Just when you thought the 2016 presidential election couldn’t get any nuttier, FBI Director James Comey wrote a letter yesterday to members of Congress to let them know that he was once again looking into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State. With the election looming just eleven days away, the timing of Comey’s letter is the mother of all October surprises. It may provide a lifeline to the campaign of Donald Trump and may also help the Republicans save their majority in the Senate (more on the Senate races soon).
Predictably, the Clinton campaign and Democrats in general are ripping Director Comey for interfering in the election. Clinton, in a brief press conference, also called on the bureau to more fully explain the issue without delay but also expressed confidence that there would be no change in the conclusion reached in July, that she had not committed an offense that would be prosecuted.
Comey, in a separate memo to his fellow FBI employees, explained his decision to inform Congress Here is the text of Comey’s letter.
This morning I sent a letter to Congress in connection with the Secretary Clinton email investigation. Yesterday, the investigative team briefed me on their recommendation with respect to seeking access to emails that have recently been found in an unrelated case. Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them.
Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. 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.
— James Comey (October 29) (letter to FBI employees)
What Comey did not publicly acknowledge but has been widely reported in the news media is that the “unrelated case” is the FBI’s investigation of disgraced New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, who is accused of sending lewd photos of himself and sexting with an underage girl in North Carolina. In case you haven’t connected the dots yet, the relevance to Secretary Clinton is that Weiner is married to Huma Abedin, who is one of Hillary’s best friends and top aides. Apparently, Weiner and Abedin shared a computer and there were emails sent between Abedin and Clinton that the bureau is now looking into. (Incidentally, Abedin and Weiner are now separated).
Needless to say, interjecting Weiner (and his long history of sexting) into the presidential campaign is the last thing the Clinton campaign wanted. They are apoplectic over this and Trump is positively gleeful, although probably overplaying his hand. At a rally yesterday, he talked about how maybe the system wasn’t as rigged as he had previously said and that justice would finally be served. We don’t know that. This bombshell revelation poses two yet to be answered questions:
- Is it possible that we’ll know anything about what’s contained in any Abedin-Clinton emails before Election Day, which is just 10 days from now?
- Is this bombshell enough to tilt the election to Trump’s favor?
The first question is of course the big one, because it influences the answer to the second. Legal experts I’ve seen have commented that there is “no chance” that the FBI will be able to draw any conclusions from these latest emails in time to reveal them to he public. I don’t claim to understand the inner workings of the FBI but it seems to me that, if you put a team of 50 agents on it, you could comb through any emails fairly quickly. It’s not the same as the previously concluded year-long investigation, which included exhaustive attempts to recover deleted emails, attempt to determine whether they were classified, and dozens or hundreds of interviews. These Clinton-Abedin emails have now been presented to the FBI on a silver platter. All you have to do is read them. What you’re looking for are anything that looks like it might be classified, a “pay for play” revelation regarding the Clinton Foundation, or an email in which Clinton reveals her true intentions about why she was using a private server in the first place.
But we also don’t know for sure that it’s as simple as I just laid it out. Newsweek is reporting that the issue may be more about how Abedin handled her own emails and that Clinton is only an ancillary player in this drama.
Still, if somehow the FBI is able to draw a definitive conclusion from this in less than ten days, that conclusion might very well decide the election, depending on how bad it is for Hillary or whether it turns about to be a nothing-burger. Famed Watergate investigator Carl Bernstein has opined that this must be really bad for Clinton for Comey to have taken this extraordinary step. Others have speculated that Clinton might go ahead win the election and then be forced to resign early in her term.
For now, let’s assume the legal analysts are correct and that we, the public, will not know anything more than simply that the FBI is still looking into the matter. If that’s the case, my guess is that this will not alter the ultimate outcome of the race, that Clinton has a significant enough advantage in overall support, early voting, the math of the Electoral College and, most importantly, the ability to get out the vote with her campaign’s massively superior ground game operation. For most American voters, the Clinton email scandal is baked into the cake already. This news is a bit stunning but I don’t see it flipping the race on a dime.
But that’s just a guess. There is no doubt that there will be a renewed energy among Trump supporters who will believe they can win the White House and will be highly motivated to cast their ballots. Trump has an “enthusiasm” advantage over Clinton already and this latest FBI revelation will only add jet fuel to that enthusiasm. The other question is whether Clinton supporters will be demoralized by the thought of casting a ballot for someone who is under an active FBI investigation (that’s another first, along with being the first woman).
Yesterday Fox News’ Ed Henry reported that he knew “for a fact” that the Clinton campaign felt that they had the presidency “in the bag.” Henry’s rationale was the campaign’s plan to have Hillary visit the state of Arizona, which is a tactic to “run up the score” rather than secure the traditional battleground states needed to win the race. If the campaign cancels the Arizona event and re-directs the candidate, that will be an evidence of panic setting in. By the way, the strategy of Clinton and her team to call for Comey to disclose more information is the correct one. As long as no new information is revealed, she can take the high road and continue her public confidence that this is again no big deal.
Still, with the returned cloud of uncertainty about an ongoing FBI investigation, the possibility of a Trump comeback cannot be summarily dismissed. Even before this news, it was an awful week for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in general. First there was the public acknowledgement that Obamacare premiums will be rising significantly in many states around the country. Then there were the ongoing WikiLeaks releases, a particularly damning one in which Clinton “fixer” Doug Band detailed how the Clintons used the Clinton Foundation to enrich themselves. The WikiLeaks releases are hard to process for the average voter but the rise in Obamacare premiums are not. And it’s not hard for the average voter to process the fact that the Democratic candidate will be subject to an ongoing FBI felony investigation on Election Day.
There is no doubt that Democrats (both politicians and citizens) are experiencing a bit of a freak-out right now. Between the WikiLeaks release and the renewed FBI interest in Hillary’s private email server, there is a sword of Damocles over the heads of the candidate and her party for the next ten days. If somehow the cumulative effect of this news results in a Trump victory, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will react with abject horror, despair and fear. If this happens, this will not be the fault of the left-leaning citizens of our nation but on the Democratic “establishment” who anointed Mrs. Clinton and shoved aside any legitimate contenders. The email story broke in March 2015. There was plenty of time for other candidates to get into the race but Mrs. Clinton instantaneously had the endorsements of virtually every Democratic Senator and House member and (as we later learned) a DNC that was rigging the process to her benefit.
This is what I wrote on March 10, 2015 about email-gate:
My guess is that this scandal will not in any way derail Mrs. Clinton’s inevitable march to her party’s nomination but I guarantee that the party pooh-bahs are sweating, hoping and praying that no more shoes drop. The worst thing that could happen to the party would be for more stories of this type to emerge in a campaign with nobody to challenge or replace her on the ticket.
If her last name were not Clinton and if there was not a groundswell in the Democratic Party for a ground-breaking “first woman president,” I think there would be a dozen challengers for the party nomination within weeks and that she would be stuck in political traffic with Chris Christie on the George Washington Bridge. But because of huge advantage of the Clinton name, the Clinton political machine, the Clinton donor base, and the natural advantage that the Dems have with the Electoral College, she’s still the most likely next President of the United States.
— www.chrisbodig.com (March 10, 2015)
Well, party pooh-bahs, the other shoe has dropped. The only question is whether it’s enough to derail her path to the Oval Office or whether she will be overtaken by the Trump Train.
I’ll conclude with a comment about what a zany presidential campaign this has been and how we now have a third instance in which genitalia has entered the political arena. The first was during the GOP primaries when Marco Rubio commented on Trump’s small hands and implied that something else might be small as well. The Donald, always eager to defend himself, declared there was “no problem there” during the next debate, prompting CNN to post the headline, “Donald Trump defends the size of his penis.”
Of course, last month, we had the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about how, because he was a big star, women would allow him to “grab them by the pussy.”
And now genitalia is back in the news with the injection of serial sexter Anthony Weiner back into the public consciousness because of his shared computer with Huma Abedin.
Crazy. Disgusting. Depressing.
Thank for reading.
Chris Bodig