FBI ADVISES NO CHARGES FOR CLINTON, BUT DIRECTOR JIM COMEY REBUKES HER FOR EXTREMELY CARELESS HANDLING OF E-MAILS.

James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 

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CHRIS CILLIZZA, WASHINGTON POST

Here’s the good news for Hillary Clinton: The FBI has recommended that no charges be brought following its investigation of the former secretary of state's private email server.

Here’s the bad news: Just about everything else.

FBI Director James B. Comey dismantled large portions of Clinton's long-told story about her private server and what she sent or received on it during a stirring 15-minute news conference, after which he took no questions. While Comey exonerated Clinton, legally speaking, he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her in the court of public opinion.

Most importantly, Comey said the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton's server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails. 

Comey condemned Clinton and her top aides as “extremely careless” in how they handled classified information during her time as the head of the State Department, adding: “Any reasonable person … should have known that an unclassified system was no place” for that sort of information. “Even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know, or should know, that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” Mr. Comey said.

There was more — much more. Comey said Clinton had used not one but multiple private email servers during her time at State. He said Clinton used multiple email devices during that time. (She had offered her desire to use a single device for “convenience” as the main reason she set up the private server.) He noted that the lawyers tasked by Clinton with sorting her private emails from her professional ones never actually read all of the emails (as the FBI did in the course of its investigation). Comey said that while the FBI found no evidence that Clinton’s private server was hacked by foreign governments, it was possible that it had been. He argued that the Clinton lawyers had deleted emails they marked as personal that contained professional content, and that while the FBI found some of those emails in its investigation, it was certainly possible more existed that they were unable to track down.

It’s worth remembering at this point that Clinton and her team deleted more emails than they turned over to the State Department.

It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

Those are facts, facts delivered by the Justice Department of a Democratic administration. And those facts run absolutely counter to the narrative put forth by the Clinton operation: that this whole thing was a Republican witch-hunt pushed by a bored and adversarial media.

Now for the key question: How much do the FBI findings hurt her campaign?

The 110 emails represented only a small fraction of the roughly 60,000 emails that passed through Mrs. Clinton’s servers. Even with the 2,000 that the State Department upgraded as part of their public release, they account for fewer than 7 percent of those sent and received. Also, as one law enforcement official noted, the recipients of the most sensitive emails included aides or diplomats who have clearances to receive classified information — as opposed to a journalist, as was the case with the former director of the C.I.A., David H. Petraeus.

In the end, as damning as Mr. Comey’s conclusion was, he did not claim that Mrs. Clinton’s behavior had compromised any program or operation.

But, for a candidate already badly struggling on questions of whether she is honest and trustworthy enough to hold the office to which she aspires, Comey’s comments are devastating. Watching them, I could close my eyes and imagine them spliced into a bevy of 30-second ads — all of which end with the FBI director rebuking Clinton as “extremely careless.”

Still, all things considered, this is a very bad day for the Clinton campaign. It’s not the worst outcome (indictment), but it badly disrupts her attempts to move beyond the email server story as she seeks to unite the party in advance of the Democratic convention later this month. And it suggests the email issue will haunt her all the way through Election Day on Nov. 8.

BY THE NUMBERS: THE FBI'S INVESTIGATION 

30,000: Rough number of Clinton emails the FBI read – but those are just the ones she didn't delete

110: Clinton emails containing material that was classified at the time she sent or received them

52: Separate email chains that included those 110 messages

3: Emails Clinton never gave the State Department which contained material classified at the time she sent or received them

2,000: Emails containing material that was 'up-classified' after the fact even though it wasn't classified at the time she sent or received them

'A very small number': Emails on Clinton's private server that were marked classified at the time she sent or received them

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MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

My track record as a critic of the Clintons’ attackers goes back two decades now. I have researched a lot of these things deeply, and I came to conclude—after initially believing the hype about Whitewater—that most of the bombs lobbed at the Clintons were duds. Whitewater was that. The Clintons lostmoney and concealed nothing. The attempts to paint her in particular as corrupt have always been, to me, chiefly ideological. That is, conservatives hated what she represented from day one—a bossypants feminist who showed open contempt for more traditional models of womanhood—and they wanted to get her. One way to get her was to carry on about how radical she was. But that didn’t really sell outside conservative circles, so they had try another route: to prove that she was corrupt.

However: To say all that is by no means to say that she, and he, never do anything wrong. They do. And as FBI Director James Comey made clear Monday morning, she did plenty wrong in her emailing habits. It was obvious that Comey wanted to communicate that very clearly.

 I think that politically, the “extremely careless” bit and the 110 emails that Comey says were classified at the time will be liabilities. But I also don’t know that this moves that many votes—those who think she shouldn’t set foot in the Oval Office because she’s untrustworthy thought that before Comey spoke. And she sure is lucky to be running against a racist con artist who wants convicted murders to speak at his convention.

But as a longtime Clinton watcher and (usually) defender, I hope to God she takes a key lesson away from this. She used the private server in the first place because she didn’t want her personal emails to be available to right-wing groups like Judicial Watch that have hounded her all her Washington life. And look at what happened—Judicial Watch got them anyway, and helped kick up a scandal to boot. Learn from this, Hillary. Judicial Watch and others will always be after you. It will never end. You can’t win this, and you can’t make any more ethically corner-cutting decisions with stiff-arming Judicial Watch in mind. When you’re president, those decisions will be grounds, fairly or not, for impeachment proceedings.

I also would love to see, though I know we never will, a Clinton press conference later this week where she stands up and says: “You know, I did wrong here, and I apologize. Believe me, I’ve learned a lesson from this, and it is X. And when I’m president, rest assured I’m just not going to use email, okay? Just won’t use it. And Bill might, but he’ll email in exactly the way the law demands. And, by the way, I think Bill was wrong to call on Attorney General Lynch in the way that he did and have told him so. That won’t be happening in my administration, either. Things are going to be different.”

Over the years, when these Clinton dust-ups have happened, I’ve said to her people some version of the above. Why not just have her say publicly that this was a mistake, she’s truly sorry, and she’ll work to see that it doesn’t happen again? And it has been explained to me that, well, she doesn’t have the emotional ability to do that; that she thinks it shows weakness; that it just hands her opponents and the media more material; whatever.

And all those things are true. She’d take a murderous pummeling for three days. And you know what? Then, those three days would end, and after that, whenever questions arose again, she could say I addressed that, I know I was wrong, and I laid out how I’m going to behave differently in the future.

This is the only way I can see for her to do anything about her lousy trust numbers. Admit error and promise to try harder. She worries far too much about how such an admission will be heard inside the Beltway, when she ought to give more thought to how it will be heard outside of it.

So now she has no sword of indictment dangling over her head. In a few days, Trump will say something intolerable—or, if they’re on their game, the Clinton oppo people will dump some of their research into some willing media hands—and we’ll be talking about something else. This email issue won’t go away, but barring new revelations, I don’t think it will be decisive over the next four months.

The next four, or eight, years, however, are another matter, unless Hillary—and Bill—finally acknowledge two things.

One, that preemptively taking all possible steps to avoid future trouble is not capitulation to enemies; it’s just smart self-preservation. And two, in the event of a lapse, contrition isn’t weakness; it’s strength, and it’s by far the politically smarter play than stonewalling, which Clinton did at the beginning of this scandal.

I hope Obama talked with her about some of these things, and I hope she listened.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, NEW YORKER
Clinton has committed no crimes with regard to her e-mails, but she has developed an unhealthy relationship with her pursuers, who surely will only redouble their efforts if she becomes President. Burned in the past, she has become excessively defensive, and harms herself more than those who long to bring her down. The next time she’s under fire—and there will be a next time—Clinton would be best advised to forget her past and act like she hasn’t seen it all before.

JONATHAN CHAIT, NEW YORK


Before his message was overshadowed by a scandal about his use of a white-supremacist image — a mistake that could happen to any candidate, really, so long as that candidate had inspired a massive following among neo-Nazis — Donald Trump was trying to make a point about Hillary Clinton’s corruption. She is the “most corrupt candidate ever,” he claims. Corruption is indeed a plausible line of attack against Clinton — or, at least, it would be, if the opposing candidate was anybody other than Donald Trump, who may actually be the most corrupt presidential candidate ever.

It should be conceded that the evidence against Clinton is fairly damning. After Bill Clinton left the presidency, the former First Couple intermingled career and personal interests in ways that, at minimum, exposed them to a high risk of contamination. The Clinton Foundation was not only a charitable endeavor but a vehicle for Bill Clinton to enjoy the comforts and exercise the quasi-official power of an active figure on the world stage. Donors to the foundation included many of the same businesses and individuals who paid the Clintons for private speeches, and who had an interest in cultivating close ties with a secretary of State and potential future president. Some of those figures had business interests that aligned with Russian strategic goals rather than American ones. The Clintons failed to promptly disclose all of their foundation donors and, on at least one occasion, appointed an apparently unqualified donor to a State Department board.

The evidence of Clinton corruption is circumstantial rather than direct. If they wanted to stay above reproach, they could have rigorously disclosed every dollar that passed through their personal and professional accounts, and made it plain that neither donating to their foundation nor hiring them for speeches would purchase any special treatment whatsoever — indeed, they bent over backward to demonstrate that they could not be bought. Instead, they profited from the ambiguity.

The case against Hillary Clinton is that her administration might be corrupted around the margins — in its minor appointments or pardons and in the relative ease in which some donors get their calls returned — but that the basic contours of her administration would be a continuation of the non-corrupt center-left program of the Obama administration. The case against Trump is qualitatively different. Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in ways that run to the very core of his identity and prospective governing choices.

He is already waist-deep in stench. Trump has not merely intermingled campaigning with his business interests; the two are one and the same. His entire political career seems to be an outgrowth of his efforts to build his personal brand, which Trump has endlessly used the campaign as a platform to promote. He has devoted speeches to attacking the judge in the fraud suit against his “university,” instructed surrogates to do the same, and promised to relaunch the enterprise if elected. 

Trump’s entire business career reeks, beginning with his early associations with organized crime and proceeding through a career of swindling. “No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks,” reports David Cay Johnston. :

No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks....it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service...What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910#ixzz4Dbx3FCxM 
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Trump is not merely comfortable doing business with criminals and thugs — his habits of manipulating bankruptcy laws and swindling his partners have left him reliant upon, let us say, unconventional sources of investment, many of whom are the scum of the Earth. 

Franklin Foer lays out impressive circumstantial evidence that Trump may well be a puppet of Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump shares a web of financial ties that help explain their shared worldview:

Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over the past decade, Russia has boosted right-wing populists across Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France,well-documented transfusions of cash to keep her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited “personally and handsomely” from Russian energy deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it....There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO

Joe Biden warned about this effort last year in a speech at the Brookings Institution: “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he can then exploit.” Ruptures that will likely multiply after Brexit—a campaign Russia’s many propaganda organs bombastically promoted.

The destruction of Europe is a grandiose objective; so is the weakening of the United States. Until recently, Putin has only focused glancing attention on American elections. Then along came the presumptive Republican nominee.

Donald Trump is like the Kremlin’s favored candidates, only more so. He celebrated the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU. He denounces NATO with feeling. He is also a great admirer of Vladimir Putin. Trump’s devotion to the Russian president has been portrayed as buffoonish enthusiasm for a fellow macho strongman. But Trump’s statements of praise amount to something closer to slavish devotion. In 2007, he praised Putin for “rebuilding Russia.” A year later he added, “He does his work well. Much better than our Bush.” When Putin ripped American exceptionalism in a New York Times op-ed in 2013, Trump called it “a masterpiece.” Despite ample evidence, Trump denies that Putin has assassinated his opponents: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.” In the event that such killings have transpired, they can be forgiven: “At least he’s a leader.” And not just any old head of state: “I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an A.”

That’s a highly abridged sampling of Trump’s odes to Putin. Why wouldn’t the Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest?....Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, purloining its opposition research files on Trump and just about everything else it could find. They also wormed their way into the computers of the Clinton Foundation, a breach reported by Bloomberg. And though it may be a mere coincidence, Trump’s inner circle is populated with advisers and operatives who have long careers advancing the interests of the Kremlin.

We shouldn’t overstate Putin’s efforts, which will hardly determine the outcome of the election...Still, a foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States has attached itself to a major presidential campaign.

Read more at Franklin Foer 

Whatever we might think of Clinton, we can be confident she is not controlled by the Kremlin. And the failures of disclosure or record-keeping in her operations pale beside Trump’s defiant refusal to disclose his tax returns.