(Rush Limbaugh) – BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I hope none of you are depressed. I’m sure a lot of you are. I told you that we were being played throughout this whole thing. I never wavered, even when Comey started today. We’ve got some sound bites coming up of the FBI director, James Comey. When he started out, I’m sure there’s some of you, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, he’s gonna lower the boom!”
And I knew throughout the whole thing, there’s no way that Barack Hussein O is gonna put Hillary on Air Force One today, fly to a campaign event, if the FBI director is going to recommend she be indicted. It just wasn’t gonna happen. And then, furthermore, this puts in perspective now that apparently off-the-cuff, surprise meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch. Well, man, oh, man, isn’t it amazing how that worked out.
So they have the meeting, it’s discovered by a lone media outlet, the ABC affiliate in Phoenix. It blows up just like that lone picture of the Clintons dancing on the beach three weeks before the Lewinsky story appeared on Drudge. Everybody got all hopped up. And just like that one picture appeared and Mike McCurry in the White House started bellyaching about it, nobody had seen it, it’s pre-internet, front page of the LA Times. What picture?
SPECIAL: Tea Party is launching a national, grassroots campaign to push for the indictment of Hillary Clinton, and we need your help now more than ever!
So they got the picture out everywhere. And then three weeks later here comes the Lewinsky story on Drudge. It had been spiked by Newsweek. Here we go. So you have the one media outlet in Phoenix that finds out Clinton’s on the plane with Lynch. Then it blows up and everybody finds out about it and all hell breaks loose.
Lynch is acting all embarrassed. (imitating Lynch) “You know what? I tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna back out of this. I am going to accept the recommendation of the FBI and the career prosecutors at the Department of Justice.” Isn’t she looking like a champion today to the people that matter. She backs out.
Do you think anybody knew what was coming down the pike? I mean, Comey said nobody knew, he hadn’t talked to anybody. If you want to be depressed, look, I understand it. The thing to be really disappointed about is the sad reality that just one institution after another that we used to be able to count on, that we thought was reliable, they all seem to be crumbling right before our very eyes.
So now, where we are with this, I mean, we can parse Comey, we can go through it, andwe will today just for the fun of it. ‘Cause you know what I thought I was listening to today? I told Mr. Snerdley, I said, “James Comey’s press conference today reminded me of Joe Biden’s announcement saying he wasn’t running.” Remember that?
Biden goes out and announces he’s not running, but if you listen to the speech all throughout the speech you got the impression he was gonna run, because it laid out an agenda, it detailed what problems exist and how he was gonna solve them. I mean, it was the speech of somebody that was gonna run, and at the end of it he said he’s not going to. I had the same feeling today watching Comey.
He lays out all the violations. He lays out all the irregularities. He lays out all the problems, and there are a lot of people in jail for doing exactly what he’s exonerated Hillary Clinton for today. Where does Petraeus go to get his reputation back? I mean, they charged him with a felony until he settled for something far less than this.
Comey admits that it’s likely that hostile adversaries have seen detailed data from her servers, that she had more than one. He’s going through all this and then says (paraphrasing), “but there’s nothing to see here. There’s not a reasonable prosecutor out there that would make this case, that would bring these charges.” I said, “Man, this is just like the Biden speech for what it’s worth.” The Clintons pulled a trick.
Here’s another thing. How many of you got all excited when you found out that Cheryl Mills had been brought in there once again for another interview and then took the fifth all these times? Do you know what the Clintons did with that? It’s finally been uncovered. This whole thing started in 2013. Hillary hired a lot of her assistants as her lawyer and then claimed privilege so that they would not have to answer any questions about what went on in her office, and Cheryl Mills is one of those examples.
She hires Cheryl Mills, quote, unquote, as a lawyer, and Mills thus can’t testify because lawyer-client privilege, even though Mills was hired after all of this had happened. Comey didn’t talk about any of that.
So where we are now is that it’s gonna be up to Trump and the Republicans to make the case, since the DOJ is not. I mean, there’s no way that the DOJ is gonna bring charges when the FBI director doesn’t suggest doing so, when there’s no recommendation.
Now, there is a parallel investigation Comey didn’t talk about and that’s into the Clinton Crime Family Foundation. That was another aspect of the Clinton-Lynch meeting that people were saying, “Wait a minute now, he’s under investigation, too, what the heck’s going on?” Same thing, folks. I wouldn’t expect anything to come of that, like nothing was gonna ever come of this. I can’t tell you the number of times, and I’m sure it happened to you, too, no matter where you go people ask you, “Do you think Hillary’s gonna be indicted?” A lot of people thought, “I think they’re gonna get her. This is serious stuff. This is playing with fire. This is national security. It’s top secret information.”
And it’s like every other time. They get all hopped up, all anticipatory, all thinking this is gonna be the time, this is gonna be it.” And I think the Clintons actually have a playbook strategy. I think one of the things they relish doing is using instances like this to get people on our side all hopped up and eager and excited, thinking that there’s gonna be an actual, in this case indictment or some form of punishment, and they always skate, and people get deflated and depressed and they throw their hands up and despair and say, “I’m through with it. I’m finished. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t matter how I vote. They’re gonna win no matter what we do,” blah, blah, blah.
And that’s their objective, is to dispirit you, depress you, and to have you thinking there’s nothing that can be done to beat them. They just have an answer or a way to slither out of virtually everything. But I do think we were played. I spent a lot of time on Friday detailing why. And it has come to pass.
Let’s go through some of the things here that Comey said. There is evidence that they were extremely careless. “No evidence of intent to violate law, but evidence of carelessness with classified material.” I always thought that intent was irrelevant. “Officer, I didn’t intend to speed. I just wasn’t paying attention.” Oh, really? Okay, you weren’t trying. Well, then forget that I stopped you.
COMEY: Secretary Clinton used multiple servers. The meaning of that is there was no doubt a concerted effort on the part of Mrs. Clinton to keep whatever she was doing out of public view. There’s no question this was going on in total violation of government law. Comey admitted that Crooked Hillary sent and received all levels of classified information. He said the FBI also discovered several thousand work related emails.
Remember that Hillary claimed under oath that she had surrendered all emails but they kept finding things in a drip, drip, drip, drip, drip kind of fashion. FBI director Comey said from 30,000 emails that were deleted by Hillary, 110 emails in 55 email chains contained classified emails, eight of them top secret, 36 secret, but we think that Hillary just deleted emails like you do and like I do. You occasionally decide you need to purge your inbox. So you just start deleting things here and there to make room. You’re not specifically hunting and pecking for which emails to delete; you just select a bunch and you delete ‘em. And we think that’s all that went on here.
The FBI director said email chains regarding a then-top secret program involved Hillary both sending and receiving emails. The FBI director said there is evidence Clinton and associates were very careless in the handling of classified material and a private server was no place for such careless handling, and yet she did it. And, remember, Petraeus was actually charged with the crimes that Hillary could have been charged with. He revealed classified data to his biographer, slash, mistress. She was writing a book on him, he gave her classified information, passed it along, and it was the Regime, it was the Obama administration which pursued and went after Petraeus and basically took him out.
He was somebody at one time being talked about as a potential Republican presidential or vice presidential candidate. But they took care of him. Petraeus’ reputation’s gone, and it’s no better than the guy who did the video that did not incite the protests and the violence at Benghazi.
The FBI director said, “the security culture of the State Department was generally lacking compared to elsewhere in the US government,” but still there’s nothing to see here. The FBI director said, “It is possible hostile actors gained access to Clinton’s personal email account.” It is possible hostile actors gained access to Clinton’s personal email account. You know, the thing about that, indictment or not, Crooked Hillary allowed top secret information to be open to attack by foreign governments, and WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who’s still holed up in the Ecuador embassy in Britain, in London, said he’s got enough information to get her indicted. Of course, that’s a moot point now, but he’s gonna keep releasing things.
As I say, it’s gonna be up to Trump and the Republicans now to prosecute Hillary on this. It’s gonna be up to them to make campaign issues out of all these things, the lack of concern, the laziness, whatever charges you want to make about her unfitness and her lack of attention to necessary detail, her unqualified status, if you will, since there will not be any official action. By the way, some people are gonna try to find some positive in that, too. Let me give you a version of how that’s gonna go.
“Hey, Rush, it’s not all bad. Think of it this way.” And actually I know this ’cause I’ve had people write me this this morning. “Look, if Hillary had been indicted — and you said it yourself last week — if Hillary had been indicted, the Democratic Party would have rallied to her and a bunch of Democrat independents would have rallied to her simply because they’re not gonna be sitting around idle and let the Republicans take Hillary out this way, ’cause they’ll think it’s a vast right-wing conspiracy, they’ve got her, ’cause Comey has long been known as something other than a Democrat. He’s a straight shooter, which means he’s uncorruptible, and so if she had been indicted, Rush, that might have meant either the Democrat Party really circles the wagons and supports her no matter what, or it could have been Biden. Rush, imagine if she has to get out and Biden becomes the guy? I mean, it’d be really, really much more difficult for Trump to beat Biden than it would Hillary, so, Rush, it may be a net positive here.”
People are gonna be looking for all kinds of things to hold onto here to not give up on everything. I don’t blame people looking for those things. There may be some validity to some of them as well. The FBI director said “no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case.” No reasonable prosecutor would bring this case. Now, what Comey brings to this, he’s got a straight shooter reputation. James Comey has, among everybody that knows him, strict law and order, uncorruptible, has not been corrupted to this point in time.
If Comey says it, you can trust it. That’s his reputation. When he says no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case, it’s kind of like saying no reasonable Supreme Court justice would ever look at Obamacare and call it constitutional. Or further, no reasonable Supreme Court chief justice would ever take Obamacare and rewrite it from the bench to make it constitutional. So what we had here, the FBI director detailed gross misconduct and then said there will be no prosecution.
The bottom line from Comey: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. There is evidence, potential violations. Isn’t that one of the things you do a trial for?
Mr. Snerdley, a pop quiz. Who was the last — well, I don’t want to give the answer away in the question. Who was the last public figure we were all told in the legal system, straight shooter, you can trust this guy, he is untainted by either party, this guy’s a bulldog, he puts his nose to the grindstone and he digs it out until he’s got the truth, and when he gets it, you can count on it. Right! Patrick Fitzgerald, who was the special prosecutor that nailed Scooter Libby for lying to him in the Valerie Jarrett leak case, even though we all knew who leaked her name. They got Scooter Libby for supposedly lying during the investigation.
So Patrick Fitzgerald, we were all told this guy’s above the law. You can’t taint this guy. He’s a straight shooter, that’s all he cares about, is the law. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He eats pizza out of boxes and drinks Diet Coke and doesn’t even have any furniture except a wooden chair in his apartment; that’s how serious he is. And they say the same thing about Comey.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a story from TheHill.com just today. Ready for the headline? ”Court: Officials Can’t Use Private Email Accounts to Evade Records Laws.” That’s TheHill.com, July 5th, 2016. “Federal officials may not use private email accounts to get around public records laws, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit overturned a lower court decision in which judges dismissed claims from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that attempted to obtain correspondence from a top White House official through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
“The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said it did not need to search for or turn over records held by the head of the OSTP on a private email account as part of the open records request.” So to review: A conservative think tank wants records from the guy who runs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the White House says (summarized), “No. Those emails are on his private server, and you can’t get them.” So the White House specifically cited private server location — private email server location — as a means of denying a Freedom of Information Act request.
Which is, by the way, why Hillary did this in part. There were many reasons. “In addition to official White House email, John Holdren, the director of the OSTP, also sent and received emails from a domain at the Woods Hole Research Center.” So a judge (his name is David Sentelle) disagreed. He said if… I don’t have time to read you his ruling, but the bottom line is you can’t use a private email server to shield your work from FOIA requests. What a day to hear that!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Well, see, Donald Trump’s had a couple of tweets. The first one: “FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow.” And he also tweeted out: “The system’s rigged. General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very, very unfair. As usual, bad judgment.”
As I say, it’s gonna be up to Trump to make the case now. The Trump campaign, his surrogates and the Republican Party. The Republican Party is not going to be comfortable doing this. My guess is, DOJ exonerates, which is what this is, no reason prosecutor. The FBI exonerates, no reasonable prosecutor. But I want to go through this again because this just flew out here from TheHill.com.
“Federal officials may not use private email accounts to get around public records laws, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. … David Sentelle, the chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit,” disagreeing with the government. “Throughout the case, the government argued that ‘[d]ocuments on a nongovernmental email server are outside the possession or control of federal agencies, and thus beyond the scope of FOIA.’”
We’ve mentioned this before but everybody thinks that Hillary decided to do this on her own, but the more you look at this administration, all kinds of people did this. Here we have the science guy, there have been others we have learned that kept official documents. Yeah, Lisa Jackson over the EPA, now working for Apple. She had a private email server, and all of it was to escape Freedom of Information Act requests, which makes total sense.
I mean, here we have a Democrat Party administration which does not believe in transparency, which wants to hide everything it does, cannot even be honest and open about its agenda if it wants to win elections. The Democrat Party to this day, even though people think the country’s lost in many ways, I still maintain to you that if Obama had run a campaign based on exactly what’s happened, promised he was going to do exactly what he’s done, he would not have been elected.
The Democrat Party, the American left cannot be honest. They have to use subterfuge. They have to deceive. They have to lie. And here they are with numerous officials, private email servers making the case in court, “Hey, private email servers, even if it’s government related, you can’t see it, private email. Freedom of Information Act has no purview there.
And the judge said, “If a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose is hardly served,” Sentelle wrote. “It would make as much sense to say that the department head could deprive requestors of hard-copy documents by leaving them in a file at his daughter’s house and then claiming that they are under her control,” he said.
Which is a brilliant point. Let’s say we’re not even talking about email. Let’s say some people have the some paper documents, they work for the government, but they’re over at the employee’s daughter’s house, and here comes some think tank or news agency that wants to see them under FOIA. “Sorry, he doesn’t have them. They’re at his daughter’s house, you can’t get them.” No different. It’s absurd. And it’s no different than, “Well, you can’t see them. They’re on his private server and his private server is not subject.”
“But it’s government business on his private server.”
“It doesn’t matter.” So it begins to appear to me that the Obama administration may have had a hand in setting this up to begin with. And, by the way, folks, Obama was communicating with Hillary knowing full well she had this, you know, off-site server, this private server. It was not news to anybody. I think it’s part of the practice that these people engage in regularly to deceive the American people and to continue to be able to operate in the darkness without any sunlight.
I just find it ironic that here we have an appellate court decision saying that government officials cannot use private email accounts to evade records laws, and the same day the FBI says: Nothing to see here. No reasonable prosecutor would ever bring this case. No criminal activity here. No willful intent. Mrs. Clinton is basically a non-tech person, didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t intend to break the law. She didn’t intend to do this. Yeah, some hostile actors might have seen the stuff but we don’t know for sure because we couldn’t find any direct evidence that she’d been hacked.
The willful suspension of common sense is what is necessary to get through each and every day when the country’s run by a bunch of leftists and globalists and statists. In order to maintain your sanity, you have to willfully suspend your common sense, because everything they do is in utter defiance of that.
Let’s get to the phones. I know a lot of people want to weigh in. We’re gonna start in Pleasanton, California, with Chris. Have at it, sir. You’re up first.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. Mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Hey, remember the IRS scandal? We had kind of a similar circumstance. We had people taking the fifth, disappearing emails. I remember the grown that went through the crowd when the director, Koskinen I believe his name is, said we destroyed some of the hard drives. And early on, Obama said, “Don’t worry, we have the FBI looking into this.” As I’ve been saying to my friends for months, “Why would we have confidence now when they said, ‘Oh, we have a straight shooter handling this,’ when we see how the IRS scandal was handled?”
RUSH: You’re absolutely right. This is our old buddy John Koskinen who ran the IRS and he’s up there testifying, and he says under oath, I forget which, either the stuff was not backed up or the copies of the backup were lost or whatever the case was, it was gone. Sorry, Congress, we can’t get it. It’s gone.
And everyone is saying, “Come on, everything’s routinely backed up. A copy of whatever somebody wants is somewhere.” And then months went by, after the emotion of the case had dissipated, and all of a sudden they found it. And Koskinen had been lying all along. And finally now Congress is prepared to — well, they were preparing — I don’t know what the status is of impeachment proceedings against Koskinen at the IRS. But, yeah, it’s the same thing.
And you’re right, Obama did say, don’t sweat it, the FBI will get to the bottom of it. And of course the FBI didn’t get to the bottom of anything. FOIA and the IRS skated, literally skated. This was the case involving Katherine Engelbrecht’s group. The Tea Party wanted tax-exempt status and they were never granted it to fundraise for the Tea Party. This was the Lois Lerner operation. It was Obama’s operation is what all this really adds up to and means.
And they got away with stonewalling and lying (imitating Koskinen), “Sorry, there aren’t any backups, sorry. You know what? Somebody erased them. You know what? We got this giant degausser back there, and, unbeknownst to us, everything is just erased. I’m sorry, it’s gone,” said Koskinen. Or the backups were never made, or some such thing. And he said it with a smile on his face. He said it with a smile, almost a contemptuous sneer on his face as he was telling Republican members of Congress that what they wanted was gone, was irretrievable.
And then later when there wasn’t any emotion left, months and months had gone by, somebody found the stuff. But the caller’s point, Chris’s point is here that we should have seen this coming ’cause the FBI was brought into that. We were told the FBI’s looking into it and we’ll get to the bottom of it, Obama said that, and it should have been a tip-off. Well, the tip-off for me is that it’s the Clintons. The tip-off for me it’s the Clintons and it’s the Democrat Party and a presidential campaign.
And I’m sorry, folks, like I said last Friday, there’s just no way that a Democrat administration is going to take action that would result in their presidential candidate, their nominee being forced out of the race, unless there was something that we don’t know about that made it almost required that this candidate get out because there was something worse to come that had not been learned. But under normal circumstances there’s no way to think that.
This is the Democrat Party, for crying out loud. They use government to get their way. They use government to advance their agenda. They use government to protect their people. They use government to cover up whatever they do to advance their agenda. All of a sudden they’re gonna come along and recommend that they’re presidential presumptive nominee be indicted? It was just never gonna happen. “Yeah, Rush, about what about Comey is a straight shooter, supposedly he’s not –” Well, draw your own conclusions.
Who’s next? This is Elizabeth in St. Louis. Great to have you, Elizabeth. You’re next. Hello.
CALLER: Hello there.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Listen, once again, you know, the Clintons have been given a pass. And they always get a pass, whether it’s from SNL or the mainstream media or the Justice Department. And the only ones that can take away that pass are the American voters. We have to defeat Hillary Clinton at the ballot box. It is the only way to get rid of them. And it has to be a decisive defeat. In my mind, we can’t count, like you say, we can’t count on the institutions that always served this nation so honorably. They just don’t seem to work the way they used to work. And I don’t think the American people are blind. I think that people see that. They get that. And if we can beat her at the ballot box, I mean, we could have –
RUSH: Well, let’s talk about that for a second. Mrs. Clinton, if you look at the people making a big deal out of this today, and they have been in recent days, comparing Democrat primary turnout, total turnout, say, in 2008 for Obama and this year for Hillary, they’re down 10 million votes. I mean, so many fewer Democrats showed up to vote for Hillary and Bernie combined, than voted for Obama. And the analysis of that is that there’s just isn’t any enthusiasm on Democrat Party side.
Forget what we saw with Crazy Bernie. There just isn’t any enthusiasm at all. Yet Republican turnout is way up, record turnout, record number of Republican votes cast. Now, they use this to argue that Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have any pizzazz. She doesn’t have any enthusiasm behind her, and some people are saying, you know, this ruling today may be okay because if she had been indicted, if the FBI director had come out and said, “We recommend that she be charged,” that puts pressure on the DOJ. But that would cause Democrats to circle the wagons just to protect her from being damaged by us. Now that’s not gonna happen.
So do you put any stock — you said you trust the American people. The polling data’s out there, Hillary’s up by nine, Hillary’s up by five, depending on the story, Trump is closing the gap. She’s spending all kinds of money. He’s spending zero. How’s all this making you feel?
CALLER: Well, I really believe that the American people, they don’t like Hillary Clinton. I mean, it’s one thing to talk about Bill Clinton. I think they basically like that guy, but I have always felt ever since Hillarycare that the American people, they just flat-out don’t really like her. And I think that does mean something.
RUSH: Well, we’ll find out. It isn’t gonna take long. It’s clear that she does not have a connection. I know, I keep saying that, folks, but I do so for a reason, because it matters. Any Democrat, any presidential candidate that the Democrats put up, anybody with a D next to their name is guaranteed a certain percentage of the vote. People are just gonna show up, it doesn’t matter.
She does not have a personal connection with most of those people. They’re showing party loyalty, not Hillary investment. She just doesn’t have that, because she isn’t that likable, and she doesn’t relate. She doesn’t even try to establish such connections, just like tyrants don’t. It doesn’t matter whether people love ‘em or hate ‘em. It has nothing to do with what they do and how they do it each and every day.
Anyway, I’m a little long so I gotta take a break. I appreciate the call, Elizabeth.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The legal aspect is one thing, but the political aspect of this is by no means over, and if Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post is any kind of a canary in the mine, then Mrs. Clinton is by no means out of the woods here. And I don’t mean to be engaging in false optimism here. I know that a lot of people are dispirited and depressed, even though I warned everybody that we were being played by all this stuff that happened last week.
I mean, they want you dispirited. They want you down. They want you giving up. They want you thinking you can’t get them, not just the Clintons, but Obama, anybody. They want you thinking that you are powerless to stop them. They tease you and they make you think that you’re on the verge of getting ‘em, and then the shoe drops and there’s nothing to see, nothing there, and everybody gets depressed and goes away. And they’ve done this enough that they’ve had, I think, a successful run at turning people off of politics and dispiriting them. And don’t let that happen to you, folks.
This woman cannot win this election coming up. This just cannot happen. So if you’re momentarily spent, if you’re momentarily depressed, if you’re throwing up your hands in frustration, go ahead and experience it for a while, but come back, ’cause this is just getting warmed up. This is just step one. Somebody might be able to make the case that politically this is more advantageous than having her be indicted.
Now, terms rule of law, it would have been best if the law had trumped here, but it didn’t, so there may be some advantageous results here politically. We’ll get into that today and as the days and week unfold before us.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here. Let me just give you the big one. I could go through the list of things that Comey said, but here’s the big one. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” That’s all you need if you’re Donald Trump. That’s all you need, plus there’s more.
“Although there is evidence” — this is the FBI director, the investigating authority here. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” da-da-da-da-da, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” You know, she’s running around running ads saying that Trump is unfit, that he is unqualified, that he doesn’t have the right temperament. Well, let’s turn it around. This woman obviously is unqualified.
She’s engaging here, the FBI director pretty much said and her defenders on CNN are pretty much saying that the way she skated was she didn’t intend to divulge US national security secrets. She didn’t intend to traffic in top secret documents. She didn’t intend. And yet the statute that they go after her for if they did would be one that charges her with gross negligence. And Andy McCarthy’s point is, how in the world does intent have anything to do with gross negligence? Gross negligence, by definition, eliminates whether there was intent or not.
Again, there are two statutes in play here. Let me see if I can make sense of this again for you. According to Director Comey, “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18).” That’s where we get the statement, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Before I go through this further, let me review some of Comey’s statements here. “There is evidence that they were extremely careless. No evidence of intent to violate law but evidence of carelessness with classified material. Secretary Clinton used multiple servers.” What do you mean, she didn’t intend? She intended to keep all of this private. That’s the whole point. There’s your intent right there. But, no, she didn’t intend to traffic in top secret information, classified information.
“Hillary Clinton sent and received all levels of classified information. The FBI discovered several thousand work-related emails. This is after Hillary Clinton claimed under oath that she had surrendered them all.” They found additional emails, work related, that she had not surrendered, even though she had told them and promised them she had.
From Comey: 30,000 emails that were deleted by Hillary Clinton, from those 30,000, 110 emails and 55 email chains contained classified emails, eight top secret, 36 secret. Now, I ran through that in a hurry the first time. But let’s analyze this. From 30,000 emails that were deleted, there were 60,000-plus emails on her server. She said 30,000 of them are private and personal, have nothing to bear here. They have to do with yoga and my daughter’s wedding and all that other kind of stuff, and I’m not turning those over.
She turned over 30,000 of the 60,000. Comey said today that from the 30,000 deleted, from the 30,000 she did not turn over they found 110 emails and 55 email chains that contained classified emails, eight of which were top secret, 36 were secret. Yet she didn’t intend to traffic in this stuff. And I guess it also means she didn’t intend to delete them, because Comey said she deleted emails like you and I do. We look at our in box, it gets big, we start deleting things to bring it down, make it a smaller size. We randomly select emails to delete here or there. That’s what we found she did.
So 60,000 emails, 30,000 of ‘em she says are irrelevant, and that’s not challenged by the way. She turns over 30,000. And, remember, they were turned over in hard copy paper form, if you recall. Well, apparently the FBI found some of the 30,000 that she deleted or did not turn over. And in that 30,000 they found 110 emails and 55 email chains containing classified information. But there’s nothing to see here, because she didn’t intend to traffic in the stuff. But she didn’t turn it over.
Comey said that email chains regarding a then top secret program involved Hillary Clinton both sending and receiving emails, but I guess she didn’t intend to be disseminating classified information. Comey said there is evidence that Clinton and associates are very careless in the handling of classified material, and a private server is no place for such. But still no recommendation to indict.
Comey said the security culture of the State Department was generally lacking compared to elsewhere in the US government. He said that it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Clinton’s personal email account. So, you know, whether she’s indicted or not, or whether she intended to or not, Hillary Clinton, by virtue of Comey’s press conference today, allowed top secret information to be open to attack by foreign governments. And after saying all that, the FBI director said no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case. Which is why I say, and of course no reasonable Supreme Court chief justice would deny America’s first black president an unconstitutional law, like Obamacare.
So Comey detailed gross negligence. He detailed gross misconduct and says there’s not gonna be a prosecution because there was no intent. So how do you get there? Well, again, according to Andy McCarthy, Comey admitted, like I just detailed for you, that Hillary Clinton checked off every box required for a felony Violation of Title 18, Section 793(f). Title 18 is the federal penal code. With lawful access to highly classified information, she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed from its proper place of custody, and then she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Gross negligence.
Director Comey even conceded that she was extremely careless, as I just read to you, and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications, her own and those she corresponded to being intercepted by foreign intelligence services. He admits all this.
So there’s not an exoneration here, is my point. There is a legal, “Well, there’s not enough here for us to prosecute. We’re not sure we can get a conviction.” But in the political world this is just beginning. So, in order to give Hillary Clinton a pass, what the FBI did, apparently, was rewrite the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. Section 793(f) of the federal penal code, Title 18, does not require an intent element.
The added intent element makes no sense, because the point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to be careful with national defense secrets. And when they fail, to be careful, when they fail to carry out that obligation, because they have been grossly negligent, then they are guilty of serious wrongdoing.
The lack of intent is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence. They may roll the dice and hope nothing happens, but they don’t intend to. It’s why, when you have a gross negligence statute, it’s irrelevant to put intent in it or not.
So what happened here? Well, there happens to be another statute that does require intent, that does not expressly deal with what Hillary trafficked in. But apparently that statute that requires intent is what is being used here in order to arrive at the conclusion that no prosecution is recommended. The FBI has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States, we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the US.
Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her and her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we, the FBI, have decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. We have decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted because she didn’t intend any of it.
And that’s the commingling of the statutes. It makes no sense. If you’re trying to make sense of it, stop. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s the commingling — my word — of two statutes. One requires intent. The other one is simply based on gross negligence. So they’ve flip-flopped ‘em, in a sense, ’cause they can. It’s that simple.
Anyway, look, it’s a long answer to our caller, but the caller wanted to make the case now that since she’s been exonerated — she hasn’t been. Comey did not exonerate her. Comey just said, we can’t find a successful route to prosecute her because she didn’t intend to do any of this.
END TRANSCRIPT
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/07/05/
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