Hillary Clinton Is Back in the Spotlight as Senate Judiciary Committee Takes Up Two Hot Potato Investigations

Via Politico, so this may or may not be true:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is launching a wide-ranging probe into the circumstances behind James Comey’s firing as FBI director, as well as any attempts to influence FBI investigations under the Obama administration.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), laid out his plan in a letter made public Wednesday in response to requests from Democrats to investigate potential obstruction of justice surrounding Comey’s dismissal by President Donald Trump last month.

“The Judiciary Committee has an obligation to fully investigate any alleged improper partisan interference in law enforcement investigations,” Grassley wrote to his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. “It is my view that fully investigating the facts, circumstances, and rationale for Mr. Comey’s removal will provide us the opportunity to do that on a cooperative, bipartisan basis.”

In the letter, Grassley also stressed that the committee is obligated to look into the Justice Department’s handling last year of the probe surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail use, citing Comey’s testimony last week that he was concerned DOJ “could not credibly complete the investigation and decline prosecution without grievous damage to the American people’s confidence in the justice system.”

The unimportant investigation is the Loretta Lynch one. The worst that can happen is that they say she is a really bad person and this is not a news flash. She is out of office. Any impropriety she committed in regards to the Hillary Clinton investigation is rendered meaningless by the fact that she is no longer a federal employee, and, therefore, can’t be fired, and that Comey commandeered the Hillary Clinton email investigation thereby protecting Lynch from any possible criminal action, whatever that might be. The only meaningful item in this investigation is evaluating the alleged email that allegedly set Comey off. Because he was either a dunderhead and sucked in by a forgery or he was one of the most disloyal subordinates ever (see this post).

We might all feel happier if she were revealed for the lying, scheming poltroon that she was as Attorney General but in the big scheme of things, as Democrats long ago tossed away even a vestigial sense of shame, it is meaningless. The next Democrat president will probably put her on the Supreme Court or on the dollar bill. I suspect the real reason for the Lynch investigation is because Grassley doesn’t want to be seen as piling on Trump and this investigation is one-of-ours-and-one-of-theirs.

The interesting investigation is the one into Comey’s firing. The first sentence in Comey’s farewell letter to the FBI is:

I have long believed that a President can fire an FBI Director for any reason, or for no reason at all.

So the Judiciary investigation is going to be focused on whether Trump improperly fired a subordinate he was legally entitled to fire in order to stymie an investigation that seems to be the Royale with Cheese of Nothingburgers. This is something which several prosecutors and law professors have said is not illegal even if Flynn is as guilty as hell.

Why would the Senate Judiciary Committee set out to meddle in an investigation that the Washington Post claims is being carried out by the special counsel? Because if Mueller is investigating “obstruction,” unless he rolls the Comey incident into the mix there is not only no there there, there is no there there there there there there there there there there there there.

Let’s look at something else another member of the Judiciary Committee said just a week ago, right after Comey’s testimony:

Transcript via The Hill:

“Unless Mueller is a complete idiot, which he is not, he’s concluded there’s no obstruction of justice case because if he had concluded otherwise, Comey wouldn’t be testifying,” Graham said on “CBS This Morning.”

“You wouldn’t let his chief and only witness go through this process if you believe you really had a case to prosecute. And Mr. Mueller is a good prosecutor,” the Republican senator added.
…
“Nobody in their right mind who believed they had a case, would take their star witness and allow them to go before the nation and 20 senators,” Graham argued. “You just don’t do it that way. So he’s concluded, rightly, there’s no obstruction of justice here. To think otherwise really is silly.”

And Mueller cleared Comey’s prepared remarks and, presumably, discussed the parameters of what he could talk about before Comey’s public testimony. This all bolsters what Graham is saying, that Comey’s testimony, at least as it relates to the “can you let it go” and his subsequent firing, isn’t of much interest to Mueller.

In a weird sort of way, this all works with the multiple anonymous sources in today’s Washington Post revelation that indicated the focus of the alleged obstruction investigation was on the intelligence community which, in itself, is strange as the intelligence community has no power to investigate anything in the United States.

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