The Hillary Hamster Wheel

[Airborne Aircrew]

Chuks:

That's a good little "operative"... Ignore the clear conflict of interest and pick on the terminology used...

Trot along little boy...

[Chuks]

Yes, AA, and you focus on this point of grammar you seem to know nothing about, ignoring that the DoJ is behaving quite properly when it steps in to tell the FBI what to do. That's not necessarily a conflict of interest; it may be proper supervision.

If you want to puff yourself up as a good little British public school boy then expect to be held to a reasonable standard when writing in English, AA. This is just like your hero Donald Trump making big noises about his success as a businessman/respecter of women/expert in tax affairs/sex god/etc., etc., etcetera, when it turns out that it's just big talk, nothing more. Who ends up looking like a "little boy," doing that sort of thing?

Here you are telling us which way to vote when you do not even have a vote! Get real!

If you like to talk the talk, then walk the walk!

[Capetonian]

Its all you've got left, isn't it, chuk-up, picking on the odd typo that someone makes, exposing the paucity of your debate and it's lack of substance.

[Airborne Aircrew]

There goes the good little operative again... Attack me and ignore the incredible conflict of interest and the fact that they think that no-one will notice... People have noticed...

Go take a look at the polls today Chuksy baby... every single one shows Hillary losing support and Trump gaining as she loses... and you can hardly call the LA Times a seat of the "vast Right Wing Conspiracy". The fact simply is that the polling firms are happy early on in the election cycle to try to mould public opinion but in order to peddle their wares in the future they have a vested interest in being as accurate as possible in the waning days of the cycle. So now you are seeing closer to the truth. Outlandish figures like Hillary up 12 points are a thing of the past.

Add to that this kind of blatant corruption on the Left's part and you'll notice the sharp downtick in every graph in her support...

But you just keep thrapping on about me... No-one will notice just a little more corruption...

[Chuks]

What part of "The DoJ runs the FBI," did you fail to understand fully, AA? It's too complicated for you to grasp, that there's no conflict of interest there?

That's not a typo, Capetonian. It's a typical mistake made by someone who's only half-educated: mixing up "it's" with "its."

Bear in mind that this is AA, the fellow who was just telling me that he's been educated to a very high standard in a British "public school." He was even telling me how to write, where the punctuation goes when using quotation marks. He was mixing up American with British English then, and now he shows that he doesn't understand a basic rule about forming the possessive.

This guy is a blowhard about the same as his hero Donald Trump, and I just wanted to point that fact out in the nicest possible way. That's all.

Now, both of you can naff right off, back to other shores for your dud comments, at least until you get voting rights in this US Presidential election, okay?

[obgraham]

The DoJ is expected to step in and tell the FBI what to do, how to behave;

By that logic, Chuks, the mayor of my town is expected to tell the police chief who to arrest, and which crimes to investigate?

[Magnus]

obg, interesting juxtaposition of the words "Chuks" and "logic" there.

[Capetonian]

That's not a typo, Capetonian. It's a typical mistake made by someone who's only half-educated: mixing up "it's" with "its."

Coming from anyone else, I'd have thought was a feeble attempt at humour. Coming from you, it's just another of your sneers.

[IJ Reilly]

Well, it's an interesting theory that Chuks has, saying that there's no conflict of interest if a superior intervenes with the workings of an investigative body.

If that were the case, then there would have been no great hullabaloo over the famous "Saturday Night Massacre," where Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson and later his deputy Ruckelshaus to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Apparently Nixon was getting a bit nervous because Cox was acting like a prosecutor and ordered Nixon to hand over his tapes. When those two Attorneys General resigned rather than fire the prosecutor, it was left to Robert Bork to carry out the deed, reluctantly if we can believe him. (The left never forgave Bork for that transgression).

So yes, it was inappropriate for Nixon to intervene in that investigation, even though the Justice Department, as a cabinet department, reports to the President in the executive branch.

Fast forward 43 years or so, and it is still inappropriate for the DOJ to intervene in a current FBI investigation, without some just cause. Academics can argue over what those causes might be, but suffice to say it should be a pretty high bar -- and a political reason certainly doesn't meet it.

All in all, a delicious irony for the irrepressible Ms. Rodham-Clinton, who started her political career on the Senate Watergate investigative committee. Seems all she learned from that affair was 1). Republicans will always be held to higher standards; and 2). Nixon wasn't nearly ruthless enough.

[Airborne Aircrew]

IJ:

Chuks will come back with some, frankly ridiculous, deflection showing that you, personally, are an arse...

He will, of course, fail abysmally at addressing the content and thrust of you argument... Because he can't...

Take cover, because Chuky baby will be after your arse in the nicest possible way I'm sure...

[Chuks]

"By that logic, Chuks, the mayor of my town is expected to tell the police chief who to arrest, and which crimes to investigate?"

Let's say that the Chief of Police announces, two weeks before a tight election for Dogcatcher, that one of the candidates is under investigation for mopery, that it might be something or it might be nothing, just that she's under investigation. The mayor had previously told him that doing that, just making the announcement, was not a good idea, not a proper thing to do. Is there something in the logic of the statement quoted above that means that would be an improper action on the part of the mayor? He hasn't interfered with the investigation itself, just told the Chief not to make that announcement just before the election, especially given that no facts about the mopery are yet known.

How about the Chief of Police deciding to investigate that one candidate for mopery while keeping quiet about the other candidate's possibly having taken money from the Russian Mafia? Would it be improper for the mayor to tell him either to publicize both investigations or else to keep quiet?

From another angle, let's say that the Chief decides to crack down on people jaywalking while the town suffers a wave of bank robberies. Would it be improper of the mayor to tell him to prioritize differently?

In other words, some other agency has to be in charge of the FBI, and that agency is the DoJ. Some of you might not like the way that the DoJ wants to tell the FBI what to do, but that's still the DoJ's remit. Too, nobody here is saying that the DoJ is interfering with the investigation of whatever is on Anthony Weiner's laptop, are they? Telling the FBI not to announce something is not the same as interfering with that thing.

AA, it's still an open question whether I have failed abysmally or else succeeded brilliantly. Opinions may well vary. I say brilliant, you say abysmal; I say potato, you say tomato, so let's call the whole thing off. When it comes to this, though, "He will, of course, fail abysmally at addressing the content and thrust of you argument... Because he can't..." anyone can see the sticky paws of Billy Bunter running all over the language of Shakespeare. It looks like Donald Trump groping a beauty queen, what you do to English!

[BenThere]

The problem is that the FBI has always been an independent, non-political law enforcement agency. It's not in the remit of DOJ to protect members of the party in power, who appoint the AG, to protect its political allies, or attack the opposition, regardless of the crimes they are under investigation for or suspected of. This administration has politicized the IRS in much the same way and it's wrong. You should know that, despite your political bent.

When Nixon tried to do essentially the same thing, way back, two AGs that he appointed quit rather than follow his directives. I don't think you're going to see that level of integrity from Lynch, just as we didn't see it from Holder, both of whom are willing accomplices to this corrupt regime.

[obgraham]

You're reaching here, Chuks. The police chief runs the police department. Not the mayor. If the mayor doesn't like what she's doing, he can fire her and hire another. But it would be an egregious breach for the mayor to direct the wheels of justice onto or away from a particular suspect.

Same holds true at the Fed level. Once appointed, the FBI director has a mandated 10 year term. Specifically to prevent political interference in his work. But yes, the President can fire him. Only has happened once. And guess who did the firing? -- one William Jefferson Clinton.

[Chuks]

Of course it's a reach; this sort of thing is always subject to interpretation. You may have noticed, however, that Harry Reid, a Democrat and the Senate minority leader, has accused FBI Director Comey of being in possible violation of the Hatch Act by his action in publicizing this investigation into the fresh e-mails found on Weiner's laptop. Is this another political move, one made to support Hillary Clinton? Of course, but it is also somewhat plausible to accuse Comey of doing this to support Donald Trump, and this accusation has been made at a very high level; it's much more than some idle back-and-forth such as ours.

This is not like a mayor directing an investigation to go in this direction or that, primarily. It's like the mayor merely objecting to an investigation being revealed at a late stage in an election, thus influencing the election. (The Hatch Act is meant to prevent influencing elections in this way among others, in fact.)

As far as that goes, though, of course a mayor can direct his police department to investigate something. That happens all the time during elections, when a candidate promises to fight corruption by directing the attention of his police department onto illegal gambling, for instance. It's accepted that a mayor can tell his Chief of Police to crack down on that sort of thing, or do you really think that a Chief of Police has, should have, total autonomy?

Anyway, if you Trump supporters are so upset about this sort of thing, what do you make of this? “If I win I am going to instruct my Attorney General to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation – there has never been so many lies and so much deception,” That is Trump threatening Hillary Clinton by detailing a planned abuse of the legal system, since it's the Attorney General, not the President, who should make an independent decision to appoint a special prosecutor to look into this or that. I have not seen anyone from the Trump side focusing on that one, which goes far beyond merely advising on making an announcement or not.

"The problem is that the FBI has always been an independent, non-political law enforcement agency." No, Ben, the problem is that the FBI has often been highly politicized. Think of that time in the Fifties, when, for the FBI, the Mafia did not exist while they were chasing the Reds hiding under our beds. That only changed in late 1957 with the Apalachin meeting, when the obvious existence of the Mafia could no longer be ignored by J. Edgar Hoover. Before that, he found that chasing Reds was far more profitable, being more in tune with the politics of the Cold War. Recently we had the FBI ignoring the threat posed by Muslim terrorists, even ordering a field agent to stop investigating what turned out to be preparations for 9/11. On what basis that decision was made we probably will never know, due to FBI protectionism, but it might well have had something to do with the politics of that time.

[IJ Reilly]

Chuks, Harry Reid may have accused Comey of "publicizing" a restarted investigation. However that's not what happened. Comey sent a letter to the house committee, outlining the reasons for restarting an investigation that had previously been closed. That in itself was newsworthy, hence the publicizing by every media outlet with microphone and internet connection.

Was Comey really supposed to sit on the fact that 650,000 relevant emails had been found, emails that should have been turned over months ago by court order? Not informing Congress could have been considered trying to influence the election. He was in tough spot, no?

The reaction has been pure Clinton: first deny, then vilify, deny again, accuse others, obfuscate facts, and then run out the clock. Reid is just playing his assigned role. With a willing press and eager lapdogs in the US and abroad, the tactic is pretty effective.

All this is worth the NY Post headlines, such as "Hillary Fingered by Weiner Probe."

[Chuks]

"Was Comey really supposed to sit on the fact that 650,000 relevant emails had been found, emails that should have been turned over months ago by court order?" Where did you read that all those e-mails were relevant, and that they are all subject to a court order? Comey did not say that, did he? In fact, we have no idea how many of those are relevant, and how many are simply more "dick pics" shot by naughty Mr. Weiner.

I really do think this man is crying for help, probably for help by some kind of aversion therapy. "Now, Anthony, we are going to show you a shot of a 15 year-old schoolgirl wearing her trainer bra. Let's see what happens next .... "

Zzzap! "Aieee!"

"Hmm ... let's try that again, shall we? This time without the hard-on. Nurse, more voltage!"

In fact, Comey supposedly had been ordered by the DoJ, put there over the FBI, to sit on that news, just as he is sitting on various snippets about much of what the FBI knows about what Donald Trump is up to with the Russians, such as this steady stream of e-mails back and forth between a Trump server and the Alfa Bank of Russia. As with the e-mails, we simply do not know what the FBI is looking at in that regard. It might be nothing, or it might be something; we have no idea, just as we have no idea what is in those 650 thousand e-mails.

[Airborne Aircrew]

just as he is sitting on various snippets about much of what the FBI knows about what Donald Trump is up to with the Russians, such as this steady stream of e-mails back and forth between a Trump server and the Alfa Bank of Russia.

I see that tinfoil hat is sitting a a rakish angle today Chuky...

Link

[Airborne Aircrew]

There is an emerging train of thought out there that the 650,000 emails found on a laptop not directly belonging to Huma may have been her "life insurance"... That's an awful lot of emails to have just been a casual use of the laptop.

Hardly a stretch when you are dealing with the Clintons....

[Chuks]

AA, is Billy Bunter channeling the Donald again, with his typical "A lot of people are saying ... " BS? "There is an emerging train of thought ... " is there?

What is it now, AA, Hillary Clinton as the Godmother, ready to clip Huma next? That is hardly a stretch ... for someone who occupies a fact-free personal space!

Maybe the Donald is using that same team of detectives he sent to Kenya to get the low-down on Barack Hussein Obama's true citizenship. Now they have moved into doing IT research on Hillary's hidden e-mails, all 650,000 of them.

[IJ Reilly]

Chuks, please. You, parroting the latest DNC talking points? At least try some heavy lifting.

Even the NY Times debunked the Russia connection story. That was another obfuscation, just another guy with twirly plates saying "Hey, look at me over here!" You, a student of Conrad and Whitman, with your book Moby Dick on the shelf, fall for that stuff?

The 650,000 emails figure came from the Wall Street Journal...just look it up. Ok, it's not Mother Jones, I'll give you that.

And it was Comey himself who said the emails "appear to be pertinent." Interesting word, that. It doesn't mean "incriminating," or "smoking gun." It means they are, until further investigation, relevant to the case at hand. He was simply notifying the congressional committee, as was his duty.