BREAKING NEWS! LORETTA PROMISES TO ACCEPT FBI RECOMMENDATIONS
Republicans and the overwhelming majority of honest, hardworking, law-abiding American citizens are elated. Having been assured that we have an FBI Director who is the most upstanding, courageous, no holds barred, non-political, justice seeker possibly in world history, there is almost dancing in the streets.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, suspected by some of us more cynical types of being just a tad more “political” than we like to see, has announced that she will abide by the findings and recommendations of the FBI director regarding the long investigation surrounding Hillary Clinton’s “curious” handling of State Department communications.
General Lynch made her announcement in the aftermath of her ill-advised meeting with the husband of the principal subject of the FBI’s investigation, one William J. Clinton.
The NY Times suggested, however, that Ms. Lynch is not “recusing” herself from the case as Republicans have demanded, so it’s not that big a deal. As the Times puts it: “Ms. Lynch has said she wants to handle the Clinton investigation like any other case. Since the attorney general often follows the recommendations of career prosecutors, Ms. Lynch is keeping the regular process largely intact.”
The news that she will accept whatever “recommendation” the FBI makes is regarded by many Republicans and conservative pundits as really good news, expecting that the implacable Mr. Comey will make a criminal referral.
Unfortunately, like the less sanguine among us, we are not quite so delighted or optimistic, as it might be inferred by our recent column regarding our skepticism over Director Comey’s “stand-up guy” credentials.
Our view is rather sadly reinforced by his agency’s recent handling of its 2 year investigation into whether the IRS “improperly targeted” conservative groups.
In that case, the Justice Department accepted, happily no doubt, the FBI’s conclusion that there was no criminal action and thus no charges would be filed against Lois Lerner or anyone else at the IRS.
Oh sure, the probe revealed, there was some “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime,” Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said in the letter.”
The outcome of the case made President Obama seem to be almost supernaturally “prophetic”. It was, after all, well before the FBI had completed its intensive investigation that Mr. Obama had determined that there was not a “smidgen” of evidence* of corruption or wrongdoing at the agency that we are now assured was “only” plagued with “mismanagement and poor judgment”!
But then, nobody’s perfect.
As our previous column recalled, however, Scooter Libby, former chief of staff for former Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury based almost entirely on a conflict in Libby’s recollections and those of a widely admired journalist, Tim Russert, about a case in which, indeed, there was no crime committed.
We can’t help comparing the outcome of that case with that of the IRS case. In the latter, the press and the public was made aware of numerous incidents of subpoenaed documents vital to the FBI’s investigation going “missing”; of several IRS computer hard drives all mysteriously “failing” at the same time; of “Blackberrys” which likely contained information a reasonable person might conclude would be crucial to such a probe just ‘disappearing: of sworn testimony later found to contradict facts; the central figure in the case, Lois Lerner, taking the 5th amendment (and apparently not given immunity to force her to testify truthfully), etc, etc.
And our president, in the Hillary Clinton case has issued a **”prophecy” very similar to that he proclaimed in the IRS case…no criminal wrongdoing he can see, no sir!
So, yes, we do have apprehensions about the FBI’s ultimate recommendations. If James Comey could give his approval to the IRS conclusions by his agency, and was intimately aware of how the Libby case was handled, and is unruffled by the president’s premature conclusions, he probably has a much stronger stomach for “Obama-style” justice than many give him credit for. DLH
*”President Obama, in an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, tried to put behind him the scandals that have hung over his second term, suggesting his administration did not mislead the public on the Benghazi attack and going so far as to say the IRS targeting scandal had “not even a smidgen of corruption.”
** “I don’t think it posed a national security problem,” Mr. Obama said Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He said it had been a mistake for Mrs. Clinton to use a private email account when she was secretary of state, but his conclusion was unmistakable: “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.” (NYT report)
