RUTHFULLY YOURS

Back in Precambrian times — that’s to say, in June 2016 — I noted that, while the primaries were over, there was nothing to suggest that the multifarious oddities of this exceedingly odd election season had run their course. On the contrary, there were plenty of reasons to believe that the oddities would continue. “There is a powerful tendency,” I noted in that column,

to believe that, whatever local disruptions we face in the course of life’s vicissitudes, “normality” will soon reassert itself and the status quo ante will reinstall itself in the driver’s seat … Whether you embrace or repudiate Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton doesn’t signify in the context of my contention: the oddity of this campaign season is not over. We are likely to see not just local disturbances like the sudden sacking of campaign managers, but spectacular changes, reversals, upsets, and dei ex machina.

I’d like to take a moment to thank FBI Director James Comey for illustrating my thesis.

This election has been hard on pundits espousing the conventional wisdom. They might turn out to be correct—anything not self-contradictory might turn out to be the case—but mere possibility is cheap.

What about the odds, the probabilities? To be frank, I suspect the polls are more aspirational than accurate. What does it mean that a “respected” poll by The Washington Post and ABC reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton’s supposed 12-point lead on Donald Trump had suddenly narrowed to 2 points? That poll, by the way, was conducted before the revelation that thousands of new State Department emails were discovered on a device used by Anthony Weiner when he wasn’t sexting 15-year-olds.

The Clinton campaign has been thrown into hysterical (by which I do not mean “funny”) disarray by the revelations, which undermine The Narrative in about 38 different ways. (Remember that Clinton’s chief aide, Huma Abedin, swore under oath that she had given up all devices containing State Department emails.) CONTINUE AT SITE

I have never been a fan of the notion – at the Justice Department, it is the received wisdom – that the election calendar should factor into criminal investigations.

Law-enforcement people will tell you that taking action too close to Election Day can affect the outcome of the vote; therefore, it should not be done because law enforcement is supposed to be apolitical. But of course, not taking action one would take but for the political timing is as political as it gets. To my mind, it is more political because the negatively affected candidate is denied any opportunity to rebut the law-enforcement action publicly.

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that, through no fault of law enforcement, investigations of political corruption are inherently political. Thus, I’ve always thought the best thing to do is bring the case when it’s ready, don’t bring it if it’s not ready, and don’t worry about the calendar any more than is required by the principle of avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

A problem arises, however, when you start bending other rules. FBI Director James Comey bent a few of them when he decided to (a) make a public recommendation against prosecution, (b) nevertheless make a public disclosure of the evidence amassed by the FBI, and (c) include a public announcement that the investigation was closed.

All of this is highly irregular. Director Comey says he is “a big fan of transparency,” and aren’t we all? But transparency is like virtually everything else we applaud: it is not an absolute value; it has its place and its limitations.

Criminal investigations are not supposed to be transparent. There are very good reasons why, for example, grand jury proceedings are secret. They are the same good reasons why the FBI generally protects the identity of sources of information. If people come to believe their cooperation with law enforcement is inevitably going to result in the publicizing of their communications with agents or their testimony in the grand jury – even if there is no indictment or trial – then they are going to be considerably less cooperative.

That would significantly harm the mission of law enforcement. That, in turn, would badly damage the rule of law.

FBI director James Comey really stepped in it. He should have known that cleaning up one of Hillary Clinton’s messes would be just like wiping that proverbial dog poop off your shoe. You think you’ve got it, but there is always some left over in the tread that you track into the house. The wife yells, and then you’re on your hands and knees with the carpet cleaner while your oversized Rottweiler puppy tries to eat the filthy rag. Welcome to my life…but I digress.

Over a long career, Comey carefully cultivated a reputation for smarts and probity. Perhaps it was truly earned, more likely the result of basic competence combined with clever politicking and strategic sycophancy. Either way, it earned him his current job and, as standing in D.C. goes, an enviable combination of power and respect on both sides of the aisle.

Comey was no stranger to Hillary’s machinations. He was part of the team that investigated Whitewater only to recommend that no charges be filed. Confronted with Hillary Clinton’s email corruption, Comey tried to be too clever by half. He accompanied his legally and bureaucratically inappropriate exoneration of Clinton in July with a public tongue-lashing intended to preserve his Boy Scout image while letting Clinton, himself, and his agency off a sharp political hook. He rather spectacularly failed.

Comey’s letter to the Senate last Friday announcing that the FBI was reopening the email investigation that he closed so confidently in July has placed the nation into a constitutional crisis regardless of what the emails actually say, or the outcome of any further investigation or criminal proceedings. The mere fact that FBI agents found problematic emails on at least one computer owned by Huma Abedin (Hillary’s closest aide) and her estranged pederast husband, former Democrat New York congressman Anthony Weiner, after voting in the election has begun, ensures that regardless of outcome, the result will not be accepted as legitimate by a significant portion of the American public.

The political and media hyperventilation over Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the November result now appears doubly hypocritical and misplaced. Hillary and her allies are already lambasting Comey – their erstwhile former hero – for inserting himself into the race less than two weeks before Election Day. Are Hillary and her supporters now prepared to accept the election result if Trump pulls out a come-from-behind win thanks in part to public misgivings over the renewed investigation? And should Hillary win, it goes without saying that Trump and Republicans in general will have legitimate reasons to question a result that makes a person under active criminal investigation President-Elect.

Obviously, this election cycle has evolved into a circus of corruption. The mud-slinging is interminable, filled with duck and run operations, outright fraud, and lawlessness. In a little over a week, by hook or crook, we will know the winner of the presidential election. The question is, will it be fair, or is the voting rigged? In the State of Washington, it is hard to tell. There are so many avenues for potential dishonesty.

This week, I took the time to personally carry my “mail-in ballot” to the local voting office in King County, Washington. The state instituted its slick new balloting system several years ago. However, the way they handle ballots is extraordinarily disturbing. Here’s what happened.

Entering the building, my husband and I were met by a cadre of temporary employees steering citizens to various areas. The woman who approached me appeared stern, as if I wasn’t supposed to be there, and asked what my business was. I replied, “I would like to hand-deliver my ballot to the election office.” Her response was, “Oh, that’s unnecessary. All you have to do is drop it in the repository in the parking lot.”

Aware of this practice, I balked.

A large steel box has been placed at the end of the parking area (over 50 yards from the front door), abutting the freeway, near a far corner of the building. Guiding me to the window, she pointed out a large white and blue steel container with a slot in it, somewhat like an oversized U.S. Postal Service mailbox. I turned to her and said, very patiently, “No…I want to hand-deliver it to an election official. I am not comfortable with drive-by voting.”

She banally replied, “But that’s the way we are set up to collect ballots.”

FBI Director James Comey’s revelation on Friday that the bureau was reviewing new evidence related to a previously completed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices roiled the presidential race just 11 days before Election Day. It also provided the latest chapter in a long history of October Surprises.

Republicans seized on Mr. Comey’s notification to Congress to attempt to reinvigorate Donald Trump’s campaign, while Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats challenged the Federal Bureau of Investigation to release the pertinent evidence promptly.

The October Surprise has been a staple of American politics for decades. The phrase refers to an 11th-hour revelation or turn of events that, whether intentionally or not, has the potential to shift the direction of the presidential race. Sometimes October Surprises appear to have altered the course of a campaign, sometimes not.

Here are notable examples:
1972

In October 1972, Richard Nixon was coasting to re-election against Democratic South Dakota Sen. George McGovern; polling showed him leading by as much as 26 points that month.

Though his campaign seemed little in need of a late boost, on Oct. 26, Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger declared “peace is at hand” in Vietnam, and that a final cease-fire agreement with the North Vietnamese communists could be reached within days.

Rather than applaud the Nixon administration, Mr. McGovern credited the anti-war movement for the development. He questioned why it had taken Nixon four years to “put an end to this tragic war” and declined to speculate on the effect on his chances at winning the election.

Mr. Nixon won re-election in one of the most lopsided landslides in U.S. history. And peace wasn’t, in fact, at hand. The war continued another 2½ years, ending with the fall of Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, in April 1975.
1980

The release of U.S. hostages in Iran was the October Surprise that never surprised.

In November 1979, Iranian student activists stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. The Americans were still held a year later. In the thick of President Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign against former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Mr. Reagan warned repeatedly that Mr. Carter would unveil an “October Surprise” to turn the election around at the last minute, possibly securing the release of some or all of the hostages.

“Presidents can make things happen, you know,” Mr. Reagan said in a Florida television interview on Oct. 10. In an interview with the Associated Press earlier that month, he said he was “bracing myself for an October Surprise,” noting the Iranians “are not exactly supporters of mine.”

Ultimately, the hostages weren’t freed before the election. Mr. Reagan won a resounding victory—and the hostages were released the day he was sworn into office.
CONTINUE AT SITE

It appears the FBI agents investigating Anthony Weiner for sexting an underaged girl have done the job that the FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information didn’t or weren’t allowed to do.

Agents reportedly found thousands of State Department-related emails ostensibly containing classified information on the electronic devices belonging to Weiner and his wife and top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The discovery has prompted FBI Director James Comey to, on the eve of the election, reopen the Clinton case he prematurely closed last July.

How did agents examine the devices? By seizing them. It’s a common practice in criminal investigations, but one that clearly was not applied in the case of Clinton or her top aide — even though agents assigned to that case knew Abedin hoarded classified emails on her electronic devices.

The two special agents who interviewed Abedin on April 5 noted as much in their 302 summary of their interview, which took place at the FBI’s Washington field office and notably was attended by the chief of the FBI’s counterespionage section.

On page 3 of their 11-page report, the agents detail how they showed Abedin a classified paper on Pakistan sent from a State Department source which she, in turn, inexplicably forwarded to her personal Yahoo email account — an obviously unclassified, unencrypted, unsecured and unauthorized system. The breach of security was not an isolated event but a common practice with Abedin.

“She routinely forwarded emails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account,” the agents wrote. Why? “So she could print them” at home and not at her State Department office.