In Politicized Justice, Desperate Times Call for Disparate MeasuresBy Andrew C. McCarthy
May 19, 2018 6:00 AM
FBI director Comey and the Obama Justice Department applied a double standard in their handling of the Clinton-email and Trump–Russia investigations.We wuz robbed. That’s the theme Democrats and their media allies are working hard to cement into conventional wisdom. And robbed in a very specific way: The 2016 presidential election, we’re to believe, was stolen from Hillary Clinton by disparate treatment. As Democrats tell it, the FBI scandalized their candidate while protecting Donald Trump.
You might think peddling that story with a straight face would be a major challenge. But they figure it may work because it was test-driven by the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, in his now infamous press conference on July 5, 2016 — back when the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus on which we rely to read the security tea leaves was simply certain that Mrs. Clinton would win.
If you or I had set up an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws; if we had retained and transmitted thousands of classified emails on this non-secure system; if we had destroyed tens of thousands of government records; if we had carried out that destruction while those records were under subpoena; if we had lied to the FBI in our interview — well, we’d be writing this column from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. Yet, in a feat of dizzying ratiocination, Director Comey explained that to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be to hold her to a nitpicking, selective standard of justice not imposed on other Americans.
So it was that the New York Times, in this week’s 4,100-word exposé on the origins of the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe, recycled the theme: Government investigators were savagely public about Clinton’s trifling missteps while keeping mum about the Manchurian candidate’s treasonous conspiracy with Putin.
As we contended in rebuttal on Thursday, the Times’ facts are selective and its narrative theme of disparate treatment is hogwash: Clinton’s bid was saved, not destroyed, by Obama’s law-enforcement agencies, which tanked a criminal case on which she should have been indicted. And the hush-hush approach taken to the counterintelligence case against Donald Trump was not intended to protect the Republican candidate; it was intended to protect the Obama administration from the specter of a Watergate-level scandal had its spying on the opposition party’s presidential campaign been revealed.
But let’s put that aside. Let’s consider the disparate-treatment claim on its own terms.
...more at linkhttps://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/ ... standards/
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