Boy, is the FBI amazing!

It took the FBI 16 months to review 55,000 Clinton e-mails and determine that there was no basis for prosecution.  Yet it took them only 8 days !!! to review a reported 650,000 new emails - over 6 times as many - and clear Hillary again just two days before the election. Amazing! Unless of course it had already been determined what the answer would be, irrespective of the content of the emails. In that case all that was needed was a theatrical pause and then an announcement.

I wouldn't be so cynical about the FBI if it weren't for the questionable history of the Clinton investigation up to now.

 

The FBI issue

FBI director James Comey did something highly unusual and highly unorthodox when he announced, apparently without the consent or agreement of the agents working the Clinton email investigation, that the FBI would not be recommending prosecution for her security breaches. He then did something else quite unorthodox when he released to Congress, but under very tight restrictions, some of the documentation about the investigation. And now he has done yet another unorthodox thing in writing to Congress, 10 days before the election, about reopening the email investigation with the newly-discovered Clinton emails on top Clinton aide Huma Abedin's laptop.

A number of sources report severe internal dissension within the FBI about Comey's actions, including a number of pending high-profile resignations (insiders say he has a stack of resignation letters on his desk by now). And of course by now he has infuriated both the Republicans and the Democrats. Moreover recent revelations make it pretty clear that the investigation itself was highly unorthodox (unnecessary immunity deals, no grand jury empaneled to allow the FBI to issue subpoenas, agreement to destroy the relevant laptops, agreement to limit questioning, etc, etc).  It certainly looks from the outside like the whole thing was fixed from the beginning to assure Hillary wouldn't face charges.  And in fact the agent originally in charge of the investigation, John Giacalone, resigned in disgust midway through the investigation, telling friends the investigation was "going sideways" (Washington slang for being politically manipulated).

Some writers are guessing that Comey jumped at the chance to reopen the investigation in order to try to repair his reputation, and/or perhaps to repair the reputation of the FBI, and get some of the heat off of himself. We will see. My guess is that we won't see the results of this new investigation until after the election, and that no one will have the guts to charge a president-elect with a criminal case. Of course if Trump defies the odds yet again and wins the election, Hillary will indeed be in a world of hurt.

Bill Clinton vs Bill Cosby

Several writers recently have asked an interesting question: Bill Cosby is accused of molesting a number of women, and paying off one or more of them, and is being treated as an outcast because of it. Bill Clinton is accused of molesting a number of women, and paying off one or more of them, and yet is still much loved by a large portion of the nation. What is the difference?  Is it because Bill Cosby is black and Bill Clinton is white? Is it because Bill Clinton is a Washington insider and Bill Cosby isn't? Is it because Hillary defends Bill Clinton but not Bill Cosby?

It is an interesting question.

Campus Rape Outrage

Fact: TENS OF THOUSANDS! Of young women, and a few young men, will be raped on college campuses this academic year.

Fact: The vast majority of those rapes will be committed by a very small number of serial rapist students, a disproportionate number of whom are popular athletes on campus and/or members of a few fraternities. Almost none will even be expelled, let alone prosecuted.

Fact: College administrators and college police, and even local police, will usually do little or nothing about this – and in fact will belittle the victims, threaten them, and try to talk them out of any legal action, all to “protect” the image of and donations to the college.

Want to know more? See the 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground.  College administrators, board members and powerful alumni are trying to suppress it, and deny it is accurate – but it is. 

People who are (rightly) upset about Donald Trump’s boorish and sexist locker room comments ought by rights to be rioting in the streets about college rape and rapists who are never prosecuted, and hanging effigies of college deans and presidents from lamp posts. But they aren’t.

Among the other institutional, bureaucratic, and political abuses  that are driving much of the current voter anger this year, this issue of college rape, and especially the institutional cover ups about it, ought to be prominent. It is every bit as bad as the child abuses in the Catholic Church, and it ought to stoke as much anger.

What’s next?

Unless there are some stunning surprises in the next couple of weeks, this election is pretty much over. We will get Hillary as president, perhaps with a slim majority in Congress for the next 2 years; perhaps not.

I expect it will be a difficult presidency for her. A fair proportion of the country will be against her – all Trump supporters and many of the Sanders supporters. I think there will be a real feeling among some 30-40% or more of the country that she is an illegitimate president, an unindicted felon who should have been disqualified, if not fined and jailed, for her carelessness with classified materials, but who managed to stay on the ballot because of insider tampering with the FBI and the justice system.

And I don’t expect the Trump effect to go away. Trump himself may well remain a political force (I read that his son has been in talks about setting up a Trump TV network), but even if he fades back into celebrity obscurity the voter anger that has fueled his campaign will still be there, and I expect in the next presidential election four years from now someone – perhaps Ted Cruz – will try to resurrect the Trump voting block.

If Clinton gets a temporary majority in both houses of Congress it will be interesting to see if she learned anything from the Obamacare debacle, or if she will try to force through a progressive agenda without any bipartisan support. A temporary majority in the Senate will at least allow her to appoint some liberal judges to the Supreme Court, but that might turn out to be about her most effective action as president, especially if the House remains in Republican hands.

In retrospect it is amazing that both political parties managed to field such unsuitable candidates. By all measures the Republicans should have won this election in a walk, especially against a candidate as unpopular as Clinton. Yet they managed to bungle it anyway.

Well, this election has upset lots of things. It will be interesting to see if any effective reforms come out of it in either political party.

Recommended: America's Russia Policy Has Failed

There is a good article in this month's Foreign Affairs: America's Russia Policy Has Failed. It is clear that the Obama administration has been outfoxed and wrong-footed time and time again by President Putin, and is even now being humiliated by Russia in Syria, to the point where Russia is telling us where we can and cannot fly over Syria. But the article argues that the American problem runs deeper than just Obama's naivete - that the Washington foreign policy consensus over the past few decades on how to handle Russia is wrong and needs to be rethought.

This is a good article, worth reading.

Media statistics

I suggested months ago that Trump had an uphill battle because the entire Washington establishment – Republican and Democratic alike – opposed him because he was an outsider who threatened their cozy world. He of course has made their job easier by his intemperate campaign and manifest unsuitability for the job. But even if he had been an outstanding candidate they still would have done their best to bring him down.

The current media statistics show just how biased the mainstream media has become. A recent article in The Hill reported that a review of the tapes of the evening news over the period when this last flap occurred showed that NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news together devoted a total of 23 minutes to coverage of the attacks on Trump for his sexism, but only a total (across all three networks!) of 57 seconds to the revelations about Hillary from the hacked WikiLeaks emails.

Of course sex sells better than substance in the media, but 23 minutes (favoring Hillary) to 57 seconds (favoring Trump)? Hardly an unbiased press!