Don Pesci: '600,000 e-emails from heaven'

VERNON, Conn.

It strains credulity to imagine the Clintons – Bill and Hillary, who was Bill’s co-president for eight years – as victims, and yet there it is.

James Carville, for many years the Clinton’s backyard attack dog, really does think that FBI Director James Comey has victimized Mrs. Clinton. After having declined to prosecute (persecute?) Mrs. Clinton for having placed thousands of unsecured confidential e-mails on her private unauthorized server, exposing America’s underwear to anonymous hackers, Mr. Comey’s FBI team discovered thousands of additional unsecured e-mails while rifling through Anthony Weiner’s hamper. Mr. Weiner, married to Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s closest aide, was kicked to the curb by Ms. Abedin for sending salacious emails to Internet paramours.

It was Ms. Abedin’s habit to “’routinely forward e-mails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account,’’ the agents wrote. Why? ‘’So she could print them’’ at home and not at her State Department office.” Ms. Abedin was, agents have said, “the only person at DOS (Department of State) to receive an e-mail account on the (clintonemail.com) domain....”

Since a good many of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails had been destroyed, many after Mrs. Clinton had received from Congress a subpoena instructing her to preserve them for a future hearing, the FBI team must have been pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a new cache of 600,000 e-mails.

Mrs. Clinton was once a U.S. senator from New York and, as such, was intimately familiar during her tenure as secretary of state with congressional subpoenas. As senator, she also was well versed in the protocol relating to top-secret information. She decided to ignore all this and set up her own unsecured server, and the rivers of difficulties that issued from her very nearly divine arrogance are all traceable to her poor judgment.

Yet here she is stretched on a cross fashioned by Mr. Comey – and, of course, the Russians – according to Mr. Carville. The rules of victimology now require us to offer her pity, the political version of holy water. But there is an insuperable problem: Mrs. Clinton is not a pitiable creature, nor are her minions, some of whom are refuges from the Obama administration, while others have long been associated with her. She is, instead, ruthless, greedy, self-serving and lacking in pity for those of her friendly political acquaintances who have taken bullets for her in the past.

Mrs. Clinton’s faithful body-tender, Huma Abedin, and her campaign director, John Podesta, have both been much in the news lately. Eventually, someone close to Mrs. Clinton will be pushed out of the campaign boat into shark-infested waters, a politically necessary media sacrifice to draw attention away from America’s answer to Lucretia Borgia. Some are guessing it might be Mr. Podesta but, in a pinch, any warm body will do.

Almost two years ago, when America awoke to find Mrs. Clinton was chatting with the world on a private unsecured server, Mr. Podesta wrote to Cheryl Mills, chief of staff under Mrs. Clinton at the State Department, “Not to sound like Lanny [Davis], but we are going to have to dump all those e-mails so better to do so sooner than later.’’

Ms. Mills later would be given immunity from prosecution by Mr. Comey, after having turned over to FBI investigators her own computer (was it wiped?) which later was destroyed by the FBI. Ms. Mills was given immunity, as were others who might have been squeezed by the FBI for valuable information. But Mr. Comey already had decided that a prosecution of Mrs. Clinton could not successfully be pursued.

Following his announcement that he could not establish “intent,” the roof fell in. “Intent,” it was discovered, was not necessary for prosecution, according to the relevant statutes. Mr. Comey’s wife was badgering him; FBI agents were handing in their resignations; walking through the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building in Washington D.C., Comey was snubbed by underlings; the ghost of J. Edgar was laughing behind his back.

And then 600,000 e-mails fell like manna from Heaven.

Mr. Carville is a hard-boiled political operative, a survivor of the Clinton’s bruising internecine battles. So, he is lost to sound sense. But one finds, even among journalists for whom a Trump Presidency is regarded as a disaster, a sense that although Trump is wrong about pretty much everything, he is right about the Clintons – a couple of crooks, those two.

Now we are advised by Britain’s Daily Mail, there are no fewer than “five investigations underway involving Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin's estranged husband  allegedly sexting a 15-year-old; the handling of classified material by Clinton and her staff on her private e-mail server; questions over whether the Clinton Foundation was used as a front for influence-peddling; whether the Virginia governor broke laws about foreign donations; and whether Hillary's campaign c chairman's brother did the same.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political essayist.