“This is not a win. Comey eviscerated all the excuses for Hillary and her team’s behaviors. It plays into the narrative that she can’t be trusted,” said an Iowa Democrat, who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously. “If she was running against anyone other than Trump, this would have been blown up much bigger and hit much harder.”
.. “He needs someone with a calming influence who can help him on Capitol Hill and with key constituent groups that want to vote for Trump but remain reluctant,”
.. On the whole, Republican insiders aren’t fond of those ideas, though military experience tested much higher: Just 15 percent of insiders said a retired general would be most helpful to Trump’s efforts to defeat Hillary Clinton, while only 1 percent want a fellow business figure.
Criminal charges against Clinton could have set new legal standard
Extreme carelessness isn’t criminal, at least when it comes to handling classified information.
That’s the consensus of experts in national security law, who weren’t surprised that the FBI isn’t recommending an indictment for Hillary Clinton and her staff related to her use of a private email server, saying such a move would have set a bold new standard for such cases.
Story Continued Below“It would have been a real long-shot to shoehorn Secretary Clinton’s conduct into the existing federal criminal laws,” said Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law. “I don’t think this was the case in which to pursue unprecedented interpretations of those statutes.”
The 7 key findings in the FBI’s Clinton email probe
The FBI director said Clinton’s use of an unclassified email system to handle classified information was “especially concerning” because the homebrew system was not protected by a full-time security team like the ones that protect official government servers and even commercial email services used by the general public, such as Gmail.
.. 110 individual messages and 52 email chains contained some level of classified information. Of those 52 email chains, eight contained information classified at the highest level, “top secret,” at the time they were sent.
.. Clinton’s personal email system was not one server but multiple servers, which she accessed using “numerous” mobile devices.
.. The former secretary of state stored and decommissioned her older, unused servers in various ways, creating “a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort” on the part of FBI investigators piecing together her email system.
.. The FBI could find no direct evidence, Comey said, of intrusion into Clinton’s personal server by hackers, but added that the nature of her system made it unlikely that the bureau could find such evidence even if an intrusion had occurred.
If Clinton Implodes, Democrats May Turn to Biden and Warren
One reason may be that the last thing Hillary Clinton really wants to talk about is how the office of the inspector general functioned during her four-year tenure at State. Astonishingly, the department had no permanent inspector general during that period, the office being filled by an acting inspector, Harold Geisel. He had been an ambassador appointed by President Bill Clinton and also had close ties to the State Department’s leadership. Those ties would have barred him from seeking the job of permanent inspector general. “It’s a convenient way to prevent oversight,” says Michael Harris, a University of Maryland professor who is an expert on the role of inspectors general in government. Acting inspectors general are “in a position where they could be removed at any moment.”
.. That’s where Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would come in. Biden would be sold as a steady hand who would energize President Obama’s supporters, and Warren would be pitched to delegates as someone who could keep Sanders progressives on board. “The implication would be that, at age 74, Biden might serve only one term and Warren would be a natural successor,’ a former Democratic congressman told me.