The day before Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed that the FBI—along with “Russian intelligence”—had “rigged the election.” Election denialism is perfectly acceptable behavior on the left. Krugman blamed the “rigged election” on “people within the F.B.I.” who, he asserted, “clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences,” by which he meant the investigation into Clinton’s email server. One can imagine the tenor of Krugman’s rhetoric if the investigation had been launched by the administration of Mitt Romney or George W. Bush or signed off on by AG Robert Bork.
Is it still the case that investigating a candidate for wrongdoing is “rigging” an election? Yesterday, Merrick Garland’s DOJ raided the home of a former president, and likely future presidential candidate, in a case regarding “potential mishandling of classified documents,” according to The Washington Post. Is that really it? We have long been told that “mishandling of classified documents” isn’t a serious crime.
When Clinton set up a secret private server to circumvent transparency, likely to hide favor-trading related to her now-obsolete corrupt foundation, it was a potential felony. In that illegal server, the FBI would find 100 emails containing classified information, 65 marked “Secret,” 22 marked “Top Secret,” and over 2,000 emails that would be retroactively marked classified. Many felonies. Unlike Trump, who had the power to declassify any document he wished, Hillary could not. And as numerous experts pointed out, the chances that those documents were intercepted by foreign powers were quite high. No one’s home was raided by the FBI.
