He also dropped a voter intimidation case by the New Black Panther Party and made inflammatory statements such as referring to African-Americans as “my people” and deriding America as a “nation of cowards” for not framing racial issues in the manner Holder would have wished. Holder was at the center of scandals, both personal and professional, ranging from the failed Fast and Furious gun-running sting operation to the unlawful use of a private government jet to junket family and friends to the Belmont Stakes horse race.
Lynch, remember, replaced Attorney General Eric Holder, the first and only AG to be held in contempt by Congress. After all, ordinary Americans do not get away with having their spouses meet off the record with the principal district attorney about their ongoing exposure to tax evasion charges, or find exemptions on the grounds that their serial violations of statutes were supposedly without ill-intent, or, if in a possible position of superiority, promise to retain the prosecuting attorney at a future date. And earlier, unnamed Clinton advisors had reported to The New York Times that Lynch would be welcome to stay on as Attorney General in Hillary Clinton’s envisioned administration-purportedly to “prioritize diversity.” The resulting incoherence of the FBI and numerous angles of conflict of interest in the Obama Department of Justice have nearly tarnished the reputations of both agencies. On the day of Comey’s announcement, Clinton was scheduled to campaign with President Obama, Lynch’s boss. Surely two Ivy League trained lawyers know that the spouse of someone under investigation does not consult privately with the principle prosecuting attorney in an ongoing case. The two allegedly serendipitously met and yet ordered the private meeting to be kept from the media. His conclusions followed the bizarre meeting on the Phoenix airport tarmac between the private jets of Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton. In other words, Comey laid out a case for wrongdoing but then erroneously reinterpreted the law to largely exonerate Clinton, the all but certain Democratic nominee for president. However, the statutes in question do not require willful intent to break the law, only negligence (the causes of such dangerous carelessness are irrelevant).Ĭlinton’s conduct has been described as “extremely careless” and yet neither Comey nor progressive legal gymnasts have been able to explain why that’s not synonymous with the statute’s standard of “gross negligence” for indictments-as if the adverb “extremely” is not a synonym for the adjective “gross,” or the adjective “careless” is not equivalent to the noun “negligence.” FBI Director James Comey concluded that his agency’s investigation of Clinton’s careless use of private emails to transmit confidential and classified communications on a private server likely led to security compromises, but that her actions were not a result of intentional wrongdoing-and thus not in his view prosecutable. The Hillary Clinton email scandal has tarnished the reputation of both the FBI and the Department of Justice for the foreseeable future. Despite President Obama’s campaign promises in 2008 to usher in a new era of accountability and transparency, formerly disinterested agencies have either been politicized to the point of corruption or rendered ineffective by the appointment of incompetent and politically driven directors.
A Pew poll, which has charted public trust in the federal government over some 57 years, hit a historic low last year, with only 19% expressing confidence in Washington. Name a government agency or cabinet, and chances are its reputation has nosedived since 2008.