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#1391 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
Surprising...
Trump Supporter Jeanine Pirro Defends Hillary Clinton Over FBI Announcement
Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro came to Hillary Clinton’s defense on Sunday, criticizing FBI Director James Comey over his recently announced investigation into new emails relating to the former secretary of state.
“Comey’s actions violate, not only long-standing Justice Department policy, the directive of the person that he works under, the attorney general,” the former prosecutor said, referring to Loretta Lynch’s reported disagreement with Comey, “but even more important, the most fundamental rules of fairness and impartiality.”
A vocal supporter of GOP nominee Donald Trump, Pirro said Comey’s decision to announce the investigation so near Election Day reminded her of her own experience while running for New York attorney general in 2006. She called a DOJ investigation into her practices at the time “mean-spirited, and of course, nothing came of it except the adverse publicity cost me at the polls.”
“What was done to me in 2006 was wrong, and what happened to Hillary Clinton was equally wrong,” Pirro said. “Now this nation has already gone through an exhausting and traumatic campaign season. The FBI director should not now be front and center.”
Clinton’s campaign and Senate Democrats are calling on Comey to clarify the nature of the investigation out of concern that it is being misused for political purposes. “This is the biggest political scandal since Watergate, and I’m sure it will be properly handled from this point,” Trump said at a rally on Friday.
Comey’s decision to announce the investigation so close to the election also alarmed Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the White House under George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007. Painter announced Sunday in a New York Times op-ed that he had filed a Hatch Act violation complaint against Comey. The act prohibits employees of the executive branch from engaging in political activity.
“I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations,” Painter wrote. “Until this week.”
#1392 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
mitchejw wrote:Who is a non-millennial on this board?
Technically everyone born before 1981.
So maybe James, SLC, Smoking or I guess Randall
.
I was born in 1971.
Randall was born in 1955 I think. (that's what I heard anyway)
#1393 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
Spin spin spin....
As if you read any of it.
#1394 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
After more reading about this it sure seems like Comey covering his butt more than anything. This man swore under oath that if anything new came to light it would be reopened for investigation. Chaffetz and his pals have already said they plan on investigating Clinton further if/when she becomes POTUS. In other words, as usual per the Republican party, this is only the beginning not the end of their "investigations." Same applies for Comey. Either way you cut it, this guy is going to get dragged up there and questioned relentlessly over the Clinton emails.
Now imagine Comey in front of Congress testifying that he became aware of further emails less than two weeks before the election, but did nothing. He'd be accused of being in the tank for team Clinton just for starters, and probably would face criminal charges. By releasing this information now it keeps him safe from any prosecution later when they most certainly go full "Benghazi" on him.
It also looks like nothing came from Clinton or her server and nothing was intentionally withheld from the FBI.
I'd guess it's a big nothing burger.
If the Clinton camp has anything left on Trump, I'd expect it to drop before the Sunday news shows too. Rumors have swirled for the last week that there is a "bombshell" out there. Guess we'll see soon enough.
I went through my sample ballot today and will be early voting tomorrow.
#1395 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
This is huge news. If I was a Clinton supporter of course I would be worried.
Well she's even in GA. That shows how weak Trump is. Nobody is saying she will win, but if Georgia, Arizona etc are this close, it certainly does no bode well for Trump.
It's huge news to right wing websites...that's it.
Voting has already started. I doubt most Clinton supporters could care less to be honest. Probably because they can read.
#1396 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
Latest polls has Hillary even in GA and IA.
#1397 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
That's how it will be perceived.
By Trump supporters and the usual right wing websites...and that's it.
That's the thing far righties never learn, they exist in a bubble. In 2012, they denied polling numbers, they were whipped into a frenzy over multiple Obama "scandals", and yet...they were wrong on everything. Nobody came for their guns, nobody sent their family to Fema camps, nobody took away their right to practice Christianity, and Obama won in a landslide.
It's a brilliant ploy though. We report the real news mainstream media won't tell you. The mainstream media is corrupt. The system is corrupt. All these bad things are going to happen. Then when none of it pans out: The media hid the truth from you again, the elections are rigged, the status quo will do anything to stay in power. See? Just like we told you!
#1398 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
Opening a criminal investigation against a Presidential candidate 11 days before the election? It's a head shot.
A criminal investigation?
I love how you guys take one snippet, redefine it, and run with it like it's some big discovery.
Such is the way of the conspiracy theorist I guess.
#1399 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
The press is full of "breaking news" stories that FBI Director James Comey has "reopened" the Clinton email investigation. It's juicy news less than two weeks before the election. But it's not quite right.
Here's the text of Comey's letter:
When the FBI wants to say it is reopening an investigation, it knows perfectly well how to say that. In this case, the investigation was actually never actually closed, so it doesn't need to be reopened. The relevance of this letter is likely not that explosive new evidence of Clinton criminality has suddenly emerged.
It is that Comey made a set of representations to Congress that have been complicated by new information, apparently from the Anthony Weiner sexting case. So he's informing Congress of that fact before the election.
Comey represented to Congress that the Clinton email investigation was "complete." But as the letter relates, new emails have now come to the bureau's attention in that appears relevant to this one. (Weiner's estranged wife is one Clinton's top aides.) Comey has okayed a review of that new information to determine whether the emails contain classified material and also whether they are, in fact, relevant. And this fact, renders his prior statement to Congress no longer true.
The key point here, in other words, is not that he is "reopening" a closed matter investigation because of some bombshell. It is that he is amending his public testimony to Congress that the FBI was done while the bureau examines new material that may or may not have implications for investigative conclusions previously reached.
Here's the subtext: Comey and FBI investigated Clinton hard, and when various legal and practical hurdles made it impossible to move forward with any kind of criminal case against her, he stated his view—quite unflattering to her—that her behavior had been "extremely careless" with highly sensitive information.
He did this in public because he made a decision that Clinton and her team deserved public scrutiny for their acts, because she is a major party candidate for president. This is why he went out of his way—maybe too far—in revealing unfiltered information so that the public had the opportunity to consider it before voting for or against her.
This summer, in other words, he closed the investigation, stated his reasons, and took arrows both from those who thought he should have gone forward with a case and those who thought he should have said much less than he did.
And he testified before Congress that he was done.
The trouble is that now he has learned something which he thinks may complicate his earlier judgments. And he has authorized additional investigative steps to find out. He found out that he is not done. So the question is whether to tell Congress (and the public) or not.
Even at the risk of helping Trump, Comey has notified Congress (and the world) about it so as to clarify his prior testimony. This allows voters to judge how to consider this before the election—even though he will almost surely not be able to say anything more until after the election. It's a way of not pretending that the investigation is "complete" when he knows there is some degree of residual issue.
If you're inclined to be angry with Comey over this, imagine that he had not said something and it emerged after the election that, having testified that the investigation was complete, he authorized additional investigation of a new trove of emails.
Comey and the FBI are in a terrible position here, one in which they would be accused of playing politics whatever they ended up doing.
The interesting question here is whether the FBI's predicament is Comey's own fault. It's certainly not his fault that the email mess fell into his lap and had to be investigated in the year of an election. Nor is it his fault that the the FBI ended up investigating the DNC hack and whatever trouble Weiner has gotten himself into of late. Reasonable minds will differ about whether Comey leaned too far foreward in publicly disclosing information about his thinking on the email case. He can be criticized for having said and disclosed too much and thereby made his problem worse.
But what you can't reasonably say here is that Comey has been anyone's political lackey. Over the howling objections of many Republicans, he ended the Clinton email investigation, concluding that "no reasonable prosecutor" would go forward with a case. Over the snarls of the Clinton forces, at the same time, he commented quite disparagingly about the behavior of the woman who is likely to become his boss. And now, with the election only days away, he has amended his prior resolution of the case to deal with new information.
Say what you will about the FBI, but it's surely been independent.
#1400 Re: The Garden » US Politics Thread » 523 weeks ago
Much ado over nothing right now.
Comey said the FBI “cannot yet assess” whether the material “may be significant” and that he “cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”
This won't make a difference at all, not at this point.
.