The NYTimes reports that today, Sunday, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress saying it hasn’t changed its July conclusions about the Hillary Clinton email case. As Emily Litella would say, “NEVER MIND” (emphasis mine):
The F.B.I. informed Congress on Sunday that it has not changed its conclusions about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, removing a dark cloud that has been hanging over her campaign two days before Election Day.
James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said in a letter to members of Congress that “based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”
…
Mr. Comey said in the letter that the bureau has reviewed all communications that were to or from Mrs. Clinton while she was secretary of state since he sent his last letter on Oct. 28.
…
In the immediate term, the letter removes a cloud that has hung over the Clinton campaign for a week since Mr. Comey announced his agents were reviewing new emails that might be related to an investigation into Mrs. Clinton that ended in July. But Mr. Comey’s move is sure to raise new questions from Democrats. Most importantly: Why did Mr. Comey raise the specter of wrongdoing before agents had even read the emails, especially since it only took days to determine they were not significant.
How on EARTH can this shameful episode be anything other than a scurrilous attempt to manipulate the results of the general election? He now has the results, two days before the election. As so many of us have said, there is no “there” there. He could have and should have kept quiet.
James Comey has embarrassed himself, his office, and the nation.
…it is also being reported that many of the messages were in fact duplicates of those already reviewed.
for orchestrating a fishing expedition /partisan political witch hunt 9 days before a national election.
My late brother, James, worked for the FBI’s Boston office for 25 years. He was a true professional and he explained to me early on that the mission of the Agency is to INVESTIGATE not PROSECUTE. And they NEVER leak information based on hearsay or innuendo — only solid EVIDENCE of wrongdoing. Especially just before a Presidential election.
I have a question for you, Mr. Comey.
After you slandered and defamed the good name of Secretary Clinton — how does she get back her reputation ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
They concluded that Comey selected the least-bad of several bad alternatives.
My own conclusion is that if Clinton didn’t want this to happen, she shouldn’t have been running her State Department email on an unprotected server in her bathroom in an attempt to evade FOIA (and likely other naughty reasons).
I fear your own conclusion is influenced by your rosy scenarios about the state of government systems at the time, in addition to your hostility towards Ms. Clinton.
I suggest you examine the timeline of Ms. Clinton’s email server, and compare it with — for example — the timeline and technology state revealed in the US Government’s OPM Breach.
For the convenience of the BMG readers, the OPM breach refers to the realization, years after the fact, that personal information (SSN, addresses, etc) of virtually EVERY person who had worked for the federal government or its contractors had been vulnerable to foreign intruders (most like Chinese in origin, according to government and private sources). We know that more than TWENTY MILLION individuals were compromised. There are likely more.
The vulnerabilities that allowed this to happen have been enumerated in multiple public sources. They are endemic to enterprise-scale systems — there is little reason (other than pure optimism) to assume that similar vulnerabilities were absent from the state department systems that the right wing criticizes Ms. Clinton for avoiding (emphasis mine):
We know that tens of millions of individuals were compromised by incompetent and inadequate security on government systems in the OPM breach. Not surprisingly, government sources are not forthcoming about similar vulnerabilities in other systems like State, DoJ, and presidential staff.
We know that while Ms. Clinton was operating her server (2008-2013), malware from foreign governments was present in the OPM system. There is every likelihood that the same or other malware from the same or other entities (including Russia) was installed in other government systems.
I fear you are working too hard to find reasons to attack Hillary Clinton, and not hard enough at understanding the security issues that EVERY government official faces.
And that it’s inconceivable that it would not have been. It was unprotected.
My understanding is that she wanted a server more secure than State was willing to give her.
I fear you are citing one of the lies that Fox News was forced to retract (emphasis mine):
Please try and keep up.
Comey should have kept his big mouth shut. Period.
Fred Rich LaRiccia