The FBI is charged with investigation of certain election crimes, not instigating them:
In democratic societies like the United States, the voting process is a means by which citizens hold their government accountable; conflicts are channeled into resolutions and power transfers peacefully. Our system of representative government works only when honest ballots are not diluted by fraudulent ballots. The FBI, through its Public Corruption Unit, has an important but limited role in ensuring fair and free elections. Election crimes become federal cases when:
- The ballot includes one or more federal candidates;
- The crime involves an election official abusing his duties;
- The crime pertains to fraudulent voter registration;
- Voters are not U.S. citizens.
Federal election crimes fall into three broad categories—campaign finance crimes, voter/ballot fraud, and civil rights violations. www.fbi.gov/...
There are also supposed to assure that our elections are fair and honest:
Civil rights violations
- Someone threatens a voter with physical or economic harm unless the voter casts his ballot in a particular way;
- Someone tries to prevent qualified voters from getting to the polls in a federal election;
- A scheme exists to prevent minorities from voting.
As our premier law enforcement agency, they must enforce the Hatch Act. It should go without saying they should adhere to it:
The Hatch Act of 1939, officially An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, is a United States federal law whose main provision prohibits employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the president, vice-president, and certain designated high-level officials of that branch,[1] from engaging in some forms of political activity. The law was named for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico. en.wikipedia.org/...
As usual, Wikipedia isn’t far behind breaking news:
- On October 30, 2016, U.S. Senate Democrat Minority Leader Harry Reid stated that FBI Director James Comey may have violated the Hatch Act by sending a letter to the Congress on October 28, 2016, which stated that the FBI would be reopening their investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy.[31][32] Also on October 30, Richard Painter, a chief White House ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush administration, published an op-ed saying that he had filed a complaint against the FBI with the OSC and with the Office of Government Ethics about the same matter.[33]
en.wikipedia.org/...
We’ll never known if former KGB head Putin studied Hoover, or admires him. However the connections between the methods of the two have been address, for example:
In some respects, the Putin parallel would be if former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had become president. Hoover was an American patriot; he broke up World War II Nazi operations and neutralized communist operations during the Cold War. He had, however, limited tolerance for nontraditional “free speech,” use of mind-altering substances, and homosexual behavior.
Putin has the same mindset — and with no democratic restraints. www.yahoo.com/...
Perhaps there is a curse, the ghost of master political manipulator J. Edgar Hoover wandering the halls of the building that unfortunately bears his name over the door of its headquarters.
Sunday, Nov 6, 2016 · 3:53:08 PM +00:00
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HalBrown
COMEY CHANNELS J. EDGAR HOOVER
James Comey has violated the first duty of the director of the FBI: Do no harm.
And don't forget your history.
Anyone who goes to work every day in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover must always remember that he is running an agency that abused our democracy continuously when Hoover was running it, for nearly five decades. Hoover's harassment of his political enemies, combined with a strong penchant for blackmail, reached a heinous peak in the 1960s when he used secret tapes from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s bedroom to try to scare the civil rights leader into committing suicide.
By going public the way he did last Friday, Comey has actually taken Hoover's secret abuses a step further. His gratuitous disclosure of the discovery of new emails (which may or may not have anything to do with Hillary Clinton) has done more to politicize the bureau than anything done by any other FBI director since Hoover died in office in 1972.
www.cnn.com/...
Sunday, Nov 6, 2016 · 4:05:47 PM +00:00
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HalBrown
The anti-Clinton insurgency at the FBI, explained
It’s come to this: The FBI, America’s premier law enforcement agency, just had to decide whether to investigate one of its own Twitter accounts to see if it had an anti-Hillary Clinton bias.
The account in question, @FBIRecordsVault, burst into the news earlier this week after abruptly posting records related to Bill Clinton’s last-minute — and deeply controversial — pardon of financier Marc Rich. An FBI official said in an interview that the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility referred the matter to its Inspection Division for a possible investigation into whether anyone in the FBI had intentionally released the documents to hurt Hillary Clinton.
The official said the bureau’s internal watchdog opted against opening a formal investigation. Still, the fact that such a decision even had to be made highlights the crisis engulfing the bureau in the days since FBI Director James Comey stunned observers inside and outside the bureau by notifying Congress just 11 days before the election that he was renewing the dormant probe into Clinton’s private email server. CONTINUED www.vox.com/…
Sunday, Nov 6, 2016 · 9:10:15 PM +00:00
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HalBrown
Partial Mea Culpa — somebody told somebody who told Rudy a bombshell was coming, and there still seems to be a “cell” in the FBI who are trying to influence the election… seems to be, it needs to be investigated.. However it dose now seem Comey has vindicated himself.
An FBI investigation into newly discovered emails potentially pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s private email server will not result in any new charges, the bureau announced on Sunday.
In a letter to Congress, FBI Director James Comey said that he was not going to revisit his prior conclusion that Clinton acted legally ― albeit carelessly ― in using a private account while she was secretary of state.
Since my letter, the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation. During that process we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Based on our review