Suspension of disbelief is the term that came to mind when I watched FBI Director James Comey’s decision to recommend no charges against Hillary.
As Comey went through the litany of Hillary’s misdeeds, lies, defalcations of duty, extreme carelessness, cunning and risks to national security, Comey made the case for any of a series of charges against Hillary. Then, with the reputation of the FBI about to be vindicated, Comey dropped the dreaded “however.”
In House testimony, Comey again confirmed every factual point demanding prosecution, yet defended his decision not to recommend charges because he was treating Hillary just like he would any other citizen.
Can anyone seriously claim, as Comey has, that Hillary was treated as any other citizen would? It’s laughable and requires the suspension of disbelief. Either Comey is the dumbest person on earth, or he thinks we are.
Judicial Watch has dug and dug and driven much of the investigation into Hillary’s misdeeds through its FOIA litigation. Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations, Chris Farrel, had an op-ed in The Hill calling out Comey for his complicity in this scandal, FBI’s Comey is complicit in Clinton email scandal:
Comey provided the following detailed examples of how Mrs. Clinton violated the law: “110 e-mails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information.” Comey charged that former Secretary of State Clinton (and her colleagues), “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” And he confirmed that, “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”With respect to Mrs. Clinton’s culpability in the compromise of national defense information to hostile actors, Mr. Comey stated: “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent.She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”Unbelievably, having defined the elements of a national security crime and given specific examples of Mrs. Clinton’s reckless, dangerous conduct in each case, Mr. Comey concluded that “no charges are appropriate in this case” and that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Mr. Comey did not tell the truth. Many people, in and out of government, know Mr. Comey’s blatant falsehood.
In conclusion, Farrell writes:
Should Mr. Comey continue as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? No.
It’s hard to argue with that.
What would Hillary say if she were on the other side of this? I think we know. She would insist that Comey’s decision and rationale requires the willing suspension of disbelief, a term she used with regard to the far more legitimate report of General David Petraeus regarding the Iraq war and proposed surge, as William Safire wrote in a column at the NY Times:
After years of blinking at news of the celebrated glitterati and suffering the certitude of the illuminati, finally the old-fashioned literati had their moment in the political sun.It came in a Senate hearing room on Sept. 11, when Gen. David Petraeus, commander of United States forces in Iraq, gave his promised report on progress in the war. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton reached back 190 years in literary history for the exact phrase and told him, “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”“The phrase ‘suspension of disbelief,’ ” noted the columnist Alan Nathan in The Washington Times, “is a literary term of art referring to one of Aristotle’s principles of theater in which the audience accepts fiction as reality so as to experience a catharsis, or a releasing of tensions to purify the soul.” He went on to characterize the general’s testimony as “more in keeping with Bertolt Brecht’s philosophy of Verfremdungseffekt, or distancing from that suspended belief, in order to maintain a clearheaded appreciation of the drama in focus.”
Hillary smeared Petraeus, as history showed. The only “willing suspension of disbelief” was by Hillary.
Here, the FBI has had its reputation smeared not by critics of Comey, but by Comey.
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