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OPINION

The Speech James Comey Should Have Given

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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Someone should have told FBI Director James Comey that when you’re peeing on someone’s shoes, and you both know that you’re peeing on their shoes, you’re only going to make things worse by telling them that it’s raining.

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There were probably people in this country who seriously thought that Hillary Clinton would be indicted because of the overwhelming evidence against her in the private server scandal. After all, you still get those emails claiming to be from an escaping government official in Nigeria who wants to hide millions in your account because somebody, somewhere will offer up their checking account number.

And maybe somebody, somewhere, actually believed that justice would be served by Obama’s Department of Justice. But most Americans – the ones who delete the emails asking for their checking account number – suspected that the fix was in all along. Wherever the topic of Hillary’s dangerous and shady private server came up – church social or break time at work, barroom or ball game – the opinion was always the same: Hillary Clinton is crooked as a snake, and anyone else would already be in jail if they did what she did, but she is going to walk.

Average Americans of a follow-the–money frame of mind thought the private server was used to cover up influence peddling links to the Clinton Foundation. Others thought the cover-up was to protect Hillary from any fallout from bad decisions she made as secretary of state. Still others pointed to the sleazy private meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch as cinching the dirty deal. Whatever the reason, America was expecting to have our shoes peed on once more by a government whose corruption is increasingly matched only by its arrogance.

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So why, after reading a list of findings against Hillary that supported an indictment, would James Comey pee on our shoes and tell us it’s raining by saying that there was no evidence of intent? Even people without law degrees understand that prosecution for gross negligence does not depend on intent. If someone lets a vicious dog roam the neighborhood, the authorities do not have to prove that the owner intended for the dog to bite a child named Joey, and most people know that. So why did Comey insult our intelligence while undermining the rule of law, when few Americans thought that anyone in Obama’s politicized DOJ would uphold the law in the first place?

Whatever his reasoning in giving the laughable cover story about lack of intent or his claim that no reasonable prosecutor would have taken the case, it would have been refreshing if Comey had simply come clean with something like the following speech.

“I think we all know that Hillary Clinton should be indicted for gross negligence because of her actions that put secret state information at risk. There is no need to detail those actions here, as they are well known by most Americans at this point. But I also think we all know that there’s not a snowball’s chance that Hillary Clinton is going to be indicted, and there never has been, so let’s just go ahead and put that on the table. You’re all smart people, and you know what would happen to anyone in my position who crossed the Clinton Cartel, let alone anyone who recommended indictment for the likely Democratic presidential candidate. Please don’t talk to me about undermining the rule of law, because you can rest assured that the law still applies to most people. Before you start criticizing me, let me just ask how many of you would have been willing to take the risk for yourselves and your family of recommending indictment in this case?”

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Would condemnation of Comey’s decision have been any worse if he had simply said what most Americans already knew? Americans are already politically polarized between the far left and the center-right mainstream, and a little truth-telling by James Comey would have been unlikely to change that. And perhaps, by saying openly what most Americans already know instead of insulting our intelligence with political spin, Comey might have set an example for others.

Imagine, for example, that Obama himself was inspired by Comey’s candor and started saying what we all know about, for example, amnesty: “Let me be perfectly clear about this. My support for amnesty has nothing to do with caring about illegals. These people are going to vote Democratic by the millions. Hell, if they were Republican, I’d be on our border building a wall myself. And don’t get me started on why we really oppose voter ID! We’d be here all day, and I’ve got an early tee time.”

The nation’s political shoes would still be soaking wet, but at least we would know that our political elites have enough respect for us to tell us the truth for a change.

Of course, there’s a better chance that you can get rich by partnering with an escaping Nigerian official.

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