An honest criticism of Paul Thompson's email scandal thesis.

[paulthompson]

44. He?

By "he," I take it you mean Comey?

I think it would be great if both Comey and Lynch pledge to resign after their decisions on this, so there could be no possiblity of them making decisions to further or extend their careers. But fat chance of that happening.

A quid pro quo is just one thing that could come out of this. It's a matter of how much of a stickler Comey wants to be. I have no doubt there are illegal things that have been done that he could charge her for re: the classification of emails. But in other cases, people have been willing to let a certain amount of mishandling of classification info slide. The simple fact is that some areas of the law are strictly enforced and others are not. For instance, people abuse the rules about religious nonprofits and hardly anyone ever gets punished, because the government doesn't want to be seen as prosecuting religion.

I believe he also would have a slam dunk convincting her for obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, since we already know of three instances where more of her work emails came out that she didn't turn over, and media reports indicate there's more of that coming. Bloomberg News reported the FBI has recovered Clinton's 31,000 deleted emails and were sorting them into work and non-work, which suggests a lot of work ones got deleted. But again, sometimes people get prosecuted on that, and sometimes they don't.

Prosecutors have a lot of leeway over what they decide to do. It's been noted that in previous cases Comey has been a real stickler. For instance, he prosecuted one financial fraud case based on one line in one email. The truth is, nobody knows what he's going to do.