The FBI may have failed to thoroughly investigate Clinton - Tracking Thread

Great Debates
1

This has popped up a bit in the Russian Investigation threads, but really isn’t related unless the charge is purely a bit of slander to delegitimize the FBI/Mueller investigation.

To date, the only evidence of there being an issue was the sidelining of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page by the DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.

But, today, Christopher Wray indicated that the Horowitz investigation also revealed some negative handling of the Clinton case by Andrew McCabe, and so he’s been fired rather than allowing to see out the last 7 weeks of his service to earn a pension. Unless Wray is a complete ass, I think it’s fair to say that you wouldn’t do that unless McCabe had earned it in some way. (My read of Wray is that he’s pretty reasonable.)

While a lot of this will all be answers once Horowitz releases his report, I feel like we’re going to get a few more bombshells in the 2-3 months leading to that point, so it seems worthwhile to have a place to discuss/debate the topic outside of the Russia threads.

2

I don’t think this is an accurate summary of the events to date at all. It has been known that McCabe would be retiring when he was eligible for full pension benefits, and that at the tail end he’d use his remaining accrued vacation to get him to that date. That’s the story of what happened thus far. The idea that he’s been fired, that he won’t earn the full pension as planned, etc. has no basis that I can see.

3

I’ll grant that it’s not 100% clear, but it certainly sounds like he was basically told to get out of the building.

4

You said that Wray indicated that the Horowitz investigation revealed negative handling. But the link says:

So Wray is not commenting on the report, and the connection is only suggested by the timing. That’s pretty weak.

You said that McCabe was fired, but the article you linked said:

Retire, not fired. From WaPo:

It seems like the key underlying facts that you’ve based you conclusion that McCabe “earned” something on are not accurate.

5

I think you are filling in blanks the way you would like.

6

50/50 that’s in response to me. Results unclear.

7

There must be literally thousands of people in D.C. just biding their time awaiting the earliest possible retirement opportunity, or looking hard for a new job.

8

We’re debating something that hasn’t happened yet?

9

I sincerely hope you’re right.

10

Because if there’s one thing the Trump Administration has shown us, it’s that dilettantes are just as good as professionals! Literally nobody in the world can tell the difference between someone like Jared Kushner and someone like David Gergen!

11

There is also a theory that a pro-Trump NYC-FBI faction was involved in this as well.

12

There is a scurrilous internet rumor about Kushner proposing to ship all of America’s overstock of opiates to the Palestinians. No one seems to know how these things get started.

13

Oh for fuck’s sake.

Hillary was investigated for more than 25 years and not one charge was ever levied against her. Not even close. She’s the most persecuted politician in the modern era, and I say that as someone who doesn’t like her.

Frankly, in 2018, when someone brings up Hillary’s alleged crimes, it makes it abundantly clear to me that they’re not a rational and reasonable human being. If I ran the world, they’d get a permanent spot in Chimera’s Home for the Terminally Stupid.

Edit: I’m not talking about anyone in this thread, just to be clear.

14

Some further detail about McCabe’s involvement with the Clinton investigation:

It sounds like this might somewhat explain Comey’s surprise announcement just as the election day was closing in; information about the contribution to McCabe’s wife was circling, so he had to move on the laptop despite any other considerations.

15

Fake news. I’ve been getting calls from everyone, everyone agrees there was no collusion.

16

I think it is hilarious and tragic how much power conservatives keep handing to Hillary Clinton. She may have lost but she’s still in charge!

17

My expectation is that the result of the inquiry will be that, effectively, the FBI crew didn’t give a damn about Clinton one way or another and viewed the whole investigation as a waste of their time. Fundamentally, to the extent that the email server was a security issue, as the government workers have noted, it would generally be treated as a firing offense - which becomes moot when the person that you’re investigating has already left the government. The most they could ever really do was, as evidenced by Comey’s early letter on the subject, is give a speech denouncing how horrible she was for not following established protocol…but ultimately not criminal.

But ultimately, I think the investigation is interesting for two reasons:

  1. It’s not actually an investigation of the Clintons. It’s an investigation of the FBI and whether it has been behaving in a partisan manner. And while that doesn’t feel like it’s going to prove to be a major concern, it’s a subject worth paying attention to.
  2. Given that it’s the counter-argument to the Russia investigation, there would be a strong impulse for anyone who hates Trump to simply ignore and deny any wrong-doing on the part of the FBI, if there was some. I don’t think that’s a reasonable response. As I’ve noted in many threads, you don’t have to pick sides in a argument. Both sides can be good, both sides can be bad, things can be complicated, and sometimes it’s all just down to bad luck all around. Regardless of what my expectation would be for this investigation, I’d rather keep an open mind about it than bury my head in the sand.

And I do think that there are two things about the case that make me doubt my theory that the FBI simply didn’t want to get involved in the Clinton investigation, that they never considered it a real case, and that, that’s most of what this is about.

Firstly, at least Strzok and Page do seem to have been toning it down because of concern of angering their future boss-to-be.

And secondly is that Comey does seem to have put his top people on the Clinton case. Strzok was called into Mueller’s team, presumably for being a power hitter, and I believe I read that he was the head of all things Russia, so not small fry. And, as the new McCabe information shows, he seems to have been pretty integral to the Clinton investigation as well, apparently having Weiner’s laptop in his possession.

The FBI has some 34,000 employees and one would think that the #2 of the FBI would be mostly employed in the task of overseeing resources, reading spreadsheets, and decidering, not personally running an investigation - let alone a turd investigation foisted on them by one political party trying to smear the other. That seems like the sort of thing that you assign to interns.

So I’m curious what the reason was that the very top levels of the FBI felt the need to get personally involved.

18

I’ve seen her in the news for 2 different reasons the past few days. Although I agree with the sarcasm in your statement, the flipside of that is that she genuinely does have the ability to “hurt the cause”. This is not her fault; it is the fault of the irrational hatred of her by Republicans, but it is there. God almighty I just wish she’d retire and lay low. The midterms are coming, not a good time for her to be popping up gopher style.

19

Preach.

20

There’s all these rumors that the DOJ IG is a very unfair person. Everyone is saying he is a Bernie supporter. I’m not saying this, but it sounds true to me.

So we have a guy who is aligned against Hillary and against Trump, saying that McCabe did something wrong. All we need to do is cleanse the IG’s office for all their wrongdoing.