While we wait for the inauguration of popular vote loser, the unpresidented Donald Trump, more evidence has emerged that today didn’t have to turn out like … today. Files released by the FBI show that the connection between James Comey and the Clintons was boiling since at least 2001.
FBI Director James Comey—blamed by many Democrats for costing Hillary Clinton the presidential election last year—was excited about pursuing a criminal investigation into President Bill Clinton's most controversial pardons more than a decade ago, newly released FBI files show.
A FBI memo about the grand jury investigation into Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons of fugitive financiers Marc Rich and Pincus Green says that when Comey was about to take over as the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan in 2001 he expressed strong interest in the case.
"...Comey is enthusiastic about this investigation and supports the proposed investigative plan set forth by AUSA [redacted,]" the FBI message said. The name of the author of the memo was also deleted from the record released publicly but the memo was sent to top officials in the criminal investigative division at FBI headquarters and at the FBI field office in New York.
Commodities dealers Rich and Green set up a company based in Switzerland and used it to trade with Irans—in essence, just what Rex Tillerson and Exxon did in Iran, Syria, and Sudan. Rich and Green were charged with tax evasion and trading with Iran, racking up 300+ years of prison time. Bill Clinton’s pardon came under suspicion because Rich’s wife made large contributions both to the Democratic Party and to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.
Comey launched into a wide ranging investigation looking for “bribery, obstruction of justice, money laundering, conspiracy and campaign finance law offenses.” But despite hundreds of interviews and years of work by the New York FBI office, by 2004 the answer was clear … and familiar.
“While some evidence has been obtained to support [the FBI squad’s] theory of contributions from [Marc] Rich in exchange for the pardon, the investigation, at the present time, is expected to receive a declination of prosecution from the Southern District of New York in the near future.”
Comey wasn’t satisfied with those results. In 2008, he was still complaining about the pardon in a letter to Congress.
The long investigation, the suspicion that something wasn’t right, but the final admission that not enough was discovered to file charges, mirrored the results of Comey’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server. That investigation ended with the thundering—and extremely unusual—denunciation of Hillary Clinton in July in which Comey stated that the probe could not recommend Clinton's indictment.
The FBI director repeatedly said Clinton's use of the server did not rise to the level of criminal behavior because investigators were unable to amass any evidence that she had intended to mishandle classified information. The probe did reveal that some information marked classified at the time passed through her servers.
It’s almost difficult to remember now that two weeks out from the election, the discussion was not about whether Hillary Clinton would win, but if her win would be by such a margin as to generate a wave election, sweeping Republicans from the Senate and, just possibly, the House. The two candidates had polled about two points apart at the start of the month, but by the day before Comey released his letter telling Congress that the FBI was assessing new emails that could be "pertinent" to the investigation of Clinton’s email server, that margin was over five points and growing. Within a day, polling trends reversed and the margin shrank by 80%. Within two days, after the New York Times front page featured the Comey letter in every single story, and news channels ran little else, the margin was the closest it had been since the summer.
In an election where the “winner” lost the popular vote by over two percent, and took the electoral vote with a small number of votes across a bare handful of states, many factors can be deemed “decisive.” The false news stories planted by Russian sources. Clinton’s failure to visit states in the Upper Midwest. Wikileaks trickle of documents that kept a low-burning dissatisfaction smoking on the left.
But none of those things had the immediate, obvious, and visible effect of James Comey’s letter.
James Comey entered the FBI trying to harpoon Bill Clinton.