Election Day 2016 has come and gone, but Democrats still are sour at the FBI. This is a reference to Director James Comey releasing a letter to Congress eleven days before voters cast their ballots informing them that the bureau will be reviewing hundreds of thousands of emails that were discovered on the laptop of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Albert Camus couldn’t have come up with a better lose-lose situation for the FBI director. If he released the letter now, it would look like the FBI was playing politics. If the contents of this discovery were released after Election Day, the FBI would still look as if they were playing politics for sitting on this information. The former course of action was taken, with Democrats crying foul that this is unprecedented. Bill Clinton used a federal indictment against former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger four days before the 1992 election to discredit the first Bush administration. So, in terms of lawfare being used to score political points, no—it’s not unprecedented.
But back to 2016, former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta gave his first interview with Bloomberg Politics’ John Heilemann at the Newco Shift Forum, where he’s still angry with the FBI, saying that there was a faction within the bureau that wanted Clinton to lose (via Politico):
Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said Monday that “forces within the FBI” may have sought to elect Donald Trump as president.“There are at least forces within the FBI that wanted her to lose,” Podesta said during an interview with John Heilemann hosted by NewCo. Podesta offered no evidence to back-up his speculation. “I’m not sure they really understood the alternative, but they wanted her to lose. I think that’s one possibility.”
These “forces” could have played a role in FBI Director James Comey’s controversial decision to alert Congress 11 days before the election that the FBI was evaluating more of Clinton’s emails, Podesta said.
Concerning the hacks, there’s no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian intelligence to influence the election. Second, there is no evidence that Russia hacked the election. There was a concerted influence campaign through Russian state-funded media and social media trolls in which they peddled propaganda, but that’s not a hack. No vote tallies were tampered with—and the Obama White House even said the results of the 2016 election reflected the views of the people. There was no hack. Hackers associated with the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee and Podesta’s emails, which were posted on Wikileaks, but founder Julian Assange says his source isn’t Russian. Moreover, the report from the U.S. intelligence community on this matter doesn’t mention Wikileaks, the DNC, or Podesta (though it's heavily insinuated). These all remain allegations. Moreover, it’s not like this was a shocker. Crowd Strike, a private cyber firm, said that the culprit for the DNC hack was Russia back in June, according to investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson.
Yet, most importantly, if Hillary Clinton hadn’t conducted official State Department business on an unsecure and unauthorized private email server while she was secretary of state, none of this would have happened. In fact, she might have increased her chances of becoming president. It’s because she didn’t play by the rules and ignored records keeping regulations for federal agencies that the FBI got involved in the first place over breaches of sensitive information. If she had just followed the regulations and guidelines, there wouldn’t have been stories about secret servers, a rehashing of old character attacks so soon, and the FBI serving subpoenas. The Clinton team thought this would blow over in a couple of weeks when it was first reported in March of 2015. Wrong. It was only exacerbated by the fact that the Clinton campaign’s entire narrative over the nature of the server and the reason it was set up collapsed, killing her on character issues. Most voters saw her as dishonest, untrustworthy, and inauthentic. That stuck for the remainder of the 2016 cycle. Again, this was avoidable. It’s all her fault and it remains that way: No server, no FBI investigation. It’s that simple. Her husband Bill did not make it better for her when he met with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch privately for almost a half an hour on the tarmac in Phoenix. A few days later the FBI and DOJ concluded that no charges would be filed against her. Golf and grandchildren were said to be the topics of discussion. Maybe that was the case, but the optics were enough to taint the credibility of the DOJ’s decision. Again, there would not have been an issue if Hillary has just followed the 2009 regulations for the National Archives and Records Administration.
If there’s anyone that Podesta should be mad at--it should be Hillary. She was a terrible candidate. The server was a big deal with voters—and it all could have been prevented. This was an avoidable blunder. And that fact that you continue to whine about the FBI is emblematic of the entire political left right now. They’re incapable of bashing this woman for her missteps and accepting responsibility. Just own it. And realize that you lost 2016 because Clinton was a bad candidate, old news, and she ignored tens of millions of voters on top of that. Oh, and calling her opponent’s supporters deplorable on top of this email fiasco was another baffling and unforced error as well.