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The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI
and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre
atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized
everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.
Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d
seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to
be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.
That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical
violations not just because they were assured there would be no
consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their
laxity.
How
could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow
even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no
impropriety had Hillary won
On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various
pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning
were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1
percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate
Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a
29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of
scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private
home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign
donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails.
Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming
President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of
the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a
President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely
aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether
she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of
the United States?
Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an
out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to
find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email
scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the
airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some
point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation”
in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.
How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to
allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been
no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the
Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no
charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s
obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton
may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York
Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney
general.
“The
only mystery in these sordid scandals is how a president Hillary
Clinton would have rewarded her various appendages. In short, how would
a President Clinton have calibrated the many rewards for
any-means-necessary help? Would Lynch’s tarmac idea have trumped
Comey’s phony investigation? Would Glen Simpson now be White House
press secretary, James Comey Clinton’s CIA director; would Andrew
McCabe be Comey’s replacement at the FBI?
How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an
oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just
months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had
received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the
political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry
McAuliffe?
Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in
which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement.
Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily
win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for
bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway
maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new
Clinton administration. Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton
way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned
career advancement.
Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce
Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the
election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for
Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be
Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities?
Did
Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, or Debbie Wasserman Shultz worry about their
fabrications, unethical behavior, and various conspiratorial efforts to
ensure that Hillary Clinton would be exempt from criminal liability in
her email shenanigans, and that she would win the Democratic nomination
and general election?
Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a
successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary
ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term
progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering
the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power
couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would
at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his
byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except bet on the wrong horse.
What about the recently reassigned FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI top
investigator Peter Strzok? Their reported 50,000-plus text messages (do
the math per hour at work, and it is hard to believe that either had to
time to do much of anything else) are providing a Procopian court
history of the entire Fusion-Mueller investigation miasma.
So why did Strzok and Page believe that they could conduct without
disclosure a romantic affair on FBI-government-owned cellphones? Why
would they have been emboldened enough to cite a meeting with Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe, in which they apparently discussed the dire
consequences of an improbable Trump victory?
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s
[probably Andrew McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI] office that
there’s no way Trump gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that
risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die
before you’re 40.
And why would the two believe that they could so candidly express their
contempt for a presidential candidate supposedly then under a secret
FBI investigation?
Once more, those are the wrong interrogatories. If we consider the
mentality of government elite careerists, we see that the
election-cycle machinations and later indiscretions of Strzok and Page
were not liabilities at all. They were good investments. They signaled
their loyalty to the incoming administration and that they were worthy
of commendation and reward.
Hillary Clinton’s sure victory certainly also explains the likely
warping of the FISA courts by FBI ....
[MORE]
The doors open and he finds himself in the
middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a clubhouse and
standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who
had worked with him.
