While the networks have largely avoided providing any updates in the ongoing investigation of Hillary’s private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State, Time explored the case for four pages in the April 11 issue. Time’s Massimo Calabresi explored Comey’s role in probing both Democrats and Republicans over the last 20 years.
But the Republicans were presented as the more aggressive partisans. In the controversy over his e-mailing of classified information, Time asserted “Republicans have repeatedly alleged, without proof, that in the process she destroyed incriminating evidence about her handling of government matters.”
Earth to Time: Destroying or hiding thousands of documents – claiming they’re all “private” communications about personal matters – is exactly why Hillary foes are “without proof.”
At least in all of this verbiage, Calabresi dug a little deeper than most reports and reminded people that FBI director Jim Comey has found the Clintons to be slippery before:
Some Republicans are referring to his recommendation as the “Comey primary” in the hopes it will sway the election their way. That may be wishful thinking, but one thing is clear: Comey has spent much of his career investigating and occasionally confronting high-profile public figures, including the Clintons.
Comey’s first brush with them came when Bill Clinton was president. Looking to get back into government after a stint in private practice, Comey signed on as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. In 1996, after months of work, Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case.
Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment: she and her husband had tried to hide their roles in two other matters under investigation by law enforcement. Taken together, the interference by White House officials, which included destruction of documents, amounted to “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté,” Comey and his fellow investigators concluded. It constituted “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”
Time suggested this report was unnecessary if no criminal charges were recommended. That’s never a standard liberal journalists employ when they’re exposing Republicans. “Comey had a front-row seat to Clinton’s controversial handling of documents in the White-water case. Ultimately the Senate committee he worked for two decades ago found no criminal wrongdoing but issued a politically damaging report anyway.”
Calabresi added that Comey also played a role in investigating the Clintons’ shady pardons of donors like Marc Rich, but found his decision to to prosecute a sign of independence:
Comey parlayed the Whitewater job into top posts in Virginia and New York, returning to Manhattan in 2002 to be the top federal prosecutor there. One of his first cases as a line attorney in the same office 15 years earlier had been the successful prosecution of Marc Rich, a wealthy international financier, for tax evasion. But on his last day as President in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich. “I was stunned,” Comey later told Congress. As top U.S. prosecutor in New York in 2002, appointed by George W. Bush, Comey inherited the criminal probe into the Rich pardon and 175 others Clinton had made at the 11th hour.
Despite evidence that several pardon recipients, including Rich, had connections to donations to Bill Clinton’s presidential library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, Comey found no criminal wrongdoing. He was careful not to let the investigation be used for political purposes by either party.
Despite Calabresi noting that since J. Edgar Hoover’s era, presidents have sought FBI directors with a “puritanical devotion to political independence." But he also reported that when Comey left the George W. Bush administration, he aided the Democrats in taking down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (so much for the puritanism):
[Comey] briefly blocked the National Security Agency’s Stellar Wind program of blanket telephone-metadata after a dramatic confrontation with then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Comey’s stand against Gonzales didn’t end there, and its fallout has implications for the current Clinton email investigation. In May 2007, Comey had left government, and Gonzales, who had replaced John Ashcroft atop the Justice Department, was clinging to his job amid unrelated scandals.
Comey surprised the top Democratic staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee by agreeing to make public the details of the Stellar Wind confrontation for the first time in compelling open testimony. The hearing was designed to force Gonzales out, and ultimately it worked. Comey’s testimony led to the discovery by White House lawyers that Gonzales had improperly stored classified notes on Stellar Wind, which in turn led to his resignation that August, according to top Bush White House officials.
So the Democrats during the last presidency drove out an Attorney General over improperly stored classified materials? So why would "objective" journalists so helpfully allow this double standard during Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency?
