How can Bernie’s supporters still be marinating in toxic innocence about his true relationship with and his place within the Democratic Party? Still, despite all evidence to the contrary, they cling to the reality-bereft notion that he can and will act as a redeemer figure to the irredeemably corrupt Party as opposed to the Judas Goat he has proven himself to be.
Yep. You might have surmised. I don’t feel the burn. I’m burnt out on Comrade Bernie. I feel like a burnt offering placed before corrupt Democratic Party deities. Why? Not once did Bernie call out the Clinton Campaign and their toadies in the DNC for their election malfeasance thus he betrayed his credulous flock. Instead, he delivered them to a candidate who stood for everything he claims to stand against.
But it is not only his Judas Goat proclivities, he, in stark contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, is a drone murder apologist, a liberacrat imperialist who slags Russia, he urged the Saudis to bomb more countries, and he embodies all the genocide-enabling proclivities of a garden variety liberal Zionists. Moreover, history reveals, the Democratic Party is the reeking landfill of leftist, labouring class, and minority socio-economic movements. If Sanders was sincere, he would not act as an advocate for the irredeemably corrupt Democratic party — but be would break the news to his followers, they will only truly feel the burn by the act of burning down the infamous thing — so that a true leftist/socialist party could be seeded in its compost and ashes.
“Bernie did the best under the circumstance,” Berniecrats are prone to respond.
Demonstrably false. Sanders, had he made an honest effort, would have called out the Clintonites and their operatives in the DNC, all through the primaries season, and, in particular, after the Wikileaks revelations about their malfeasance. He even stood silent when his supporters were insulted and bullied at the Democratic convention. In short, he has revealed, by his actions, he is far from worthy of trust.
“So what is your solution? A two-party system is what we have.”
Easy enough. As Voltaire averred about the miseries inflicted by the dogma of The Church and its hold on the collective mind of the populace, the solution will be found in “Ecrassez l’infame!” i.e., “crush the infamous thing” i.e., the Democratic Party.
“But that risks too much chaos,” blubber Fainting Couch Liberals.
You haven’t seen anything yet. Capitalism lurches from bubble to bubble. An economic collapse comes to pass every seven or so years. We are a year overdue. And this time, there will not be trillions to funnel to the Wall Street crooks who caused the collapse, as their quisling Obama, AKA President Drone von Citigroup, did. Political duopoly, the enabler of capitalist despotism, is the problem, rotten root to noxious bloom. And Bernie Sanders is one of the system’s constant gardeners.
It would deliver one public payer, no deductibles, no co-pays, lower costs, everyone in, nobody out, no more medical bankruptcies, no more deaths from lack of health insurance and free choice of doctors and hospitals.
That was the promise of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 campaign.
But since then, Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.
Then become part of Senator Chuck Schumer’s Senate Democratic leadership.
And this weekend, Sanders has been telling people he will introduce health care reform legislation in the Senate within a couple of weeks.
But it’s not going to be a companion bill to HR 676.
Instead, Sanders is telling reporters he wants to “move toward Medicare for all.”
“Right now we need to improve the Affordable Care Act and that means a public option,” Sanders tweeted yesterday.
The public option?
That would be the plan put forth by the Democratic corporatist Howard Dean, currently a member of the public policy and regulation practice of Denton’s, the multinational corporate law firm.
Dean got into nasty confrontations with single payer activists who confronted him during the Obamacare debates with questions about his corporatist connections and his support of the public option over single payer.
Don McCanne of Physicians for a National Health Program, the premiere single payer health care group in the country, has argued persuasively that the public option — allowing Americans to opt into a public plan — would not solve our healthcare crisis.
“The tragedy is not so much that on this path we will end up with a public plan that will be only one more feeble player in the dysfunctional market of private plans, but rather that we will, once again, have walked away from single payer, perhaps for decades, because of this meme about lack of political feasibility,” McCanne wrote last year. “Instead of making private plans compete with a public option, we should get rid of them and establish our own single public plan.”
“the current Medicare experience combined with experience in many different states that have tried this type of reform shows that public plans are left with the sickest patients and fail due to rising costs while the private insurers continue to collect premiums from the healthiest patients and maintain their high profits.”
Sanders also told reporters this weekend that he would consider legislation that would drop the Medicare age from 65 to 55.
David Himmelstein, a PNHP founder, said that while the public option would be a “modest improvement” and dropping the Medicare age to 55 would be a “good step,” “neither could realize most of the vast savings on administration available under single payer, nor would they achieve universal coverage or address the problems of the tens of millions who are currently underinsured.”
“Introducing a public option will divide and confuse supporters of Medicare for all,” said Margaret Flowers, MD a pediatrician who co-directs Health Over Profit for Everyone, www.HealthOverProfit.org. Flowers is also a member of PNHP. “Senators who should co-sponsor Medicare for all will be divided. Sanders seems to be urging a public option to please the Democratic Party, but Sanders cannot serve two masters – Wall Street’s Chuck Schumer and the people. Sanders must decide whom he is working for.”
“While it might seem politically pragmatic to support a public option, it is not realistically pragmatic because a public option will not work,” Dr. Flowers said. “Senator Sanders knows that and he knows that the smallest step toward solving the healthcare crisis is National Improved Medicare for All. This would fundamentally change our health system that currently treats health as a commodity so that people only have access to what they can afford to a system that treats health as a public necessity so that people have access to what they need. Medicare for all achieves the savings needed to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone.”
“If Senator Sanders believes that it is acceptable to promote a policy that leaves some people out, then we want to know who should be left out. The US is already spending enough to cover everyone and that’s what we need to do.”
“The Affordable Care Act, built on a heavily subsidized private insurance industry, is not possible to fix. The ACA must be replaced by a national health policy that serves the needs of the people by replacing private insurance with publicly-financed Medicare.”
“Sanders wants to lower drug prices,” Dr. Flowers said. “Only a single payer system can negotiate lower drug prices. Sanders says healthcare is a human right, but human rights should not be commodities or profit centers. People do not pay for their human rights.”
“We look to Senator Sanders to act on what he promised during his presidential campaign, a National Improved Medicare for All now, not tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. It is not up to him to decide if single payer can pass in Congress. That task is for the people to decide.”
Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.
Lori Kearns is the health policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
She’s been making the rounds in recent weeks telling single payer supporters that Senator Sanders will not introduce his single payer bill into the Senate next year.
Why not?
Because party unity is more important than single payer.
Sanders apparently believes that single payer will get in the way of electing a Democratic Senate in 2018.
Wouldn’t want to confront Democratic Senate candidates with the deaths of their constituents due to Obamacare, would you?
One reason why Sanders soared during the primary was his constant refrain that we need to cover every American with a single payer health care system.
This resonated with the American people, with polls showing that three-fifths of Americans — including a majority of those who want the Obamacare repealed, and even 41 percent of Republicans — favoring a “federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.”
Translate — single payer.
Everybody in. Nobody out.
If Sanders believes it, where is the bill?
Why won’t Sanders re-introduce it in the upcoming session?
Because he is now in the Democratic leadership in the Senate — handpicked by Wall Street favorite incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-New York.)
And if the Democrats say no, Sanders says no.
Call it death by Democrat.
And death by Obamacare.
Narrow networks.
High deductibles and co-pays.
Skyrocketing premiums.
Twenty nine million Americans still uninsured.
And more than 28,000 preventable deaths a year due to lack of health insurance.
All under Obamacare.
And Sanders won’t introduce his single payer bill because the Democrats tell him not to?
During the battle over Obamacare on the Hill in 2009, I asked Sanders why he was supporting Obamacare when he stood for single payer.
Sanders was a student of the difference — Obamacare controlled by the health insurance companies and written by their lobbyists — single payer a public system that cuts the health insurance companies out of the game.
Sanders looked at me, snarled, told me not to lecture him and walked away.
Goodbye single payer. Hello Chuck Schumer.
Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.
He’s no more a progressive revolutionary than any other member of Congress, nor Washington’s bipartisan criminal class, bureaucrats included – Sanders a card-carrying member throughout his deplorable political career.
Endorsing Hillary Clinton after rhetorically campaigning against what she represents exposed his duplicity – a progressive in name only. An opportunist for his own self-interest, he wants his extended 15 minutes of fame made more long-lasting.
Claiming his new initiative “will fight to transform America and advance the progressive agenda (he) believe(s) in” belies his deplorable House and Senate voting records, on the wrong side of most major issues, especially supporting most US wars of aggression.
A separate Sanders Institute intends operating like his Our Revolution initiative. Maybe his real aim is cashing in on his high-profile persona – including a new book due out in mid-November titled “Our Revolution: A Future To Believe In.”
Save your money. Its contents are clear without reading it – the same mumbo jumbo rubbish he used while campaigning.
It excludes his deplorable history of promising one thing, doing another, going along with Washington scoundrels like Hillary to get along, betraying his loyal supporters – the real Sanders he wants concealed.
On August 24, the New York Timessaid his Our Revolution initiative “has been met with criticism and controversy over its financing and management.”
It’s “draw(ing) from the same pool of ‘dark money’ (he) condemned” while campaigning. After his former campaign manager Jeff Weaver was hired to lead the group, “the majority of its staff resigned,” said The Times – described as “eight core staff members…”
“The group’s entire organizing department quit this week, along with people working in digital and data positions.” They refused to reconsider after Sanders urged them to stay on.
A major concern is the group’s tax status as a 501(c)(4) organization able to get large donations from anonymous sources – meaning the usual ones buying influence, letting Sanders pretend to be progressive and revolutionary while operating otherwise.
Claire Sandberg was the initiative’s organizing director. “I left and others left because we were alarmed that Jeff (Weaver) would mismanage this organization as he mismanaged the campaign,” she explained.
She fears Weaver will “betray its core purpose by accepting money from billionaires and not remaining grassroots funded and plowing that billionaire cash into TV instead of investing it in building a genuine movement.”
Vermont GOP vice chairman Brady Toensing blasted Sanders for “preach(ing) transparency and then tr(ying) to set up the most shadowy of shadowy fund-raising organization to support” what he claims to endorse.
“What I’m seeing here is a senator who is against big money in politics, but only when” it applies to others, not himself, Toensing added.
Campaign Legal Center’s Paul S. Ryan said “(t)here are definitely some red flags with respect to the formation of this group…We’re in a murky area.”
Is Sanders’ real aim self-promotion and enrichment? Is his Our Revolution more a scheme than an honest initiative?
Is it sort of like the Clinton Foundation, Sanders wanting to grab all he can – only much less able to match the kind of super-wealth Bill and Hillary amassed?
Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Sanders didn’t just fall from grace. He crashed, burned and resoundingly proved politicians can never be trusted.
Nothing they say is credible. For months, supporters believed he was the anti-Clinton, campaigning against what she represents – an agenda of endless wars of aggression, world peace at risk, neoliberal harshness, police state terror, the worst of all possible worlds.
She’s the most recklessly dangerous choice for president in US history, the most wicked, the most legally, ethically and morally challenged.
In mid-July, Sanders sold out, betrayed his loyal supporters, proved himself just another self-serving dirty politician by endorsing Clinton, embarrassing himself in the process.
On day one of the Democrat War Party convention, he again made a spectacle of himself before a nationwide audience – assuming the role of Clinton puppet, relegating himself to irrelevance.
He touted a “political revolution” the whole world knows is fake. His populist rhetoric resoundingly rang hollow. Who can believe anything a Judas says, a despicable scoundrel selling out to wealth and power while continuing the charade of supporting populism over privilege.
Bush/Obama policies created a protracted Main Street Depression. Half of US households are impoverished or bordering it. Workers need two or more rotten jobs to survive if they can find them.
America resembles Guatemala, not the home of the free and the brave, beautiful for its privileged class alone, a classic example of thirdworldism.
Sanders lied claiming “(w)e have come a long way in the last 7 1/2 years, and I thank President Obama and Vice President Biden for their leadership in pulling us out of that terrible recession.”
What a shameless misrepresentation of harsh reality! He put his thumb in the eyes of tens of millions of suffering Americans – one missed paycheck away from homelessness, hunger and despair.
He praised Obama instead of condemning him, duplicitously claiming Clinton supports a progressive agenda, a scandalous perversion of truth.
The rest of his remarks included similar mumbo jumbo rubbish repeated endlessly while campaigning -meaningless rhetoric, exposed by endorsing Clinton, shamelessly praising her, bashing Trump.
He reduced himself to a caricature of the phony persona he displayed on the stump. Support for Clinton means endorsing imperial wars, democracy for the few alone and tyranny heading toward becoming full-blown while pretending otherwise.
Saying “Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president, and I am proud to stand with her here tonight” showed everything he claims to stand for is a Big Lie.
It’s pure fantasy, duplicitous doublespeak, the lowest denominator of political dishonesty, stringing along his supporters, betraying them when it most mattered.
His soul was for sale all along. He’s now a footnote in the deplorable history of US politics, hugely corrupted, impossible to fix.
Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Wikileaks over the last few days dumped tens of thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server.
The disclosures of dirty tricks directed against Bernie Sanders contained in those emails are startling, and only add to the whirlpool of corruption and sleaze surrounding Hillary Clinton and the wheezing corpse of the democratic process.
There’s a lot to unpack here:
— The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email server, which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months including during trips to China and Russia and which contained Top Secret national security data, was not hacked by the Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians.
— Many in Camp Clinton and the media labeled Bernie Sanders’ supporters as paranoid when they made claims during the primaries that the DNC was working against them. The hacked emails confirm the DNC was working against them, including suggestions that the DNC find ways to suggest Sanders was an atheist to discredit him in religious areas.
— Persons who claimed many in the media, including CNN, were biased in favor of the Clinton campaign during the primaries were dismissed. The hacked emails confirm the DNC was working closely with the media to seek negative coverage of Sanders and positive coverage of Clinton.
— Politico now admits it was a “mistake” sending the DNC an article draft in advance. The writer showed the draft to the DNC even before his own editors saw it.
— Facebook admits to blocking Wikileaks links to the DNC email hack from its newsfeeds (but blames spam filters.)
— The DNC appears to have expended significantly more effort toward defeating Bernie Sanders than they did against any of the Republican candidates.
And some more:
— Instead of focusing on the contents of the hacked emails and the dirty tricks they exposed, many mainstream media outlets headlined instead the Clinton campaign talking points that the Russians hacked the emails and released them in an effort to derail her candidacy in favor of Donald Trump. Many of the same stories suggest Trump is some sort of pro-Putin stooge.
— On 60 Minutes, Clinton refused to say intervention by the DNC to favor one candidate was “improper.” Her non-answer was edited out of the interview broadcast.
— After DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation following this week’s Democratic convention, the Clinton campaign announced Wasserman Schultz would be hired by them as “honorary chair of Hillary’s campaign’s 50-state program to elect Democrats in every part of the country, and as a surrogate for her campaign nationally.”
— Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be replaced as DNC chair by (only now former) CNN commentator Donna Brazile. Brazile argued the pro-Clinton side of debates on CNN throughout the primary season.
— In the hacked emails, Brazile said “I will cuss out the Sanders camp!” over complaints by Sanders of inadequate representation by the DNC. In March while still employed by CNN, Brazile called Sanders’ decision to run as a Democrat for the additional media exposure “extremely disgraceful.”
And very sadly:
— Bernie Sanders, his campaign sabotaged by the DNC with what were once “paranoid” accusations now proved, still endorses Hillary Clinton and will still speak at the Democratic National Convention.
It pains me to say as his once-supporter that the man has no courage. Even Ted Cruz stood up for himself in front of the Republicans in Cleveland. It is a sad day when we learn Ted Cruz has more balls than Bernie Sanders.
Those who are calling all this a coup of sorts, they’re wrong. It’s a surrender. But in the words of Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make?
In remarks from the Democratic National Convention stage applauded by big media, Sarah Silverman lauded the Democratic Party primary process as “exemplary”.
I guess that’s why she’s a comedian.
Perhaps she doesn’t know who Debbie Wasserman Schultz is. Perhaps she doesn’t know that Schultz just resigned as head of the Democratic National Committee after the release by WikiLeaks of DNC internal emails showing evidence of them conspiring against Sanders. Of course, Schultz was then immediately named “honorary chair” of the Clinton campaign. Schultz as “honorary” anything — now that’s funny.
Still, Silverman insisted: “This Democratic primary was exemplary. No name calling … that stuff is for third graders.”
Yes, name calling is for third graders. Which I guess is why she then blurted out “Can I just say, to the Bernie or Bust people, you’re being ridiculous.”
Wow, there’s a well-reasoned argument. “You’re being ridiculous.”
I have mixed feelings about people shouting in a hall, but what was really ridiculous was that as I flipped from network to network, none seems to want to tell me what it was the delegates were chanting. After poking around my twitter feed, here’s some of what they were apparently saying — more substantial than the speeches from the podium:
“Tax Wall Street!” and “Release the transcripts!” and “99 percent!” and, as it was claimed that Clinton would be tough on Wall Street: “Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs!” and “We trusted you! We trusted you!” (to Elizebeth Warren) and apparently, at one point, they referred to the DNC scandal — “Wikileaks! Wikileaks! Wikileaks!” When Bernie Sanders talked about Hillary Clinton on crime, some shouted “super predators!”
But who wants to hear what delegates think when we have Sarah Silverman making STD jokes about “feel the burn”?
Not that activists shouldn’t be questioned. I’ve had my own criticisms of #BernieOrBust for some time. Some of them have made a cult out of an obviously flawed man, who it’s been apparent for weeks if not months would not get the nomination. Backing Sanders should be a tactic, not the goal. His supporters now should use the VotePact.org voting strategy — see in my piece “#BernieAndBoom.” This would mean disenchanted Democrats and disenchanted Republicans who know and trust each other pairing up and vote for the independent candidates of their choice, like the Green or Libertarian candidates. Methodical action is the order of the day in the coming weeks, months and years.
And I don’t mean to be too hard on Silverman. After all, I don’t think her performance with Al Franken was quite the unintentionally funniest bit on Monday night.
I thought it was hilarious when Elizabeth Warren tried to paint Clinton as someone who would stand up to Wall Street. And I thought it was unintentionally uproariously funny when the much touted “first Muslim” member of Congress, Keith Ellison, introduced Sanders without a mention of perpetual U.S. wars — which have killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims over the last several decades. Seeing the king of rhetoric, Bill Clinton applauding speakers like some kind of phony wise man was sickeningly priceless. And there was comedic irony in Cory Booker’s endless empty platitudes about “courage” and such as grassroots activists showed some degree of actual courage — struggling to find a way to be heard in a rigged system.
Silverman also said: “My shrink says we don’t get what we want, we get what we think we deserve.” So, maybe that’s what she thinks she deserves: a corporate, militaristic candidate serving the interests of the elite — of which Silverman is a member at this point.
The sign many were waving last night — “love trumps hate” — was way off. Clinton — “we came, we saw, he died” (about Qaddafi) — is the candidate of love? Really? The Clinton message is actually “fear trumps Trump”. Even as speaker after speaker at the DNC attacked Trump for instilling fear (true enough), their own go-to message was: Back Hillary because the Donald should arouse such fear in you that all other thought processes should immediately shut down.
So it took extra chutzpah, and comedic gold, for Silverman to saying that “I will vote for Hillary with gusto” — showing for all to see her extraordinary delusion.
This is a world view in which substance, debate and democracy must be avoided. The New York Times headlined a piece “Sarah Silverman tames the Bernie beast” — echoing the now fashionable founding money man of the one percent Alexander Hamilton’s derision of the general public: “Your people, sir — your people is a great beast!”
Appropriately, just as Sanders ended his own sad speech, which induced tears of grief among his perhaps naive delegates, the choreographers of the evening’s festivities chimed in a riff from “Taking it to the Street” — perhaps they didn’t think to look at the rest of the lyrics of the song:
You, telling me the things you’re gonna do for me
I ain’t blind and I don’t like what I think I see
Quite appropriate for an evening of promises on behalf of the corporate candidate of perpetual wars who has just again reiterated her actual big money allegiance with her vice presidential pick — to the delight of a stage managed, big media driven system appalled by the threat of accountability and democracy actually breaking out.
Watching the new Bernie Sanders, distracted by his “awkward dance” to the tune of that damn Platform, one might think him unaware that he had his last best chance to win the Democratic nomination snatched from him in broad daylight. Republicans appear far more disturbed than Sanders is about Clinton sewing up the nomination by beating her secret server rap on dubious legal grounds. Since polls have consistently shown Sanders, not Clinton, to be the strongest candidate to beat their guy, one might expect not Republicans, but Sanders, to be out front on this issue. But its 2016, when the “progressive” revolutionary is endorsing the establishment plutocrat.
In last Thursday’s “emergency” congressional oversight hearings, FBI Director James B. Comey was questioned about his unprecedented Tuesday, June 5, press conference Statement justifying the Bureau’s mutually contradictory factual and legal conclusions from its long-pending investigation of Hillary Clinton’s “servergate” problem. Republicans under committee Chair Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) conducted a professional, informed and fair interrogation of Comey that contributed to the debate. Comey’s less than convincing legal justification for his decision opened as many lines of inquiry as it closed.
Trey Gowdy, (R- SC), a former federal prosecutor, walked Comey through the false statements that Clinton told his Benghazi Committee in October. This evoked a sworn on-the-record FBI endorsement of what amounted to several counts of a potential criminal indictment of Clinton for lying under oath. One wonders if the FBI will investigate the question whether Clinton intentionally lied to Congress as gingerly and at the same level of competence as the FBI’s first limited investigation, which even non-lawyers on the Oversight Committee were able to effectively criticize.
Having virtually framed the indictment of Clinton for lying to Congress, Gowdy then delivered a Socratic lesson to Comey on the subject of how such “false exculpatory statements” by Clinton, along with Clinton’s pervasive and “complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the public record” could have been used in the “servergate” case to prove her requisite criminal intent, the supposedly key element of the crime which Comey claimed he could not find.
Gowdy completed his attack on Comey’s central evasion for not indicting Clinton by instructing him that intent is rarely proven by direct evidence, such as Comey seemed to suggest was needed. “You have to do it with circumstantial evidence,” Gowdy said. Gowdy outlined in less than five minutes for Comey what the FBI was somehow incapable to piece together over many months.
Circumstantial evidence has been used in similar cases. In the notorious case of Jeffery Sterling, DoJ was able to imprison a CIA agent on the sole basis of circumstantial evidence amounting to no more than speaking to a reporter, a case that was partially motivated by retribution for Sterling’s racial duscrimination claim against the agency. Another entirely circumstantial case was made against a mid-level bureaucrat for talking with a reporter without direct proof of intent, let alone transfer of any particular information.
This initial examination of Comey by Gowdy and other Republican committee members supports the suggestion that Comey’s formal statement denying Clinton’s criminal intent, quoted below, constitutes one of a series of “coincidental shams and deceptions deeply rooted in a corrupt political system.” This sham includes a) the extended delay and timing of what appears to have been a superficial and artificially limited investigation designed to exculpate, b) the unethical ex parte meeting between Comey’s boss and Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport, c) AG Lynch’s refusal to recuse herself for that ethical lapse, and d) instead abdicate the DoJ’s prosecutorial judgment to a political FBI Director, e) Clinton (who “believes in gestures”) making anonymous leaks that “she may decide to retain Ms. Lynch,” f) Obama’s endorsement of and North Carolina campaign stop with Clinton timed to deflect attention from the FBI’s criticism of her lies and “extremely careless” conduct in high office, g) unprecedented signature of non-disclosure agreement for agents on this case, and then h) the very nature of the Statement itself, both the unprecedented PR exercise of its being made public and the FBI’s straying well beyond its proper duties and expertise to make and announce the operative legal decision not to prosecute. Reciting some these coincidences Rep. Mica observed “what’s come down, it almost looks like a choreography.”
It may be only a coincidence that Lynch was appointed attorney general by Obama very shortly after Clinton started deleting her “servergate” files in February 2015. And it may be a coincidence that Comey was appointed around the time in 2013 that Clinton’s potential crime was coming to light. But was it a coincidence that Obama failed to appoint a State Department inspector general during all four years of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State?
Selling a Technical Fix for a Political Problem
The FBI does not prosecute, and does not evaluate or fire prosecutors. It investigates federal crime, which is a technical and not political process. It is not the FBI’s job to tell prosecutors how to do theirs, but rather to provide the investigation needed for prosecutors to make legal decisions based on reliable and thorough facts. Jason Chaffetz (R- UT) called out (3:34) how unprecedented it was for Comey to go public with such a statement, and then also to do so about more than just the facts discovered by the FBI, but also to publicly pre-judge the legal questions involved in a possible prosecution, indictment, and trial. Rep, Mulvaney also repeated this criticism as a question: “It is unprecedented that an FBI Director gave the type of press conference that he did and took a position that an unreasonable prosecutor would only take this case forward. Why would do you that?” Comey agree, :Yes, it’s a great question.”
Comey’s opinion was that commission of the crime detailed in the FBI’s investigation should nevertheless not be prosecuted because of insufficient “intent” by Clinton. This opinion was not only based on a failure to marshal available evidence, as Rep. Gowdy pointed out, but also a misinterpretation of well-settled law, as discussed below. It also prejudices any future prosecution the Justice Department might have decided, or may decide to pursue in the future, unless discredited as an abuse of the FBI Director’s authority
As Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department official, judged, Comey’s performance was “a gross abuse of his own power,” in part because he “substituted his judgment for that of prosecutors.” The FBI’s autocratic legend who was not shy about expanding the powers of the Bureau, J. Edgar Hoover, himself decreed: “We are a fact gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody.” sixty years later, Comey has now added a corollary to this rule: “except a Clinton” when it’s time to determine the next president.
This unprecedented FBI polemic about Clinton’s intent violated the general rule that one does not ever speak publicly about a pending investigation or litigation because it can distort due process. It was dramatically improper conduct for political purposes. It is one reason why Comey should be at least fired, if not formally reprimanded or impeached by Congress.
The argument for impeaching Comey is that if Comey does not suffer serious consequences in public, the Clinton case cannot be effectively prosecuted. He has spoiled the case, and failed to faithfully execute “the Laws.” (Art. II, Sec. 3.) He has also established a dangerous precedent for abuse of FBI power that needs to be soundly rebuked. That is difficult to do in any other politically responsible manner than the constitutional process for checking inappropriate executive action, an impeachment vote by the House of Representatives. (Art. II, Sec. 4.) His errors in stating the governing law on which he based his institutionally improper opinion provide yet other reasons for disciplinary action.
This impropriety of the chief federal investigator acting as prosecutor, grand jury, judge, and jury arose out of the context where Comey’s boss Loretta Lynch had said she would abdicate to the FBI her duty to make the legal and political decision on the Clinton case, rather than simply recuse herself for her ethical lapse in holding a secret ex parte meeting with a potential target and surrogate of the main target of the investigation.
By making the legal decision himself rather than properly leaving it to senior Justice Department lawyers and the attorney general, Comey clearly did a political favor not only for Lynch but also for President Barack Obama, who also has a flair for improperly prejudging pending cases, as he did this one. Both of them would otherwise have had to take political responsibility, with an historically dissatisfied electorate, for an unpopular and controversial partisan political decision, the first of its kind in U.S. history, based on a distorted legal analysis. Both had conflicts of interest as political partisans of the same stripe as Clinton. Obama would have effectively pardoned his endorsed successor for preserving his plutocratic legacy. Lynch would be exonerating her potential future employer, who may well eventually appoint her to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court much has her husband appointed Lynch to be US Attorney.
Both the ethical lapse at the airport and the ensuing abdication, rather than recusal, deserve separate reprimand. In her hearings the barest scent of impeachment was in the air. Rep. Goodlatte (31), lawyer and Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, and not known to make such accusations lightly, charged that Lynch’s abdication was “not [a]… responsible way to uphold [her] constitutionally sworn oath.” The hearing established that “servergate” was the first time Lynch had announced such an abdication of duty ahead of time, that she would follow recommendations of a committee rather than make her own decision. This abdication of responsibility under the pretense that it would remedy her ethical lapse, according to Rep. Jordan (2:13) actually “made a bad situation worse.” AG Lynch’s rehearsed, run-out-the-clock, stonewall demonstration before the Committee of “prodigious dissimulation skills” (Franks,1:50) in furtherance of her abdication bordered on contempt of Congress. On the merits, Rep. Gowdy who knows how to conduct cross-examination could not get a straight answer from Lynch to the simple question of why a specific intent standard was applied by the DoJ when the statute does not demand it, which is the central issue. Her riposte to nearly every question is that her sole decision was to in effect abdicate her duty and that questions on the details should be referred to Comey.
Comey’s highly improper public recitation of facts sufficient to indict, while denying Clinton, for his own political reasons, the opportunity to controvert those facts in court by indicting her was undoubtedly the price Comey had to pay to prevent mutiny from the professionals inside his Bureau. One former spy who is closely following the case predicted that “there are high-ranking spies who [we]re perfectly willing to leak the sordid details of …. exactly what Hillary Clinton did,” had Comey failed to make a credible accounting. But FBI investigators take institutional responsibility solely for delivering the facts, not for Comey’s personal venture into political fixes at the presidential level, nor for his idiosyncratic legal conclusions that Lynch improperly allowed him to make, with some cover provided by unnamed DoJ attorneys on a committee.
Evidence of Intent: looking in all the wrong places
Comey was able to make a political decision appear to be a technical decision by basing it upon his peculiar views of the evidence necessary to prove intent, at least in this one case. But as Rep. Gowdy explained to Comey, this technical decision about intent failed to take proper account of the inferences to be drawn from the circumstantial evidence that shows Clinton’s intent to break the law. For example, Clinton clearly intended to give classified information to her lawyers who lacked security clearances, as well as to allow her uncleared tech support to have access. Comey had no good answer for such facts.
Among the many lapses of judgment that Comey defended, he did not think it germane to an assessment of her intent that Clinton, and nine of her former top aides, refused to be interviewed by the State Department inspector general. A person of innocent intent would have no reason to avoid such an interview by her former employer on a matter within the scope of her employment.
Comey’s refusal to comment on the existence or not of a related Clinton Foundation investigation suggests that, contrary to speculation, those very public allegations of Clinton’s handling of systemic conflicts of interest was not part of the secret server investigation. Such a joint investigation of the two potentially related matters would have justified the FBI’s delay. Not taking into account the Clinton Foundation line of inquiry would exclude consideration of a potential motive for Clinton’s prioritizing over keeping the nation’s secrets keeping secret from the government her “private” emails. About half of the total were allegedly private, representing a quite intensive “private” life for someone in such a high public office. Investigator Greg Palast points out that notionally private communications because addressed to her family, did involve official business. That potential motive would have been far more nefarious than the motives that Comey does approve for prosecution in other cases, such as whistleblowing on matters of mismanagement or torture.
The damage done may also have been greater. William Binney, a former high-ranking NSA official, claimed that the “rather devastating compromise of technical capability and a commensurate loss of high value intelligence” from just one 2011 Clinton email released by the State Department may be “difficult for the public to understand and comprehend, but it is … much worse than what Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or any of the other whistleblowers have done.” The email wasn’t redacted because it was sent to Clinton by Sid Blumenthal, a private citizen with no security clearance. But as shown in many other emails he sent to Clinton, he somehow had access to the latest top secret NSA information that revealed the NSA’s sources and collection methods.
As it turned out, such a motive of keeping corrupt activities private from government security officials and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) investigators might have been ineffective in any event. On the same day Comey gave his presentation clearing Clinton, the D.C. Circuit ruled that government email records on private equipment are subject to FOIA if they are not held under a claim of private right. See Competitive Enterprise Institute v. Office of Science and Technology Policy (2016) (“If a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his [sic] department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose [of FOIA] is hardly served.”)
After reciting facts that have long been known by the public, and that contradicted exculpatory public statements by Clinton, the FBI’s operative finding delivered by Comey was that “we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information.” In the oversight hearing on July 7th, Comey did not demonstrate a full grasp of facts, such as who paid for Clinton’s server. He did not personally interview Clinton nor did he talk with all of the “five or six” agents who did. Another painfully obvious example was when Comey was asked by Rep, Meadows “did [Clinton] contradict some of [her] public statements in private? Because you said she didn’t lie to the FBI, but it’s apparent that she lied to the American people. So did she change her statements in [her] testimony with you last Saturday?” Comey’s incredibly ignorant response was “I haven’t gone through that to parse that…” Rep. Meadows requested “Can you do that and get back to this Committee?” When asked again by Rep. Mulvaney: “why she told y’all one thing and told us another?” Comey replied “I don’t know as I sit here. I mean, I can — I’ll figure that out” even though he agreed “that [could] have been of interest to you in helping to establish intent?”
This is Congress asking the FBI to apply one of its most common enforcement tools, trapping people into making false statements, as if it were some novel enforcement tool they had not thought of before. It will be important to monitor whether Congress will insist that Comey satisfy Rep. Meadows’ request, and Comey’s promise, to “figure that out” why Clinton is not being prosecuted for false statements to the FBI.
Due to repeated professions of ignorance of this kind, Comey’s formula that he did not “find clear evidence” was less than convincing that he looked in the right places.
Comey’s finding was not that Clinton’s conduct did not possibly violate the law, but an inference from Clintons’ “Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to, won’t do it again:” Voila! No intent; no crime. As Gowdy’s questioning suggested, if when Comey used the word “clear” to describe the quality of evidence of intent that he was looking for he actually meant “direct,” that kind of evidence almost never happens in the real world. The evidence of intent, unless confessed, is always inferential, circumstantial, and indirect, not “clear” in the possible colloquial use of that term that Comey seemed to employ.
Since “clear evidence” is not a legal term, the country is left to guess what Comey’s subjective meaning for the term is. The impression left by Comey, which Gowdy forcefully challenged, was that indirect and inferential evidence was not considered by Comey to be “clear” evidence, and therefore Clinton could only be indicted if she confessed. Indeed, Comey distinguished the Deutch case on the grounds that Deutch “admitted, ‘I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing this.” The idea that no prosecution can be maintained without a confession is of course the most arrant nonsense. Rep. Duncan reported that when he was a judge he “saw many cases where the evidence of criminal intent was flimsier than the evidence in this case.” But Comey has so far gotten away with asserting the contrary.
The kind of clarity that Comey was seeking would have to dispel his opinion about, among other things, Clinton’s apparent denial that she understood classification markings within a text of a document: “I think it’s possible — possible that she didn’t understand what a “c” meant.” But then, in response to a question by Rep. Meadows whether it is reasonable to doubt such a denial, i.e., “wouldn’t a reasonable person think that someone who has the highest job of handling classified information would understand that?” Comey replies “I think that’s the conclusion a reasonable person would draw. It may not be accurate.” One can observe Comey retreat here from applying the legal reasonable doubt standard into some subjective standard of his own concerning “clear evidence.”
Provided Clinton insisted on her own ignorance which no jury would likely accept, if Comey was looking for other “clear” evidence of intent, he was looking for some abstraction that does not exist, and which the law does not require. No matter how much one looks no other direct evidence will be found without extraordinary investigatory measures. Comey was apparently not looking for it by using such measures. He did not disclose the existence of wiretaps to monitor Clinton’s private conversations for which he clearly did have probable cause. But the inferential and circumstantial kind of evidence that Gowdy recited, and which is commonly sufficient to convict of the intent element of all ordinary crimes where the issue might arise, was not discovered under Comey’s leadership because it was apparently not “clear.”
Comey’s “Reasonable Prosecutor”
Comey’s flawed approach to assessing the element of intent is discussed in further detail below. First, it should be pointed out that Comey offered this opinion, one that departed from the traditional standard of reasonable doubt in favor of some unknown subjective standard of his own, to support his “judgment … that no reasonable prosecutor would bring … a case” for Clinton’s “potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.” As mentioned, this judgment went beyond Comey’s position as FBI director to give, and it was given on the basis of his own idiosyncratic legal test.
In his July 5th statement, Comey explained:
“Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past. In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”
Again, Comey probably did not “see those things” because he did not look, mainly because he was looking for the wrong thing. Clinton’s server did involve “vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct.” It was not just a mistaken channeling of a few emails through her separate personal email. It was systemic and vast removal of her routine official email traffic from secure government channels to her insecure private server domain used for her “hdr22@clintonemail.com” address.
This pervasive arrangement was therefore all but certain to expose national secrets.
Clinton deliberately commingled the personal and the public, permitting her to later delete the public’s communications under the unverifiable, and apparently inaccurate, excuse that she only deleted her personal communications. There is no reliable way of knowing what she deleted because the data was wiped nearly clean.
A fiduciary who commingles financial assets is guilty of crime. Clinton commingled real assets, national secrets owned by the public, with her private information, and put them both in her private insecure server. This violates several federal statutes.
What would be enough evidence of intent for a “reasonable prosecutor” to pursue a conviction for this violation is again left to Comey’s own subjective standard. An objective standard would be met, first, by restraining the FBI Director within the proper scope of his duties, then appointing a professional unbiased special prosecutor to separately assess the legal implications of the facts the FBI produced. The prosecutor should be free of political ties and conflicted interests, such as job retention or promotion in a new administration. Then the case should be presented to a grand jury for possible indictment to determine its objective validity.
That is the constitutional process to achieve objectivity in prosecutions of this political kind of matter. But as mentioned above, the case cannot now be prosecuted unless Comey himself suffers consequences for his improper and unprecedented conduct that relegated the legal and policy decision of whether to prosecute to his own subjective standards under the pretext of being a technical decision backed by the prestige of the FBI.
Before anyone searching for such an independent prosecutor takes Comey’s word about his standard for “reasonable” prosecutors, they might want to first check with his FBI Sacramento office about whether they would agree with Comey that Assistant United States Attorney Jean M. Hobler should be considered unreasonable for successfully prosecuting the case of a reservist named Bryan Nishimura for “removing and retaining” on his private computer classified material acquired when he was serving as a Naval Engineer in Afghanistan.
The FBI investigated this case as a violation of 18 U.S.C. §1924, and published a press release just one year ago lacking any suggestion that the FBI considered Hobler to be anything but a “reasonable prosecutor” for winning this case. Though not nearly as significant as Clinton’s similar crime, this case was virtually identical as far as the element of intent goes. Intent was not an issue. In fact, the investigation of the Nishimura case found no motive “to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel,” which is not quite true of the Clinton case. But lack of wrongful motive was not a problem for the prosecution of Nishimura. Comey contended the Nishimura case could be distinguished when it was raised by a committee member at the hearing, but he did not actually say how.
Congress needs to ask the Director to put together a dossier of similar cases that the FBI has investigated, and that Comey might have thought could be distinguished although their relevant facts are similar to Clinton’s case. Since in his July 5th presentation Comey said “we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” we need to know if his definition of “these facts” include only relevant facts, or if he considers distinctions that are political or otherwise legally unpersuasive.
Congress needs to ask Comey for all the available legal memoranda distinguishing such cases as the Nishimura case, or the John Deutch case, and others, so people can determine whether these cases really are so different in principle from Clinton’s case after they have a “complete accounting of the facts” which Comey claimed they do not now have, but which he does have. It is almost certain that none of the cases prosecuted under the relevant statutes prohibiting mishandling of government records could be distinguished with respect to the element of intent.
Many commentators, including Representatives Gowdy, Chaffetz, and other oversight committee members concluded that Comey is operating within the framework of a two-tiered system of justice by providing an evasive justification of insufficient intent. The elite political class has one kind of law and everyone else has another. See Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014). At the same time that police are murdering people on the streets with impunity, the political elite in the capital is placed above accountability to the law.
Confusing motive with intent
Comey has not only misled the public by his demand for evidence that Clinton’s violation of the law was “clearly intentional and willful” according to some subjective evidentiary standard of his own. More importantly, in his discussion of precedents, quoted above, he deliberately confuses these terms relating to intent with the separate concept of motive. Comey’s description of his search for precedent suggests that he was not really looking for intent, but rather different varieties of motives involved in cases where forbidden material had been placed on private computer devices, or otherwise compromised.
As Supreme Court justices Alito and Thomas said in another context, Comey’s quoted statement about controlling Justice Department precedent “confuses two fundamentally distinct concepts: intent and motive…. [O]ur cases have recognized that a lawful motive (such as necessity, duress, or self-defense) is consistent with the mens rea necessary to satisfy a requirement of intent.” Rosemond v. United States (2014).
Any motive whatsoever, innocent or otherwise, can be used as evidence of intent, but rarely, if ever, can be used to disprove intent for purposes of determining guilt. From the defense perspective, the Supreme Court observed: “Motives are most relevant when the trial judge sets the defendant’s sentence …” Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476, 485 (1993) (hate crime). Thus motive might affect punishment, but ordinarily not guilt, except for proving the element of intent or as circumstantial evidence for identifying the culprit of proven bad acts, which is not in question here.
In the Sterling Espionage Act case, proof of an alleged motive for disloyalty to the CIA was virtually substituted for the lack of any direct evidence linking the defendant to the crime. Such trumped up cases invite a jury to illegitimately convict a person for imputed bad thoughts when there is insufficient evidence of the defendant’s bad acts. But where motive is not an element of the crime, evidence that one does not have bad thoughts cannot be used for defensive purposes, to exculpate, as Comey has used it.
In the end, Comey’s argument amounted to little more than an opinion about the success of such a “bad thoughts” case against Clinton. But it ignored that Clinton’s “bad acts” was all he needed to prove, and Clinton’s connection to those acts, unlike the Sterling case, are virtually unquestioned. By cleverly diverting his legal analysis of intent to the issue of motive, Comey made an inherently arbitrary political distinction between motives that the administration can tolerate by its friends and motives it disapproves. This is a violation of the rule of law which does recognize such political preferences but rather defines a crime applicable to everyone irrespective of their friends in high places or the kinds of motives their friends find politically unthreatening to themselves.
This highly limited, solely evidentiary, role of motive in all ordinary criminal prosecutions is shown to be violated by Comey’s reference to the kind of “intent” that he said was defined by Justice Department precedent concerning “disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.” Such categories clearly involve motives for committing a crime and not the element of intent to commit the underlying crime of mishandling the nation’s secrets, and other government information. Whether it was done for reasons of disloyalty, obstruction, or any other motive in not necessary to proof of intent. These “fundamentally distinct concepts” of motive and intent are jumbled up here on Comey’s list of precedents together with his discussion of “intentional mishandling” or “intentional misconduct,” instead of focusing on the actual element of intent to commit the acts which constitute a crime.
In this context of Comey’s description of the precedent he consulted, each of these formulations appear to share a concern more about the motive of the accused to accomplish some specific purpose by means of violating the law, rather than looking to the intent simply to violate a law. Again, intent is an element of a criminal offense, but motive – with very rare and particular exceptions – is not. Comey has let Clinton off because he did not find evidence of a motive sufficiently evil by his subjective standards, even though under the relevant statutes motive is not even an element of the crime that needs be proven at all. It is not necessary to unpack Clinton’s motives in order to convict her of the crime. Her professions of innocent motive does not obviate that she had the necessary intent to commit the acts that constitute several crimes.
There is evidence, of course, that Clinton did reveal her motive by saying to a confidant, “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.” This is evidence of her intent to make her own rules that would better protect her own inordinate interest in personal privacy rather than to follow the State Department rules for her communications to protect the public’s interests in security. Her publicly expressed motive for having a secret server was different. She told the public it was for her own “convenience” that she risked making accessible to foreign countries and hackers the nation’s secrets entrusted to her, along with “the personal.”
Clinton said it was for this interest of convenience that she wanted to use only one communications device, which is a somewhat less suspect motive than an unprecedented and unauthorized obsession with secrecy. It was Clinton’s decision, intent, to put both “the personal” and the public information equally at risk through her insecure server rather than risk some disclosure of “the personal” to the internal processes of the State Department. This judgment raises questions about whether she might be hiding from the public (although not from foreign hackers) information as important to her as the nation’s secrets.
An unnamed former NSA official familiar with the effort to get Clinton to obey the rules, now asks, “What did she not want put on a government system, where security people might see it?” She must have known that her own server was not only less secure than the government’s, it was also “less secure than,“ Google’s ordinary Gmail account, according to Comey.
The alleged motive of Clinton wanting to use only one mobile device for convenience appears to be a lie in any case, because the FBI found she actually had used more than one device. Apparently, Clinton bought an iPad in 2010, just one year into her tenure as Secretary of State, while continuing to use her BlackBerry. If Comey’s sworn testimony does disprove Clinton’s convenience motive, that she wanted to have the personal and the public communications all on one device, then as the former prosecutor Rep. Gowdy pointed out to Comey, lying about her motives would be highly probative evidence of her intent. Rep. Gowdy also contends “if it were convenience Director, she wouldn’t have waited two years to return the documents and she wouldn’t have deleted them four years after they were created” to which Comey made no coherent response.
A person lacking any intent to break a law would not need to invent motives for breaking the law, in order to disguise other more nefarious motives. A person with no intent lacks the state of mind to have a motive. Satisfying the legal element of intent only requires that Clinton acted deliberately, not that she acted with an particular subjectively evil motive.
Comey’s use of the term “willfully” in his “precedent” argument quoted above, as if it, like Comey’s subjective term “clear,” required some proof of motive, otherwise known as specific intent, is legally outdated. The Supreme Court long ago rejected the idea that, without more, the term “’willfully’ requires proof of any motive other than an intentional violation of a known legal duty.” United States v. Pomponio, 429 U.S. 10, 11-12, (1976). The sole question that “willfully” can raise is whether Clinton knew she had a legal duty not to “remove and retain” confidential or other national defense information, or otherwise mishandle the public’s information.
It is not necessary to parse Supreme Court decisions to understand the fundamental difference between motive and intent that Comey confused, since the distinction is embedded deeply in criminal law. A popular nineteenth century legal handbook, for example, stated quite clearly that “motive with which an act was done is immaterial in deciding the question of criminality. A crime can be committed with a good motive…” “Motive may … sometimes be shown in evidence; but it is merely as evidence of intent. Motive must not be confounded with intent.” May’s Criminal Law (Beale, ed., 2d Ed.: 1893) 18.
Comey, in violation of these black-letter law principles, precisely did “confound [motive] with intent.” In saying that Clinton lacked sufficient criminal intent according to the precedent he described, what he was actually saying was that the FBI did not have clear evidence of the kind of motive that he himself found sufficiently offensive, not what Congress required to prosecute her violation of the law. His argument, discussed further below, was that the unprecedented nature of the professed motives for a Secretary of State to commit the crime of systematically mishandling the nation’s secrets about foreign affairs that were entrusted to her was an excuse for exonerating the crime.
It was not Congress that created such a hierarchy of motives in the relevant statute, a hierarchy that would exonerate the unprecedented motives of corrupt elites but not the quotidian motives of those without power. In order to achieve the political aim of exonerating Clinton, it was her executive branch political allies, on delegation to the FBI Director, who reinterpreted the law to insert a motive element of the crime, where none exists.
Intent is Presumed
Even more important than Comey’s confusion of motive and the ordinary intent element of a crime is his related view of the amount of evidence needed for its proof. The fact of motive, being subjective, may be difficult to prove. The legal element of intent, once properly disentangled from motive, is nowhere near as difficult to prove as Comey wants us to believe. Again, it has been long established in criminal law that, “one [who] does an unlawful act … is by the law presumed to have intended to do it, and to have intended its ordinary and natural consequences.” Id. 19.
When Clinton arranged to have her public business conducted on an unauthorized private email server in her basement against the rules of the State Department, and therefore in violation of a number of federal laws – that act alone was sufficient to prove the intent element of the crime, the same as it would be for any mentally competent, sane, adult. The burden is on Clinton, not Comey, to prove by persuasive evidence that she peculiarly lacked the capacity to have the same intent any reasonable person would have in taking the actions she did. Comey therefore misled the public and Congress when he claimed that as a general rule prosecutors are concerned about “the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent.” Intent is ordinarily the least “especial” element of a crime.
Comey justified the fix by saying, “I don’t think our investigation established she was particularly sophisticated with respect to classified information.” A predecessor of Clinton as Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, lectured her employees that “if you are not professional about security, you are a failure.” Even if the kind of ignorance and failure in dealing with the nation’s secrets that apparently persuaded Comey about Yale Law School graduate Clinton’s motive were ever to be believed by a jury, or anyone other than Comey, ignorance of laws (not to mention Comey’s new standard of “lacking sophistication” about laws) concerning such matters is normally not a defense. When Comey was challenged by Rep. Farenthold on this point, Comey’s reply that “you must be aware of the generally wrongful nature of your conduct” did not exclude the case of Clinton. Comey acquitted her because of lack of very specific knowledge, not lack of general awareness that her server would contain classified information. Her ignorance defense would be even more difficult to sustain in view of signed documents where she acknowledged her understanding under oath, for example, that “classified information is marked or unmarked classified information.”
There are some obvious exceptions to the general rule that evidence of motive is unnecessary to proof of the crime, such as for hate crimes, civil rights violations, and treason where evil motive is an express element of the crime. There are also some less obvious exceptions where “Congress may decree otherwise” by expressly adding a “willful” element for criminalizing “not inevitably nefarious” regulatory offenses, such as involving taxation, or currency structuring. See Ratzlaf v. United States, 510 U.S. 135 (1994). Neither has Congress generally created such a motive element for the laws intended to protect the government’s interest in secure communications, nor are such laws normatively neutral regulatory measures of the kind that do require specific intent. Moreover the government has not treated these laws as requiring a nefarious specific intent, in cases like the Deutch case where the motive was similarly simply one of convenience.
One writer who offers legal credentials as authority for rendering political opinion has supported the FBI’s decision to exonerate Clinton. He claims it was justified by “a legal concept called mens rea. As a general rule, most crimes require prosecutors to prove that an individual acted with a particular state of mind before they can be convicted of a specific crime.” First, this statement is misleading to the extent it suggests that “most crimes” require specific (“particular”) intent, or motive. As mentioned above, very few crimes do. “As a general rule,” intent is presumed from the commission of the illegal act, and prosecutors have little concern about difficulties with proving intent.
Second, criminal laws do not necessarily require prosecutors to prove intent. For example, a Florida drug-law was held constitutional that provided “knowledge of the illicit nature of a controlled substance is not an element of any offense under this chapter. Lack of knowledge of the illicit nature of a controlled substance is an affirmative defense,” meaning that the defendant has to disprove the element of intent, with evidence that rebuts the common-sense presumption that people know what is in containers they control, whether it may be illegal drugs or classified information.
Third, this writer, like Comey, expressly limits his analysis to laws involving classified information, though other laws listed below were also implicated by Clinton’s secret server that go beyond just classified information to include all public records, or at least records involving national defense and foreign relations, without regard to their classification. On the assumption that only mishandling of classified information is prohibited, the mentioned writer thus draws the conclusion: “She had to have acted with knowledge that specific information was classified when it was transmitted. There is little, if any, evidence that Clinton possessed this state of mind.”
This statement, which reproduces the premise for Comey’s fix, can only be called nonsense in light of the description of the general presumption of intent from setting up insecure private communication that would inevitably include routing classified materials and materials about national defense and foreign relations through an insecure private server. No such specific information about any one particular communication was required by any law. Executive Order 13526, Sec. 1.4(d) (2009) defines “classified,” in part, as information relating to “foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States” which “could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security.” Almost any information that a Secretary of State would be handling could have such an impact, some more credibly than others, since the Executive Order further provides that any “foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.”
It is the job of a Secretary of State to deal with “foreign government information” for the nation on a daily basis. Comey was unable to disagree with Representative Chaffetz’ observation that Clinton would reasonably expect to be communicating classified information through her insecure server on a regular basis. Chaffetz pointed out, “She’s not the head of Fish and Wildlife.”
Unlike the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. § 793(a), which applies to anyone and not just public officials, those few laws that Comey selected as within the scope of the FBI inquiry regarding Clinton’s emails, for example § 793(f), do not require a specific motive that the mishandled information was “to be used . . . to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Under § 793(f) the material itself only needed to relate to national defense, which does not concern motive but rather describes the kind of information protected by that particular statute.
Neither statute mentions classification. The statute concerning classification is 18 U.S.C. § 1924 which applies when “an officer, …of the United States … by virtue of his office … becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information … knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.” This is the statue which reduces intent to gross negligence, presumably because the classification requirement is designed to place officials on notice of the material’s importance. Similarly, the only specific intent statute of this nature is one that applies to the general public which cannot be expected to know what officials can be expected to know.
Clinton did not have “authority” for removing her materials from the State Department communications system and did intend to retain them at an unauthorized location, which she did until she was forced to return them nearly two years after she left office. There is certainly circumstantial evidence of intent to retain and never return the material, had the existence of her server not been discovered. Asked about whether “keeping the servers at home … obviously is not in compliance with the department’s policies,” Comey answered “Yes.” In response to Rep. Buck’s proposition: “that [Clinton] knew that she didn’t have authority to have this server in her basement?” Comey replied: “Yes, that’s true.” Any reasonable person would have known that classified information would be “removed and retained” by Clinton’s secret server operation. Rep. Buck established this fact by asking: “as secretary of state, she also knew that she would be receiving classified information.” Comey replied, “Yes, in general.”
No Precedent, or Bad Precedent?
Representative Gowdy concluded his questioning by attacking the lack of precedent excuse that Comey gave for recommending against prosecution. Lack of precedent resulted from the fact that no prior Secretary of State had systematically removed their communications including the nation’s secrets from the State Department to their basement where secrets were insecure. Over their lifetime of scandals and corruption, such as the engine for global conflicts of interest labeled “The Clinton Foundation,” the Clinton’s atrophied ethics have always tended to break new ground. The sleaze that led to Bill Clinton’s historic impeachment was also unprecedented. The fact that there are no precedents for Clinton’s particular motive for secrecy resulted in her extraordinary conduct in pursuit of that secrecy.
Both Gowdy and Chaffetz turned the “no precedent” claim around against Comey, suggesting that instead of lack of precedent being an excuse not to prosecute, that Comey was himself making bad precedent by failing to prosecute on the ground of lack of intent. There is now no disincentive for Clinton or her staff or anyone else not to operate the same privatized communications system whether in the presidency or in any other high position of trust, provided they have the political clout to fix the FBI Director.
Artificially limited scope of investigation
Comey reported only three possible charges that could have been brought against Clinton or her aides: intentional or grossly negligent mishandling of “classified information,” both felonies under § 793(f); and knowingly removing and retaining classified information from appropriate systems, a misdemeanor under § 1924.
Comey indicated that his recommendation was limited to “laws governing the handling of classified information,” although the statute governing two of his possible charges, § 793(f,) does not mention classified information. He didn’t mention the various other laws implicated by Clinton’s mishandling of her emails, nor by her misstatements about it in various venues.
The FBI apparently did not record or take sworn testimony of its interview with Clinton, one of the most important interviews in the history of the FBI. So Comey’s subjective judgment that there was no evidence that she made false statements to the FBI, a charge the FBI can usually gin up in such a case, cannot be objectively tested because the interview was not recorded and there is no transcript of the interview. Rep. Mica requested the “302” account of the interview from Comey and this must be made public.
Comey admitted to the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee that the FBI did not investigate lies told to the Benghazi Committee under oath because it did not have a “referral” from Congress. Committee chair Chaffetz responded: “You’ll have one in the next few hours.” Will the FBI also need a referral to investigate the other possible crimes committed by Clinton with respect to her email practices? These would include possible violations of 18 U.S. Code § 641 (one who “disposes of any record … of any department or agency”); 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (1) (exceeding authorized access to computer to obtain government information “unauthorized [for] disclosure for reasons of national defense or foreign relations”); 18 U.S. Code § 1512(c) (one who “destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record … with the intent to impair … availability for use in an official proceeding,” such as a FOIA proceeding, perhaps?); 18 U.S. Code § 1519 (the same, evidence tampering, to “influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States,” like the Clinton Foundation charity conflicts of interest or bribery, perhaps?); 18 U.S. Code § 2232 (“Destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure”); and 18 U.S. Code § 2071 (punishing one who “takes and carries away any record … in any public office”).
The FBI’s “thorough” investigation, taking 3 years of workhours, did not cover Clinton’s associates who sent her classified information and who clearly did have specific intent about particular messages, as revealed when Rep. Massie inquired about “someone down the chain being investigated.” They also seemed to miss the State Department inspector general’s finding that Clinton “did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act” and were therefore punishable under § 2071. See n. 41 and 44 U.S. Code § 3105(2). This potential violation was not within the scope of the FBI’s inquiry. Cf. Lynch (1:30)(“not under purview”) with Comey (Q: “did Secretary Clinton in fact comply with the department’s policies or the Federal Records Act?” Comey: I don’t think so.”)
Another matter raised at the hearings that Comey didn’t pursue was that Clinton may have had on her insecure secret server the names of covert CIA officers, the disclosure of which is a felony under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Gross negligence
Bernie Sanders has been preoccupied with convincing his followers that the Democratic Party platform is relevant, by performing his new role in the Kabuki theatre of the corporate Democrats. He is too busy acting out a supposedly important public debate over the irrelevant platform to get involved in this real and personal “servergate” example of impunity for plutocrats. Instead of leading his followers in calling for fair application of the law to his FBI-certified “extremely careless” rival, he was planning to endorse her for the Democratic Party nomination that was stolen from him, without effectively demanding party rules that would prevent current and future such electiontheft, and/or any other valuable bargaining chip in return.
Therefore, with the newly docile Bernie silenced from any effective action, it was left to Green Party candidate Jill Stein to point out, along with many others, that — aside from the above analysis of Comey’s legalistic obfuscation of the true legal meaning of and limited proof necessary for the element of intent – there was one violation that could be easily understood and accepted by all. “All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation, specifically of Title 18 Section 793(f) of the federal penal code…. Director Comey said that Clinton was ‘extremely careless’ and ‘reckless’ in handling such information. Contrary to the implications of the FBI statement, the law does not require showing that Clinton intended to harm the United States, but that she acted with gross negligence.”
Section 793(f) punishes anyone “entrusted with … any … information, relating to the national defense, [who] through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.” No one disputes that the FBI’s “extremely careless” and “reckless” factual findings, which Comey described as common-sense terms that mean “real sloppiness,” precisely satisfy this statute’s reduced intent standard of “gross negligence.” Comey explained that he did not want to apply these literal terms of a statute that reduces the ordinary element of intent to this lower standard, He asserted some institutional disagreement with the statute, although it matches the precise factual findings of the FBI and the law remains on the books to be used to intimidate others.
This stand by Comey. if legally mistaken, would risk violating the constitutional obligation of the executive branch to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” (Art. II, Sec. 3.) Unless Comey can now produce a cogent constitutional argument that requiring lesser intent in this statute is a violation of due process, then his refusal to indict presents a separation of powers crisis. There is no governing precedent permitting the Justice Department not to enforce this law because it disagrees with it. Congress should either amend the statute to conform it to constitutional principles or alternatively insist that it be enforced on pain of impeachment for failure to execute a valid law so the Supreme Court can decide the issue. Leaving an invalid law on the books after Congress has been formally told that the Justice Department refuses to enforce it is itself of constitutional concern.
Beyond the response of requiring the Justice Department to produce a fully articulated argument for unconstitutionality of the “gross negligence” standard to Congress, one capable of convincing Congress to repeal the law, this gross negligence issue is something of a red herring from the real issue that Comey has dodged: the existence of objective evidence necessary to prove the element of intent, by his confusion of intent with motive. As Rep. Gowdy accurately pointed out, the problem is that Comey is “reading a specific intent element into a gross negligence statute, not even general intent.” In other words Comey is using the standard deception technique of setting up a false dichotomy between specific intent, which none of the statutes support, and gross negligence, which Sec. 1924 supports. Comey is thereby trying to ignore the fact that what Gowdy calls “general intent” or the ordinary intent element of most crimes can be easily proven by the evidence of Clinton’s conduct. Comey has in fact invented his own statute that would require not just specific intent of some important factor, but specific intent with respect to each separate instance of mishandling of classified material rather than general intent for a pattern and practice that any reasonable person would understand would result in mishandling of classified information. No reasonable legislator would write such a statute.
It is unlikely that Comey’s highly flawed legal explanation for the FBI’s institutionally inappropriate spiking of the prosecution of Hillary Clinton will escape the political verdict rendered by Trump and others that it was “rigged.” Whether the motive for rigging was more anti-Sanders or pro-Clinton, Trump will be its main beneficiary. He would almost certainly lose to Sanders, while it is likely he will now be conveniently pulling ahead of Clinton in the final polls prior to his next hurdle, the July 18 Republican Convention. As the Wall Street Journalwrote, “Washington rewards officials who are best at currying public favor, best at surviving, best at creating unfounded legends.” Such an official who has “spent a lifetime with one eye on politics and one eye on his résumé would have behaved exactly as Mr. Comey did.”
It is clear that by eliminating Sanders’ last best hope for nomination Comey has significantly helped elect his future boss, of either party. But Clinton’s history suggests that there is more to this deal yet to be uncovered.
Rob Hager is a public interest litigator who filed an amicus brief in the Montana sequel to Citizens United and has worked as an international consultant on anti-corruption policy and legislation.
The worst disservice Sanders has done to his supporters, other than to lead them on a wild goose chase for real change, is to virtually ignore his rival’s vaunted “experience.” He need not have mentioned Hillary Clinton’s Senate record, since there was nothing there; her stint as law-maker was merely intended to position her for a run for the presidency, according to the family plan. But there was a lot in her record as Secretary of State.
As she recounts in her memoir, she wanted a heftier “surge” in Afghanistan than Obama was prepared to order. Anyone paying attention knows that the entire military mission in that broken country has been a dismal failure producing blow-back on a mind-boggling scale, even as the Taliban has become stronger, and controls more territory, than at any time since its toppling in 2001-2002.
Hillary wanted to impose regime change on Syria in 2011, by stepping up assistance to armed groups whom (again) anyone paying attention knows are in cahoots with al-Nusra (which is to say, al-Qaeda). In an email dated Nov. 30, 2015, she states her reason: “The best way to help Israel…is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”
In her memoir she criticizes Obama for not doing more to oust the secular Assad regime. She has repeatedly stated during her campaign that she favors a no-fly zone over Syria, like the one she advocated for Libya. That means conflict with Russia, which is bombing sites in Syria, with the permission of its internationally recognized government, under what Russia’s leaders (and many rational people) consider to be terrorists’ control.
Sanders–sorry, I cannot call him “Bernie” anymore, since he has become precisely as avuncular as Dick Cheney—could have effectively attacked Hillary the Skjaldmær (Old Norse for “Shield-maiden,” referring to an often berserk warrior-woman) for her role in the destruction of Libya. But no! Always referring to her deferentially as “Secretary Clinton”–as though her actions in that role merit respect—he rarely alluded to her greatest crime at all. That’s unforgivable.
(Yes, in one debate he mentioned Libya in passing–timidly, and with no follow-up. While he repeatedly mentioned how The Secretary had voted for the Iraq War and he hadn’t, he hardly exuded moral outrage about that or any other Clinton decision. His campaign was all about her Wall Street ties and well-paid, secret talks, the transcripts of which he once wanted to see but has now apparently lost interest. It was never about “foreign policy,” which is supposedly her forte. He may call himself a “socialist,” but he’s no anti-imperialist. He has voted in favor of every “defense spending” bill, supported the NATO assault on Serbia in 1999, supported Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014, etc.)
He could have attacked Clinton savagely–with the savagery of mere matter-of-fact honesty–by citing those emails exchanged between Clinton and her vicious confidant and former adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter, in which the latter—under the subject line “bravo!”–congratulates her on engineering Obama’s agreement for the bombing of Libya. (On March 19, 2011, as the bombing of Libya began, Slaughter wrote: “I cannot imagine how exhausted you must be after this week, but I have NEVER been prouder of having worked for you. Turning [Obama] around on this is a major win for everything we have worked for.”
He could have quoted that email from Sidney Blumenthal, that Svengali figure who has long been Clinton’s unofficial mentor (along with Henry Kissinger and others): “No-fly! Brava! You did it!” (Brava, if you’re interested, is the feminine form of Bravo.)
He could have repeatedly used that damning clip that reveals Hillary’s joy at the grotesque murder of Muammar Gaddafi–who had become a friend of Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, and the CIA as of 2011–at the hands of Islamist thugs, who rammed a stick and knife up his anus on camera just to make it more humiliating. His ads could have started with some appropriately edited version of this:
And ended with this:
And left the people to draw their own conclusions.
He could have asked, “Why the hell did you appoint Dick Cheney aide Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Eurasia, and support and fund that coup in Ukraine in 2014 in your goddamn ambition to expand NATO?”
But no. He didn’t have it in him. And now he wants his youthful erstwhile followers to transfer their support to someone who is not only the embodiment of Wall Street, with all its blood-sucking and all its crookedness, but the personification of U.S. imperialism in an era when its depth of crisis has produced a state of perpetual war.
Savvy people in Syria and elsewhere surely understand what the Sanders endorsement means: Syria is the next Libya.
Hillary in the Oval Office, Binyamin Netanyahu at her side, will laugh as Assad gets her knife up his ass, chaos deepens, the draft is re-instated, and boys and girls–of all ethnicities, gay and straight together–march off to fight the Brava Wars drastically reducing youth unemployment and making legions more eligible for the GI Bill.
Even if Sanders doesn’t vote for the war (and why should there be a vote, after all, in this post-constitution era?), he will share responsibility.
Shame! And shame on any once “Bernie” supporter who follows him into his moral morass.
*****Feel the burn. The burn of the rigged system. Why be drawn into it—the object of Hillary’s praise, for switching so readily from him to her (for the sake of “unity”)?
What is there to unite with, but more corruption, exploitation, and wars based on lies?
The votes that matter are the votes on the street. Either Trump or Clinton will provoke mass upheaval. The key contribution of the Sanders campaign has been to lay bare for idealistic youth the magnitude of the rot in the system itself, while raising (however dishonestly) the prospect of “political revolution.”
It’s the hope Sanders has sold out. But yes, that’s what we need. Social, economic, and political revolution. Too bad he’s chosen the other side.
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
“I am persuaded no constitution was never before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809.
“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time.” –Herman Melville, 1850.
“I chant the new empire.” –Walt Whitman, 1860.
“Our frontiers today are on every continent.” –John F. Kennedy, 1960.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” –Frederick Douglas.
If you haven’t been hiding under a partisan rock for the past several years, you’re aware that President Barack Obama has given himself the sort-of legalish right to murder anyone anywhere with missiles from drones.
He’s not the only one who wants that power.
Yes, President Obama has claimed to have put restrictions on whom he’ll murder, but in no known case has he followed any of his self-imposed non-legal restrictions. Nowhere has someone been arrested instead of killed, while in many known cases people have been killed who could have easily been arrested. In no known case has someone been killed who was an “imminent and continuing threat to the United States,” or for that matter just plain imminent or just plain continuing. It’s not even clear how someone could be both an imminent and a continuing threat until you study up on how the Obama administration has redefined imminent to mean theoretically imaginable someday. And, of course, in numerous cases civilians have been killed in large numbers and people have been targeted without identifying who they are. Lying dead from U.S. drone strikes are men, women, children, non-Americans, and Americans, not a single one of them charged with a crime or their extradition sought.
Who else would like to be able to do this?
One answer is most nations on earth. We now read news stories from Syria of people dying from a drone strike, with the reporter unable to determine if the missile came from a U.S., U.K., Russian, or Iranian drone. Just wait. The skies will be filled if the trend is not reversed.
Another answer is Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, but not Jill Stein. Yes, those first three candidates have said they want this power.
Another answer, however, should be just as disturbing as those already mentioned. Military commanders around the world want the authority to murder people with drones without bothering to get approval from civilian officials back home. Here’s a fun quiz:
How many zones has the United States divided the globe into for purposes of complete military domination, and what are their names?
Answer: Six. They are Northcom, Southcom, Eucom, Pacom, Centcom, and Africom. (Jack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack were already taken.) In normal English they are: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Western Asia, and Africa.
Now here comes the hard question. Which of those zones has a new would-be commander who was just encouraged by a prominent Senator in an open Congressional hearing to acquire the authority to murder people in his zone without getting approval from the U.S. president?
Clue #1. It’s a zone with the empire’s headquarters not even located in the zone, so that this new commander speaks of killing people there as playing “an away game.”
Clue #2. It’s a poor zone that does not manufacture weapons but is saturated with weapons made in the United States plus France, Germany, the U.K., Russia, and China.
Clue #3. Many of the people in this zone have skin resembling people who are disproportionately targets of U.S. police department killings.
Did you get it right? That’s correct: Africom is being encouraged by Senator Lindsay Graham, who a short time back wanted to be president, to blow people up with missiles from flying robots without presidential approval.
Now here’s where the morality of war can wreak havoc with humanitarian imperialism. If a drone killing is not part of a war, then it looks like murder. And handing out licenses to murder to additional people looks like a worsening of the state of affairs in which just one person claims to hold such a license. But if drone killing is part of a war, and Captain Africom claims to be at war with Somalia, or with a group in Somalia, for example, well then, he wouldn’t need special permission to blow up a bunch of people with manned aircraft; so why should he need it when using robotic unmanned bombers?
The trouble is that saying the word “war” doesn’t have the moral or legal powers often imagined. No current U.S. war is legal under either the U.N. Charter or the Kellogg-Briand Pact. And the intuition that murdering people with a drone is wrong can’t be a useful one if murdering people with a piloted plane is right, and vice versa. We actually have to choose. We actually have to set aside the scale of the killing, the type of technology, the role of robots, and all other extraneous factors, and choose whether it’s acceptable, moral, legal, smart, or strategic to murder people or not.
If that seems too much of a mental strain, here’s an easier guide. Just imagine what your response would be if the ruler of Europe Command asked for the authority to murder at will people of his choosing along with anybody too close to them at the time.
His so-called “where we go from here speech” fell short, repeating warmed-over themes highlighted throughout his campaign – ones he largely failed to support during 30 years in public office.
His record shows a deplorable habit of saying one thing, then doing another, destroying his credibility. His populist rhetoric rings hollow.
Days earlier, he acknowledged Clinton becoming Democrat party presumptive standard bearer, saying “(i)t doesn’t appear that I’m going to be the nominee, so I’m not going to be determining the scope of the convention.”
Endorsing her is virtually certain. He’ll choose the time and place to announce it – betraying his loyal supporters, backing an unindicted war criminal/racketeer, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt his so-called crusade for change is phony.
“We have got to work tirelessly to make sure Donald Trump is not president,” he ranted – code language for supporting Clinton, the most recklessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history, WW III a coin flip if she’s elected, Sanders ignoring the major threat of our time. World peace hangs in the balance.
Throughout Obama’s tenure, Sanders supported his deplorable agenda, including endless wars of aggression, corporate favoritism and police state harshness – a Clinton administration likely to exceed the worst of his policies.
His issue isn’t stopping Trump. It’s loyalty to Democrat party bosses, supporting its presumptive presidential nominee, opposing any GOP one.
He sounded buffoon-like, saying “I’ll run around the entire country if I have to. It is hard to imagine a man who has such limited capabilities becoming president.”
He’s a billionaire businessman. His disturbing rhetoric aside, no public record exists to judge him. Clinton’s agenda as me-first lady, US senator and secretary of state is too deplorably lawless to tolerate – a rage for power and super-wealth, representing what Sanders claims to oppose.
Ignore Sanders’ rhetoric. Examine his House and Senate voting record – on the wrong side of major issues time and again, notably supporting imperial lawlessness.
Maintaining the myth of his so-called “political revolution” persists, smoke and mirrors without substance, rhetoric without follow-through.
America needs real anti-war, populist champions. Duopoly power governance excludes them, Sanders a loyal soldier, supporting what demands committed resistance.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Clinton is the presumptive Democrat party nominee. She’ll face Trump in November.
On Thursday night from his Burlington, VT home base, Sanders addressed supporters via livestream, maintaining the myth of his “political revolution,” pretending his campaign continues.
His address was warmed-over stump mumbo jumbo previously delivered numerous times before – empty rhetoric, belying his business as usual voting record, the true measure of the man, the only thing that counts.
All politicians lie. Ignore what they say. Follow only what they do. Sanders’ political history isn’t pretty. It speaks for itself.
Due diligence checking exposes him as just another dirty politician, a self-serving opportunist like all the rest with rare exceptions – none since Jack Kennedy becoming presidential material.
Sanders is no JFK, no anti-war activist, no peace, equity and justice champion, no social democrat as he claims – for sure no transformational revolutionary advocate.
Saying “the political revolution must continue” ignored its nonexistence. Dirty business as usual continues unchanged no matter who succeeds Obama.
Sanders saying he’s “very optimistic about the future of our country” belies its deplorable state – a neocon infested rogue state at war with humanity, risking WW III.
Throughout his campaign, he never once explained its danger, imperial madness, the risk of US-initiated nuclear war, targeting Russia and/or China, wrongfully blaming them for America’s high crimes against peace.
He lied, saying his “campaign has never been about any single candidate… always about transforming America.”
He did nothing to achieve it throughout 30 years in public office, failing to follow through when his vote mattered most, virtually always yielding to powerful entrenched interests – suppressing his deplorable record in addressing followers on the stump, again on Thursday night.
He ignored US imperial wars, not a word said about them, naked aggression against nonbelligerent countries, raping one after another, responsible for millions of deaths, chaos and human misery on an unimaginable scale.
He “look(s) forward to working with secretary Clinton,” he said, his endorsement certain, an unindicted war criminal/racketeer belonging in prison, not high office.
Claiming his intention “to transform the Democratic (sic) party” ignored its hardwired ruthlessness too debauched to fix – exclusively serving wealth, power and privilege.
Republicans operate the same way, both parties in lockstep on major issues mattering most, notably supporting endless imperial wars, corporate empowerment and harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers.
Sanders is part of the problem, not the solution. He’ll never admit it. I just did!
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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