The real case of collusion

Michael Barone:

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Meanwhile, the evidence builds of collusion by the Obama administration's law enforcement and intelligence personnel in trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat and delegitimize Donald Trump in and after the 2016 presidential election.

The investigation of Hillary Clinton’s illegal email system was conducted with kid gloves. One glaring example of impropriety came when FBI Director James Comey was given (and accepted) Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s order to call it a “matter” rather than an “investigation.” Clinton aides were allowed to keep her emails and destroy 30,000 of them, plus cellphones. They were not subject to grand jury subpoenas, and a potential co-defendant was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.

On June 27, 2016, Lynch clandestinely met with Bill Clinton on his plane at the Phoenix airport — a meeting that became known only thanks to an alert local TV reporter. Lynch supposedly left the decision on prosecution to Comey, who on July 5 announced publicly that Clinton was “extremely careless” but lacked intent to violate the law, even though the statute punishes violations intentional or not.

Contrast that with the collusion of Obama officials with the Clinton campaign-financed Christopher Steele/Fusion GPS memorandum alleging Trump ties with Russians. Comey and the Justice Department used it, without divulging who paid for it, to get a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page’s future and past communications — the “wiretap” Trump was derided for mentioning.

Similarly, when Comey informed Trump in January 2017 of the contents of the then-unpublished Steele memorandum, he didn’t reveal that the Clinton campaign paid for it. Asked on his book tour why not, he blandly said he didn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t actually realize he was employing tactics reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover in a bid to keep his job. Maybe.

In any case, after he was fired, he immediately sent four of his internal memos, at least one of them classified, to a law professor friend to leak them to the press, with the intent of getting a special counsel appointed — who turned out to be his longtime friend and ally, Robert Mueller. Collusion, anyone?

Collusion can get complicated and sometimes fail to produce the intended results. Comey’s deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe reportedly kept to himself for weeks the discovery that Clinton emails were transmitted over the home computer of her aide Huma Abedin’s then-husband, the disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner. It was after Comey learned of this that he made his Oct. 28 announcement that the Clinton email investigation was being reopened.
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This does not even get to the collusion of the Clinton Campaign with Russian operatives in helping Steele compile his opposition research paper dressed up to look like an intelligence report.   But it is spot on in the collusion of the FBI with the Clinton campaign to spy on the Trump campaign.  That is the collusion Mueller should have been investigating.