Monday, October 31, 2016

Imagine If Comey, The FBI and Congressional Republicans Were Held To The Hillary Clinton Standard Of Compliance With The Law

We now know that James Comey declared that October 7th was too close to an election for the FBI to say that there is credible evidence that the Russian government is trying to get Donald Trump elected president through its various e-mail stealing activities.  We also know that James Comey thought that October 28 was not too close to an election to make vague and unsubstantiated insinuations that Hillary Clinton may have done wrong with e-mails, based on no evidence at all.

James Comey has got to be investigated for the crime of violating the Hatch Act to benefit his party, the Republicans, he has to be investigated for wrongdoing in performance of his job as Director of the FBI, he must be investigated to see what other people in the FBI and in the Congress* and elsewhere may have participated in his crime or in others related to it.  He must be fired at the very least because he has proven he is not trustworthy and he is not competent to control out of control agents of the FBI or to withstand political pressure applied by Republicans.  

This gets worse with every new fact that comes out.  As Keith Olbermann points out, there is strong evidence that there was collusion between Comey or agents of the FBI and Congressman Jason Chaffetz in the release of the letter, Chaffetz giving that away by the time line of his behavior surrounding the Comey letter being sent.


I'm getting pretty sick and tired of people talking about what a boyscout James Comey is.  He pretty much proved that he's not one last week.   In fact, though, he has proven that he has been tearing up the rules of how the Director of the FBI and other employees of the Justice Department are supposed to handle investigations since early last summer when he gave his press conference in which he admitted that the FBI had found nothing to indict Hillary Clinton on even as he slammed her during the press conference.   The man has proven to be willing to apply double standards based on who he is dealing with and, or political pressure when it is applied by Republicans in congress.  What James Comey is now is a law breaker and someone who injected the FBI into a presidential campaign to the benefit of a man who is reported to be under investigation by the FBI for things more serious than leaving e-mails on an unauthorized computer, and perhaps not even that.

I don't want him to resign, I want him investigated by a special prosecutor with the full range of tools and powers that prosecutors have to compel people to tell the truth and to seek evidence with a warrant.   He can't be allowed to use his DC insider reputation to get out of this, he's only the head of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, he should at least be held to the normal level of compliance with the law that anyone else would be.  It's a far, far more generous burden than the one which he, the FBI, the Congress and the media have placed on Hillary Clinton.  She has been regularly prosecuted in the media for breaking no laws at all.

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