the future of American democracy than one Trump wins
outright. The reason: unlike the last Presidential candidate who won the
popular vote but lost the election, Al Gore, Donald Trump is not about to go
gentle into that good night. He’ll offer the split result as proof that the
election was rigged, as he’s said all along it would be — and he’ll have a
point. There’s no doubt that a defeated Donald Trump will see it as his bounden
duty to keep faith with his supporters and use all his considerable influence
to make sure that, though Hillary Clinton may become President, she won’t be
able to accomplish anything.
And he’ll have
powerful allies in that: virtually the entire Republican delegation in both
houses of Congress. As David Atkins reported on the American Prospect Web site October 25 (http://prospect.org/article/hostility-awaits-clinton),
“House Republicans long ago made clear that, should Hillary Clinton win the
Oval Office, she would not
enjoy the “honeymoon” period that Congress traditionally offers
incoming presidents. If anything, GOP lawmakers seem determined to create a
more hostile environment for a new administration than any in recent memory. … Given the anti-Clinton acrimony that Donald Trump has
ginned up among increasingly extremist GOP base voters, coupled with his unsubstantiated
claims of a ‘rigged’ election, Clinton will likely be welcomed to
Washington with calls for her impeachment or even imprisonment.”
If the 2016
election ends with Republicans keeping control of both the House and the
Senate, Clinton will not only be unlikely to get any major legislation through
Congress — like President Obama, she’ll have her hands full just keeping the
government up and running — she’ll also be unlikely to get major appointments
approved, especially to the U.S. Supreme Court. Congressional Republicans
already have pulled off an unprecedented coup in denying President Obama’s
choice to replace deceased Justice Antonin Scalia, Merrick Garland, even a hearing before the Senate. The Constitution says that the
Senate shall “advise and consent” to Supreme Court appointments, but
historically that’s meant either “advise and consent” or “advise and not
consent” — not “don’t advise, and
thereby keep the Court short-handed.”
A number of
Republican Senators — John McCain of Arizona, Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of
Wisconsin — have gone beyond the argument Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell used to justify not holding hearings on Garland, which was that the
next President should be allowed to pick Scalia’s replacement. They’ve said
they will not allow a confirmation vote on any Clinton nominee, essentially saying that they want the next Republican President to appoint the next Supreme Court
justices. Whether the next Republican President takes office in 2017, 2021 or
some time in the near or distant future, Republican Senators are content to
wait to avoid “flipping” the Court from the 5-4 Right-wing majority it had when
Scalia was alive to the 5-4 progressive majority that might result from an
Obama or Clinton appointment.
The increasingly
hard line Republican Senators are taking against any Democratic president making appointments to the
Supreme Court is ironic when you realize Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both
appointed relatively moderate justices. The most recent Republican Presidents,
Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, mostly appointed hard-core reactionaries like
Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. There were partial
exceptions: after the Senate voted down Right-wing extremist Robert Bork,
Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy, who’s mostly been a hard-line Right-winger —
he wrote the loathsome Citizens United decision — but went off the reservation on two major issues, juvenile
justice and Queer rights. And the first Bush appointed David Souter, a moderate
who significantly disappointed the Republican base.
One thing the
Comey announcements make more likely is that Republican House members may vote
to impeach Hillary Clinton and remove her from the Presidency in her first few
days in office. The fervor with which delegates to the Republican convention
chanted “Lock her up!” just about every time Clinton’s name was mentioned — a
cry Trump has stoked in his general-election rallies — Trump’s promise to
appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and bring charges against her, and
his snippy comment to her during one of the debates that if he gets elected
“you’ll be in jail,” all indicate a desire for legalistic vengeance that, as a
number of commentators have noted, seems to belong more to a banana republic or
a long-term dictatorship than a country that prides itself on 240 years of
being a representative republic.
“She won’t get impeached, but I can see a lot of pressure
to appoint a special prosecutor for several matters half the country feels have
gone unaddressed,” Ali Akbar, editorial director of the Right-wing Web site
OnRabble.com, told Atkins in his American Prospect article. Though Clinton’s impeachment and removal from
office would still leave a Democrat in the White House, Atkins wrote, “Fueling
GOP pro-impeachment sentiment is that many Republicans see potential
Vice-President Tim Kaine preferable to Clinton, whom they revile. In Akbar’s
words, ‘we would see the devil better for the country than Hillary
Clinton. Tim Kaine would be a huge relief.’”
