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The
FBI's email inquiry is a fitting end to this dumpster fire of an
election
Richard Wolffe
Saturday 29 October
2016 22.40 BST
The
latest pseudo-scandal to hit Clinton is unlikely to rob her of the
presidency. But it sure isn’t going to impress voters already
sickened by a shocking campaign
If it looks and
sounds like a scandal, is it really a scandal?
The latest Clinton
email flap has all the trappings. With evasive answers, shady
characters and FBI investigations, there must be something going on.
Right?
Rather like Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction, we may not know what’s hidden or
where, but it sure looks like the Clintons have been hiding
something.
Sadly this reasoning
is enough for most Republican voters and a good chunk of
independents. It may be enough to depress support among Democrats
just at the moment the party needs to drive a high turnout among
voters.
But it’s not at
all clear what the FBI is talking about in terms of Clinton emails.
Some reports suggest they are neither to nor from Clinton herself, in
which case we have just consumed a giant nothing-burger. After all,
we already know that the FBI has no idea whether the emails amount to
anything of any significance.
This raises the
obvious question: what on earth was the FBI director thinking when he
dropped his letter on Friday making it crystal clear that he knew
nothing? As a rule, law enforcement agencies generally don’t
publicize the fact that they are clueless.
Beyond James Comey’s
extraordinary intervention in the late stages of a presidential
election, his letter raises another, more familiar question about the
Clintons: why do they attract pseudo-scandals with such alarming ease
and frequency?
From the Clinton
Foundation to the private email server, from Benghazi to Weiner, from
Whitewater to Monica, the list is as long as it is utterly spurious.
Whatever crumbs of wrongdoing there may be, they don’t amount to
something worthy of Watergate, or even the myriad gate-suffixed
scandals since. Questionable behavior is not the same as criminal or
even impeachable conduct.
Perhaps the
pseudo-scandals say more about the Clinton haters than they do about
the Clintons themselves. But it remains true that there is a
remarkable contrast between the clouds that hang over the Clintons
and those over the Obamas.
President Obama has
not exactly luxuriated in eight years of hate-free politics. The
haters have thrown their best at him: questioning his citizenship and
his secret sympathies for Isis. They even accused him of wanting to
pull the plug on grandma.
And yet there have
been no pseudo-scandals about his personal life, his friends and
donors, or even open microphone moments. As a candidate he was
accused of palling around with terrorists, cutting a sweetheart deal
for his home, and following the lead of an anti-American preacher.
Inside the White House, not so much. The integrity and
self-discipline over the last eight years has almost driven the
scandal-mongers out of business.
All that’s left
are the obvious problems posed by a radical Islamist from Kenya
looking to foment a socialist revolution from the Oval Office. Given
that he has only two months left in the White House, President Obama
needs to speed up his secret plans or else he’ll turn into an even
greater disappointment to the right-wingnuts.
The good news for
the scandal-mongers is the next Clinton administration appears to be
just around the corner. House Republicans are already prepping their
subpoenas in case they can launch another several dozen
investigations into the newly-elected President Clinton.
In that context, it
doesn’t much matter whether the FBI’s Clinton emails amount to
anything more than political gossip. The Hunting of Hillary has only
just begun.
What does matter is
the impact on voters in these final frenetic days of the 2016
election. Recent polling suggests that most voters have already made
up their minds about whether Clinton is honest and trustworthy: they
don’t believe her. To be sure, they also think the same about
Donald Trump, albeit in slightly lower numbers.
But those poll
numbers mean that the email pseudo-scandal is unlikely to change
anyone’s mind about the candidate. In the same way, it’s highly
unlikely that Bill Clinton’s money-making schemes at the Clinton
Foundation will affect his wife’s honesty numbers.
For many voters,
this email story comes too late. More than 12 million votes have
already been cast across the country in early voting, representing
around 10% of the likely total votes in this election.
In any case, the
polls were already tightening, as Republicans inevitably rally to
their candidate, no matter how catastrophically compromised he is
with the voting demographic commonly known as “women”.
Clinton’s
post-debate highs were unlikely to hold. In fact, numerous studies
have shown that elections tend to end where the polls stand two weeks
after the conventions, despite all the fluctuations back and forth.
That suggests this election will end up as a race in the mid-single
digits as a margin of victory for Clinton.
Of course we don’t
know what the FBI emails may yet uncover, and we certainly don’t
know what turnout will look like on election day.
But we do know that
the closing days of a presidential election are anxious times.
Campaign staffers are exhausted and fear failure. The media is
desperate for one more fix of adrenaline, one more turn of the story
to up-end the likely outcome. Supporters on both sides become
obsessive consumers of any snippet of information that might tip the
balance.
Into this
gasoline-soaked period, the FBI director just threw a burning match
and walked away. But the dumpster fire was already raging in this
shocking election, and the voters who find the whole scene disgusting
will likely stay away.
Never mind the
emails. This election was already in flames.
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FBI
director Comey faces fury for cryptic letter about Clinton email
inquiry
Podesta:
Comey ‘allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate’
Trump
campaign seizes on news of review of newly discovered emails
Weiner
takes center stage in presidential race about men’s sex lives
David
Smith in Washington
Saturday
29 October 2016 19.56 BST
Hillary Clinton’s
campaign chair on Saturday led a chorus of Democratic party fury over
the FBI’s decision to review a new batch of her staff’s emails,
which was announced just 11 days before the presidential election in
a striking break with law enforcement tradition.
The Clinton campaign
launched an extraordinary criticism of James Comey, the director of
the FBI, who faced anger for his dramatic and late intervention in
the race, which deviated from FBI protocol. Comey stood accused of
betraying the bureau’s political neutrality, and came under growing
pressure to make public everything he knows.
The latest twist in
a topsy turvy election arrived on Friday afternoon, when Comey said
in a letter to Congress the FBI would review whether there was any
classified information in new “emails that appear to be pertinent
to the investigation”. In a carefully worded letter, the director
said he wanted to “supplement my previous testimony” about the
original Clinton email investigation, which he told Congress had
closed this summer, and said: “The FBI cannot yet assess whether or
not this material may be significant.”
On Saturday, Clinton
campaign chair John Podesta said: “By providing selective
information, he’s allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate in
order to inflict maximum political damage and no one can separate
what is true from what is not because Comey has not been forthcoming
with the facts.
“What little Comey
has told us makes it hard to understand why this step was warranted
at all.”
It is “entirely
possible” that the emails are duplicates of those already studied
by the FBI in its earlier investigation into Clinton’s use of a
private server while secretary of state, Podesta told reporters on a
conference call, adding that Clinton would not be distracted in the
final days of the campaign.
In July, the FBI
closed that investigation. Comey said at the time that Clinton and
her aides had been “extremely careless” but not criminal with
their email practices.
“Director Comey
was the one who decided to take this unprecedented step,” Podesta
said, “we now learn, against the advice of senior justice
department officials who told him it was against longstanding
department policy of both Democratic and Republican administrations.
“Director Comey
was the one that wrote a letter that was light on facts, heavy on
innuendo, knowing full well what Republicans in Congress would do
with it.
“It’s now up to
him, who owes the public answers to the questions that are now on the
table, and we’re calling on him to come forward and give those
answers to the American public.”
Law enforcement
sources speaking anonymously told news outlets the new emails came
from devices belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former
congressman and estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s
closest aides. Agents uncovered the emails during an investigation
into whether Weiner sent sexually explicit text messages to a teenage
girl.
Podesta said Abedin
had fully cooperated with the FBI investigation from the start.
“She’s been fully cooperative. We of course stand behind her.”
Robby Mook,
Clinton’s campaign manager, said: “The more information that
comes out, the more overblown this entire situation seems to be. That
in turn has raised more questions about director Comey from his
colleagues in law enforcement circles, to take this extraordinary
step just 11 days out from a presidential election.”
Mook highlighted a
“startling” Washington Post report that senior officials in the
justice department had warned Comey not to go public but he ignored
their advice. He also claimed that, based on anecdotes from the
ground, Clinton’s supporters were intensifying their efforts to get
out the vote.
“Our volunteers
are rallying behind Hillary,” he said. “They know what a fighter
she is … They’re as upset and concerned as we are here … This
has only increased the momentum that we’re feeling among our
activists on the ground.”
A jubilant Donald
Trump, meanwhile, seized on a potential lifeline for his faltering
campaign – on Friday describing Clinton’s handling of classified
information as a scandal “bigger than Watergate”.
With barely
disguised anger, Clinton herself demanded the FBI explain itself on
Friday. “The American people deserve to get the full and complete
facts immediately,” she told reporters in Des Moines, Iowa. “The
director himself has said he doesn’t know whether the emails
referenced in his letter are significant or not.”
The content of the
messages is unknown – and may well remain so beyond election day.
“Right now, your guess is as good as mine, and I don’t think
that’s good enough,” Clinton said.
Comey is a Barack
Obama appointee who was deputy attorney general for George W Bush. As
well as the Washington Post, the New Yorker reported officials
speaking on condition of anonymity saying that Comey was warned by
the justice department before sending his letter to Congress.
“He is operating
independently of the justice department. And he knows it,” one
official told the Post. “It violates decades of practice,”
another told the New Yorker. “It’s aberrational.”
Matthew Miller, who
served at the department under attorney general Eric Holder, told the
Guardian: “I think it was an unacceptable breach of years of
department of justice practice and precedent.
“The department
goes out of its way not to take any action close to an election that
could influence the outcome of that election. The FBI’s reputation
for independence and integrity is really at the core to their ability
to do their job effectively.”
Miller described
Comey’s decision to provide an unprecedented televised statement at
the end of the Clinton investigation in July as “the original sin
here”. The director then felt able to answer questions from
Congress in more detail than usual, but this is “by far the most
serious breach of all”, Miller added.
The former justice
department staffer said J Edgar Hoover, the original and
controversial FBI director, had done worse than Comey, “but not
even Hoover did anything publicly in the closing day of an election
that could be seen as tipping the scales.”
Republicans and
Democrats alike expressed bafflement at Comey’s timing and
ambiguous letter. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a senior Democrat with a
history of support for the security agencies, condemned Comey’s
conduct. “The FBI has a history of extreme caution near election
day so as not to influence the results,” she said. “Today’s
break from that tradition is appalling.”
Charles Grassley,
the Republican chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said
Comey’s letter to Congress “was unsolicited and, quite honestly,
surprising”. He too said it created more questions than answers.
“Congress and the
public deserve more context to properly assess what evidence the FBI
has discovered and what it plans to do with it,” Grassley said.
Some analysts
speculated that Comey felt caught in a bind: if he waited until after
the election, or if the new review leaked through back channels, he
would have been accused of a cover-up. In an internal email sent to
FBI employees, he said he was concerned about balance: the need to
inform Congress and the American people versus the danger of a
misleading impression about emails.
“In trying to
strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an
election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood,
but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it,” he wrote.
Early voting is
under way in 37 states, nearly 17m votes have been cast, and Clinton
has a healthy lead in most polls. “I think people a long time ago
made up their minds about the emails,” she said at her press
conference. “And now they are choosing a president.”
Though his own
campaign has been plagued by one scandal after another, Trump has
regularly berated Clinton over the emails, and his supporters at
rallies frequently chant: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” On Friday
he accused Clinton of corruption “on a scale we have never seen
before”.
“We must not let
her take her criminal scheme into the oval office,” he told a rally
in New Hampshire. “Perhaps, finally, justice will be done.”
On Saturday,
campaigning in Colorado, Trump made an about-face from his months of
criticising the FBI and justice department. “You have amazing
people at the Department of Justice, and you have amazing people at
the FBI,” he said. “I’ll bet you, without any knowledge, that
there was a revolt in the FBI.”
The FBI began
investigating Weiner in September, after a Daily Mail report that a
15-year-old girl had exchanged explicit messages with him. By then,
Abedin had already announced a separation from her husband.
Trump himself has
been accused by several women of sexual assault or inappropriate
conduct. He has argued that Clinton “enabled” her husband’s
infidelities, and brought three women who accused the former
president of wrongdoing to a presidential debate.
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