Exculpatory Contortions and Protecting Classified Data

There is a truism captured by novelist John D. MacDonald that goes like this: "The thing you find the hardest to do is the thing you should do." By that yardstick, FBI Director James Comey fell short in delivering his official findings in the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's cavalier, inveterate mishandling of classified information. Despite his cultivated reputation for brains, nuance, and integrity, coupled with apologist theorizing to the effect that Mr. Comey was animated by noble aims to defend the reputation of the FBI while preventing his agency and himself from inviting scrutiny as the first ever to upend an entire presidential campaign by advocating an indictment, the FBI Director took the easy way out.

To do the hardest thing would have been to do what Comey had all along professed to hold paramount: objective reliance on facts and comprehensive investigation. Instead, after cataloguing security violation after serial security violation perpetrated brazenly by Mrs. Clinton and her minions from the outset of her taking the helm of the State Department, Mr. Comey launched into paralogisms and exculpatory contortions to opine that all the evidence his myrmidons had uncovered would somehow not rise to the level of supporting a recommendation to prosecute. In doing so, he abandoned the role of objective investigator to assume the mantle of prosecutor and grand jury.

On the one hand, Comey professed inability to see intent which he and he alone felt would be a necessary prerequisite to pursue a prosecution on the basis of gross negligence. Never mind that gross negligence exists as a prosecutable category precisely in order to punish serious misconduct where not meaning to do any harm to the victim is no excuse for the inevitable harm that follows. Just as the driver playing video games instead of watching the road did not "mean" to plow into a family out for a Sunday drive in an opposing lane of traffic, this does not absolve him of blame when he is the one crossing into the wrong lane and causing their demise. So should it be that an official, however imperious, pampered, and highly placed, should not be let off the hook for starting from the outset to do all her official government business with the most sensitive of classified material via a means expressly prohibited for no discernible reason other than to hide records from public disclosure and bypass the inconvenience of having to follow security rules that come as a condition of gaining access to the most sensitive national security information. As Comey's initial proclamation of investigative findings demonstrated, Mrs. Clinton and her enabling minions repeatedly violated basic security rules -- i.e. the law -- from the outset of her tenure as a cabinet secretary. Then they lied about it.

At the same time as Comey threw aside his own findings to reach an unsupported conclusion of carelessness vs. criminality, he acknowledged that anyone else taking such cavalier liberties with national security would face serious consequences. Indeed they would and have. Ask David Petraeus, John Deutsch, and any number of others whose cases have recently surfaced in media reports highlighting this double standard: one set of security rules and sanctions for elites occupying a Clintonian perch, and another see for mere mortals.

For those of us whose formative years involved using, generating, and protecting classified information at the special access or codeword-protected level akin to what Mrs. Clinton alleged never to have mishandled, the excuses just don't wash. Mrs. Clinton did what she did without authorization and without suffering any consequence. She exposed the nation's secrets to hostile intelligence for nothing more than a combination of personal convenience and a desire to spare herself future scrutiny by fellow citizens exercising their rights to Freedom of Information Act requests or to archivists probing official records for future historical studies of American government in action. To let her off the hook the way Comey did was, in a single stroke, to vaporize his much touted reputation as a straight shooter and man of integrity.

Integrity means doing what isn't easy and accepting the consequences. Sadly, this is a lesson Mr. Comey chooses to spare himself.

Perhaps, then, another John D. MacDonald passage would be instructive for him:

"INTEGRITY ... is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.

"Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better.

"I can bend my rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them."

-- Nick Catrantzos