Comey the God: The exciting conclusion!

FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016

Coming tomorrow: Our final post on Comey the God will be coming tomorrow.

We'll return to Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate about the email matter. We'll focus on the 110 emails Comey the God said were the heart of the matter.

For those who like to read ahead, here's Kaplan's nugget passage:

KAPLAN (7/6/16): As anyone who’s ever had a security clearance will tell you, the labels secret and confidential mean next to nothing. When I worked on Capitol Hill in the late 1970s, the government gave me a secret clearance on my first day of work, pending the investigation into my worthiness to hold a top secret badge. As far as anyone knew, I might have been a Soviet spy, carting out confidential and secret documents every night and making copies for my handler. But they also knew the risk was low because there was nothing in those documents that the Soviets would have paid a dime for. The same is true of our various adversaries and stuff marked secret today.

Top secret information is another matter, but the stuff that showed up in Clinton’s private email wasn’t so special. Seven of the eight email chains dealt with CIA drone strikes, which are classified top secret/special access program—unlike Defense Department drone strikes, which are unclassified. The difference is that CIA drones hit targets in countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where we are not officially at war; they are part of covert operations. (Defense Department drone strikes are in places where we are officially at war.) But these operations are covert mainly to provide cover for the Pakistani and Yemeni governments, so they don’t have to admit they’re cooperating with America. Everyone in the world knows about these strikes; nongovernment organizations, such as New America, tabulate them; newspapers around the world—including the New York Times, where some of the same reporters are now writing so breathlessly about Clinton’s careless handling of classified information—cover these strikes routinely.

The other top secret email chain described a conversation with the president of Malawi. Conversations with foreign leaders are inherently classified.

In other words, even if Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Syrian spies had hacked into Clinton’s email servers, and if they’d pored through 60,000 emails and come across these eight chains that held top secret material, they would not have learned anything the slightest bit new or worthy of their efforts. The FBI’s discoveries should be viewed in that context.

Comey the God "should be viewed in that context." But so should Candidate Clinton.

So should the multimillionaire corporate liberals who have refused to push back on this latest scam, in much the way they've refused to push back on every previous scam.

For us, that passage from Kaplan led to a somewhat surprising conclusion. We'll discuss that conclusion tomorrow. It's all part of learning to worship our new reigning deity, Washington's Comey the God!