McCarthy compares and contrasts

In his weekly NRO column Andrew McCarthy compares and contrasts the Obama administration’s investigation of the Hillary Clinton email matter under former FBI Director James Comey with the metastasizing collusion investigation under the auspices of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Reviewing the course of the Mueller investigation so far, my friend Mr. McCarthy catches up and links to newsworthy items we haven’t gotten around to. One such item is the earliest known draft of Comey’s absolution of Clinton; another such is the compelled testimony of one of Manafort’s attorneys against Manafort before the grand jury.

Here is something that we have touched on:

The [Obama] Justice Department would not even issue grand-jury subpoenas to compel the production of physical evidence — such as the private laptop computers used by Clinton’s subordinates to store her emails (a number of which contained classified information). Instead, investigators politely asked lawyers to turn over pertinent items, and they made extraordinary agreements to restrict the information they would be permitted to look at (such as an agreement that prevented agents from looking at information on the Mills and Samuelson computers during the time frame when attempts to obstruct congressional investigations may have occurred).

It is worth noting that, very similarly, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI did not seize the servers of the Democratic National Committee, even though much of the collusion case hinges on the conclusion that these servers were hacked by Russian operatives. Instead, the FBI politely requested that the servers be surrendered so the Bureau’s own renowned forensic investigators could examine them. When the DNC refused, the Justice Department did not issue a subpoena or obtain a search warrant; to the contrary, the FBI and DOJ agreed to accept the findings of CrowdStrike, a private investigative firm retained by the DNC’s (and the Clinton campaign’s) attorneys.

If you seek to understand the deep meaning of the Mueller investigation, the whole thing is must reading. It takes a look back in anger at the phoniness of the Clinton investigation. It also serves as a preview of coming attractions with respect to which we will look back in anger before too long.

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