It would make for fun trivia someday: “Which president was known for paranoid secrecy, being buddies with Kissinger and receiving a presidential pardon?” Trick question! That describes two presidents!
The optics of a pardon would be much worse than that. It would confirm the worst Republican fear-mongering about conspiratorial plotting between Obama and Hillary, and it would be interpreted as a tacit admission of Hillary’s guilt – why issue a pardon unless she’s guilty as sin and knows it? It’s entirely unnecessary and would cast a shadow over the entire Democratic establishment that would linger for many years.
Well, almost always. Statutory rape is the first exception that comes to mind.
If Hillary stumbles in the next 2 and 1/2 months and is quilty of any crime against the State … then it would not be up to the present sitting president, Obama, to allow her to skate with a presidential pardon, but would be up to the next president, which wouldn’t be Hillary Clinton and only the Lord knows who that would be.
In my office, we get regular emails saying something along the lines of “hey guys, could you watch it with the security violations? If we keep doing it we’ll get slightly less bonus money at the end of the year.”
Can an innocent person demand that charges be brought, in order to get a “day in court” and force accusers of putting up their evidence in open court? TG! IANAL, I’m guessing not, but is there maybe and ipso fucko or a* stark staring decisis*?
Libertarian VP candidate William Weld, who was head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Justice Division under part of Reagan’s tenure, calls Comey’s actions “disgraceful” and “off the reservation”:
… there’s no way for Mrs. Clinton to know the evidentiary basis for which they made this update to their investigation, and they’ve said themselves they don’t know. It makes it all the more unreasonable to have waded into these waters in the first place.
Strange world we live in when the Libertarian VP candidate is rational and insightful, and the mainstream Republican presidential candidate is a raving lunatic.
Papa Bush did that with the Iran-Contra stooges. Hardly a blip in the radar. 
Well, OK, then, the slot I thought Comey was filling is now Bill Weld. And Jeanine Pirro…
(That’s Talking Points Memo, without which no citizen can hope to be well-informed…)
'Course, Ms. Pirro is adamant that Ms Clinton is totally guilty, as in guilty, guilty, GUILTY! Just what Comey did simply wasn’t the done thing, don’t you know.
(For a while there, looked like it was gonna be adaher as paragon and paladin. But the boy done been born again, got a new spring in his step and a sparkle in his eye, nothin’ but blue skies and sunshine ahead!)
Hey, c’mon! That stuff was just directly contravening the will of Congress, selling arms to a hostile power and lying under oath. What is trivial shit like that compared with e-mails?
And Reagan came right out and accepted sorta kinda responsibility! Said that the facts of the case are clear and irrefutable, but he just didn’t remember it that way! And America said, well, shit, we can’t throw Grampa in prison! Let’s just forgive and forget!
This breaking news is not trivial in fact it may wind up being that Obama is the one that needs a presidential pardon: http://freebeacon.com/national-security/attorney-general-lynch-pleads-fifth-secret-iran-ransom-payments/
Congress: Attorney General
Lynch ‘Pleads Fifth’ on Secret Iran ‘Ransom’ Payments
The Washington Free Beacon, huh? Do they enjoy the same spotless reputation for non-partisan candor as, say, Breitbart or Drudge Report? Or something less than those daunting standards?
Why do you hate freedom? 
I have a question and didn’t want to wade through 10 pages of posts. What is alleged to be on the laptop? The emails themselves or just the forensic data that they were on there at one time?
We don’t know except based on what we can infer from leaks. Comey didn’t say.
But since they got a search warrant to view the emails from the device, that suggests that the content was indeed on the device. Speculation is that it is some kind of Outlook archive.
Then isn’t that a problem independent of the whole server issue? The classified (or at least sensitive) emails are floating around on someone’s laptop?
How about…when a person is elected POTUS, any and all possible criminal charges and investigations against them are held in abeyance until the end of their term? As I understand it, a sitting President can only be charged with crimes by the House of Representatives as part of the Impeachment process. Doesn’t that make all this discussion of Obama pardoning Clinton moot?
They weren’t secret. Unless being on CNNis secret.
Jan 17 2016. Do try to keep up.
I’m quite happy with the appropriate explanation – the money was the accumulation of principal and interest for monies owned by Iran that were secured by the USA during the hostage crisis. Iran failed to ask for that money as part of their secret deal with Reagan, so they didn’t get it without making a court case out of it.
Can we just stop looking for ‘crimes’ our President has committed? Can the Republicans just lay down and die?
Just to clarify – when Richard Parker says that content is on the laptop, that doesn’t mean to that anyone knows whether that content includes classified information or not. It just means the laptop apparently contains emails, and nobody seems to know what those emails are about.
And just to jump ahead, even if any of those emails contain classified information, that does not mean that a crime has been committed. After all, the emails with bits of confidential information were on the server, and Comey concluded that there was no criminal intent that would justify prosecution. If the same emails are on the laptop – which is an unknown – it would be hard to imagine how criminal intent would suddenly appear.