Democrat Nancy Pelosi Cannot Stop Gushing Over FBI Director James Comey

Nancy Pelosi was the first woman to become Speaker of the House in American history. Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat, and her party controlled the House for four years from 2007 through 2011. Nancy Pelosi is now the House Minority Leader.

The trademark of Nancy Pelosi was to “compromise” and bend over backwards to appease the party in opposition at that time, the Republicans. Just before the 2006 election, with a Democratic Party win in the House expected, she did the unspeakable.

Nancy Pelosi took “impeachment off the table” for all alleged crimes of George W. Bush past, present and future. Nancy Pelosi was so sure that none of the allegations of treason, spying, torture, and war crimes could ever be valid that she said with no conditions or qualifications whatsoever: “I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table.” George W. Bush did not ever nor ever could possibly commit crimes. The man who took the White House by Supreme Court edict was above moral reproach and above the law. Forever.

Republican former George W. Bush official, adopted by the Democratic White House presented a highly publicized press conference in July to announce that the email investigation was finally over, and that “no reasonable prosecutor” would push for criminal charges.

James Comey spoke at length about the email situation. Despite his decision not to recommend charges, he described vague and hypothetical situations to make it appear that Hillary Clinton did more wrong than he could find. He then suggested, “There will be intense public debate in the wake of this recommendation.” finally, he announced his own personal pride and professed his own honesty, competence and independence.

After James Comey supposedly ended the investigation, Nancy Pelosi appeared to gush over him:

Let me just say this about Director Comey first. This is a great man. We are very privileged in our country to have him be the director of the FBI. I say that as first getting to know him when he was part of the Bush administration. And so he comes from the Bush administration to the position that he now holds … Even [Republican] Chairman [of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee Jason] Chaffetz has said on him, “Because we do believe in James Comey, I do believe that in all of the government, he is a man of integrity and honesty.”

For not recommending criminal charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi practically sainted James Comey. Just like George W. Bush, James Comey could do no wrong.

Then the curve ball came. Disregarding views of the Office of the Attorney General, James Comey suddenly reopened the email server investigation. On October 28, 2016, eleven days before the election, a letter from James Comey to Congress [PDF] stated:

In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation… Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees …

The “unrelated case” turned out to be an investigation of former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner who sent a picture of his penis to an underage girl. Now, Hillary Clinton is associated with possible sex crimes. Kenneth Starr, who investigated husband Bill Clinton for years and years and finally embarrassed him by uncovering a tryst must be so proud.

The underage girl was taken by surprise by this new disclosure. Inundated with badgering by the press, the girl released an anonymous letter to BuzzFeed:

I thought your job as FBI Director was to protect me. I thought if I cooperated with your investigation, my identity as a minor would be kept secret. That is no longer the case. My family and I are barraged by reporters’ phone calls and emails. I have been even been blamed in a newspaper for causing Donald Trump to now be leading in some polls and costing Hillary the election.

While the underage girl was outraged by the James Comey announcement, Nancy Pelosi was more conciliatory:

I am an admirer of Comey in terms of what he has done in the past. I think he made a mistake on this, and he clearly has a double standard … I think he just couldn’t take the heat from the Republicans…

Does Nancy Pelosi understand that the two parties are supposed to maintain some opposition? Republicans surely know this. Maybe it is time for her to step down and place a Democrat in the Minority Leader position who does.


PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF JAMES COMEY’S JULY 5, 2016, SPEECH

On July 5, 2016, James Comey and the FBI essentially cleared Hillary Clinton from prosecution for her email activities. Here is a complete transcript of the speech, starting a few sentences in.

Now let me tell you what we found. Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

There is no clear evidence, but, as Comey says later in the speech, this is highly debatable and he expects the debate to continue. This is not closing the investigation. This is clouding it.

While it might be appropriate to say handling of the information was careless, to say it was extremely careless is an opinion that defies Comey’s later claim that opinion did not matter.

For example, seven email chains concerned matters that were classified at the top secret special access program at the time they were sent and received. Those chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending emails about those matters and receiving emails about those same matters.

There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information we also found information that was properly classified as secret by the US intelligence community at the time it was discussed on email, that is excluding any later up-classified emails. None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but the presence is especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full time security staff like those found at agencies and departments of the United States government, or even with a commercial email service like Gmail.

I think it’s also important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the emails here containing classified information bore markings that indicated the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it. And while not the focus of our investigation we also discovered that the security culture of the State Department in general and with the respect to the use of unclassified systems in particular was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified that’s found elsewhere in the US government.

If emails were not secure in the “generally lacking” culture of the State Department, then emails that did not belong on “any kind of unclassified system” would not have been safe anyway. In any case, secure systems, even at the most secretive National Security Agency (NSA) have been hacked. The “carelessness” of Hillary Clinton if it has risen to a level of violating laws, would have been a mere technicality of little to no substance — sort of like doing 70 in a 65 zone.

While it may be true that participants should protect information “not marked classified,” this is merely hypothetical, as James Comey is not accusing anyone of not protecting such information. He puts this into the speech so that a casual viewer leaves with the mistaken belief that these things happened.

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors:

We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain in its various configurations since 2009 was hacked successfully. But given the nature of the system, and of the actors potentially involved, we assess we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.

If this is true, it applies to every “secure” system. For all we know, we have no direct evidence that the FBI system was hacked but it is unlikely we would.

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.

Hackers swirl around the internet and its email systems. We know this. James Comey fails to say if classified information was hacked or even whether it could have been hacked in the ether.

We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email account 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 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. So, that’s what we found.

It is also possible that NSA or anything else with an online connection could be hacked. If there is no evidence, we don’t assume the worst.

Finally with respect to our recommendation to the Department of Justice:

In our system, the prosecutors make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate based on evidence that the FBI helped collect. Although we don’t normally make public our recommendations to the prosecutors, we frequently make recommendations and engage in productive conversations with prosecutors about what resolution may be appropriate given the evidence.

In this case, given the importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency is in order. Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

“Unusual transparency” is indicated because Republicans in Congress put this no-harm-done incident ahead of nearly everything that actually concerns governance and matters in the lives of the people — and because the massive Republican partisan web propaganda machine fills the internet with this issue constantly.

“Evidence of potential violations” exists before an investigation. In law, we call it “reasonable suspicion” or “probable cause.” Once an investigation ends, those suspicions are no longer justified. But James Comey violates the basic rules of investigation.

James Comey cannot say he conducted a thorough investigation while clinging to suspicions of “potential” crimes. Then he did not do a very good job. James Comey instigates what he promotes later in the speech as “intense public debate.”

Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges. There are obvious considerations like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible considerations also consider the context of a person’s actions and how similar situations have been handled in the past. In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of

  • clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information, or
  • vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or
  • indications of disloyalty to the United States, or
  • efforts to obstruct justice.

We do not see those things here.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions, but that’s not what we’re deciding now.

James Comey is literally inviting Congress to censure or impeach Hillary Clinton should she win the election.

As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.

I know there will be intense public debate in the wake of this recommendation as there was throughout the investigation. What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done honestly, competently, and independently. No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear. I know there were many opinions expressed by people who were not part of the investigation including people in government. But none of that mattered to us. Opinions are irrelevant. And they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation because we did our investigation the right way. Only facts matter. And the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way. I couldn’t be prouder to be part of this organization. Thank you very much. (all bold highlighting added)