Although President Donald J. Trump fired former FBI director James Comey this week, Obama should have sacked him last July. Comey’s behavior in the E-mailgate investigation suggests either staggering incompetence or a clumsy effort to whitewash Hillary Clinton’s crimes.
• During Hillary Clinton’s July 2 interrogation at FBI headquarters, she was not under oath. How could the FBI possibly reach “the last step of a year-long investigation” — as Comey described it at a July 7 House Government Oversight Committee hearing — with the focus of that probe answering questions without a potential perjury conviction hanging over her head? Especially given Hillary’s peanut-allergy-like aversion to the truth, not swearing her in confirmed either the FBI’s grotesque ineptness or a deliberate loophole through which Hillary could slither away.
Clinton’s defenders say that, had she lied, she still could have been prosecuted for making false statements to federal officials. If so, why bother to put any American under oath?
Making Hillary raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God, would have reminded her of her solemn duty to come clean. This also would have exposed her to possible prosecution under both the perjury and false-statements statutes. But Team Comey could not be bothered with any of this. Perhaps they couldn’t handle the truth.
• Former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills participated in this session as one of Hillary’s nine attorneys, even though she is deeply implicated in many of Hillary’s misdeeds. Thus, a potential witness or even co-conspirator in Hillary’s possible prosecution offered legal aid as the FBI quizzed her. None of Comey’s people considered this a problem?
• Comey steered clear of Hillary’s three-and-a-half hour interview. Given the unusual and enormous stakes, he should have faced her or, at least, supervised nearby. From an adjacent room, he could have offered guidance, monitored Hillary for inconsistencies, and instructed his staffers to ask pointed follow-up questions.
• Hillary’s maid, Marina Santos, had regular access to Hillary’s classified documents, via secured communications equipment in her Washington, D.C., mansion. Santos reportedly printed records for the former secretary of state to read at home, apparently including Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief. Regardless, Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post, “It also appears the FBI did not formally interview Santos as a key witness in its investigation.” How could Comey possibly have let Santos go uninterrogated?
• The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills and Clinton campaign aide Heather Samuels. This extraordinary promise was part of Mills’ and Samuels’ immunity deals.
However, veteran Washington attorney Joseph DiGenova told Sirius XM host David Webb that FBI agents refused to destroy these computers, in hopes that congressional investigators would subpoena them. DiGenova said in October that when he learned that these laptops still existed, “I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet.”
Wherever the laptops of these top Clinton henchwomen are today, why on Earth would the FBI even agree to junk evidence in this case — be it damning or exculpatory? If any of the judges involved in this case asked for those laptops, what did the FBI expect to say? “Sorry, your honor. We planned to throw them into a furnace.”