The specific claim is that “Comey scolded her for breaking the letter of the law.” Can we agree at least that Comey said no such thing, regarding her breaking of the “letter of the law?”
How far apart, in your mind, are “extremely careless” and “grossly negligent”?
If I were having a routine, casual conversation with the man on the street, I would say they describe the essentially same thing. But that would be in a regular conversation, where I might use the words “Coke” and “soda” interchangeably, because the nobody really needs to know if I’m talking about Coca Cola or some other bubbly fountain drink. They are close enough.
If I were the Director of the FBI and was describing a crime, I would use the precise term. Just like when I choose words that have specific meaning in my own profession, I don’t freely substitute similar, but imprecise, terms without some reason for doing so.
For example, I’m not a law-talking guy but I know I can pull up the term “gross negligence” and compare it to the term “negligence” and differentiate between the two. Is there some legal definition translator where degrees of negligence are equated to degrees of negligence?
Serious question: are you aware of a legal standard for whether “extreme carelessness” constitutes ordinary negligence or gross negligence? If I don’t de-ice my front steps in winter, is that “extreme carelessness” or “just carelessness?”
I know this wasn’t directed at me, but I’ll take a shot. Grossly negligent is a phrase with a common legal standard with legal implications; “extremely careless” is just an opinion. If Comey had said, “I believe Hillary was grossly negligent but advise against prosecution because of the Act’s judicial history (or some such),” it clearly means something different than “I believe Hillary was extremely careless yada yada yada.” In normal conversation, the two phrases could be considered roughly synonymous, but one has a clear legal definition and the other doesn’t.
Why do we have to wait to see what they find on the laptop? We already know that some of the 30,000 deleted emails were work-related. There’s no mystery here that Weiner’s laptop might solve. She / her lawyers screwed up. They wrongly withheld, and deleted, work-related emails.
Why? You kidding? Because if the laptop is a nothingburger, that’s the end of the road, there is noplace else to go. You can, of course, keep yelling “thirty thousand e-mails” till the cows come home, if you want to.
This is why, in more efficient countries, people are just executed on the spot instead of all this time being wasted on things like determining facts.
That’s enough of that. Keep it civil.
A fair reading of Comey’s statement is that he believed he had evidence that Clinton broke the letter of the law, but that people are never prosecuted for breaking the letter of this law, and that for a number of reasons, prosecutors have required the presence of other factors.
Another fair reading, though one that fails to explain some aspects of the statement, is that Comey reached no conclusion either way as to whether Clinton broke the letter of the law because he didn’t need to upon determining that the other factors were absent.
What is clearly not a fair reading is that Comey is saying Clinton did not break the letter of the law.
I think maybe I wasn’t clear before. My previous post was directed at aceplace57’s “It would help investigators to see the type of emails Hillary deleted. Were they all personal like she claims? I think everyone agrees she had the right to delete her personal email before turning the others over to the FBI.”
But this question has already been answered. We know she deleted some work-related emails. So if aceplace57 is waiting for the laptop to reveal if Clinton’s team deleted work-related emails, it’s unnecessary, because we already know the answer to that question. Here’s the cite:
I want to address this point, which you have made before and which others have already refuted, but it didn’t seem to take.
I can have classified information in my head (I don’t, for the record). I might know that Agent X is currently in location Y. If I email that to someone using my gmail account, I have transmitted classified information over the open internet without having to take pictures of any computer screen or any documents. I hope this is totally clear to you.
I haven’t seen the stuff that had the (C) label in it that was on Clinton’s laptop, but my impression is that it was just stuff typed by people, not documents scanned and attached or anything like that.
Please respond and let me know whether you get this distinction. Thanks in advance.
Oh, so “work-related” is your touchstone, eh?
“Hey, Hillary! About that state dinner for the Prime Minister of Bongo-bongo: there’s a flower shop in DC that can supply orchids at about half-price, and I have a source that tells me that the PM is very fond of orchids”
That’s “work related”. Might even be “classified”, since it refers to a “source” of intelligence. Or it might have secret info on what banks are laundering money of ISIS. And the punchline: we wouldn’t know, would we? They can’t tell us, because its “classified”.
And so it goes.
Both “fair readings” are speculative opinions on what he said. He did not say that Clinton broke the letter of the law, which is the comment that I’ve been objecting to. As I said before, I believe he went to some lengths not to clearly address the issue, so it is factually incorrect to assert that Comey “scolded her for breaking the letter of the law.”
John? Maybe we should move the whole elections forum into the Pit until this shitstorm is over. Just a thought. You mod guys are looking a bit ragged.
Ah, so you know what “Bless your heart” means…
No. Opinions on the interpretation of a text’s meaning cannot properly be described as “factually incorrect.” They are only fair and unfair, reasonable and unreasonable.
It is perfectly reasonable to read Comey as scolding Clinton for breaking the letter of the law. That is a fair reading of his statement in which he notes that her conduct may amount to a violation of the law, chides her for extreme carelessness, and gives as the only reason for not prosecuting reasons outside the letter of the law.
Which is to say, he could have performed his function without the editorial comments, yes? He was not compelled or obligated to scold, he did that because the wanted to, yes?
It depends on what you think his function was. Writing a public letter about why he’s not recommending prosecution is already super-weird. He thought it was really important to explain his thinking and to persuade people that the FBI took the case seriously and was non-partisan.
If you credit his view of his function, then it may well have been necessary to lay out all the evidence that Clinton broke the law, as he did, before also explaining why he wasn’t recommending prosecution.
Which is to say, a more strictly non-partisan method of performing his duty was available, but he did not choose to do so. 'Course, maybe he did not realize the partisan implications of his actions. Ya think, maybe?
That’s how I see it. Otherwise you get:
Comey: So after an exhaustive search, we found there was no criminal intent.
Congressman: What about this part of the law that talks about gross negligence?
Comey: Hmm, what? I didn’t see that part.
I may have stated my reading a little too confidently but it’s utterly ridiculous to say looking at and reporting on her carelessness was out of line editorializing. It’s part of the damn law he was investigating.