{"id":277405,"date":"2016-11-05T05:02:13","date_gmt":"2016-11-05T04:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=277405"},"modified":"2016-11-05T05:17:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-05T04:17:18","slug":"fbi-cant-actually-investigate-candidate-hillary-clinton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/fbi-cant-actually-investigate-candidate-hillary-clinton\/","title":{"rendered":"The FBI Can’t Actually Investigate a Candidate Such as Hillary Clinton."},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The power above the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the U.S. Attorney General, and, above that person, the U.S. President.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s whom the FBI actually serves \u2014 not the U.S. public.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the reason why the FBI is having such internal tensions and dissensions over the investigation of Hillary Clinton: Not only is she the current President\u2019s ardently preferred and designated successor<\/span><\/a> \u2014 and overwhelmingly supported also by America\u2019s artistocracy and endorsed by the aristocracy\u2019s press \u2014 but the top leadership of the FBI have terms-in-office that (unlike, for example, the term of the U.S. Attorney General) do not end with the installation of the next President; and these people will therefore be serving, quite possibly, the very same person whom they are now \u2018investigating\u2019. This is the reason why James Comey, the FBI\u2019s Director, let Clinton totally off the hook on July 5th, when he declined to present the case to a grand jury: he and the rest of the FBI\u2019s top management violated three basic principles<\/span><\/a> of trying white-collar-crime cases when a prosecutor is serious about wanting to prosecute and obtain a conviction against a person \u2014 he (and they) wanted to keep their jobs, not be fighting their boss and their likely future<\/i> boss.<\/span><\/p>\n

If America were an authentic democracy, there would be a way for the FBI to serve the public even when the U.S. President doesn\u2019t want it to. According to the only scientific study that has ever been done of the matter, the U.S. federal government is a dictatorship not a democracy. This was reluctantly reported by the researchers, whose own careers are dependent upon the aristocracy which they were finding actually controls that government. They found that the U.S., at the federal level, is not a democracy but an \u201coligarchy,\u201d by which the researchers were referring to an \u201ceconomic elite,\u201d America\u2019s billionaires and centi-millionaires who control America\u2019s international corporations and the \u2018charities\u2019 (such as think tanks) that are dependent upon them \u2014 including many that directly affect U.S. politics, such as the think tanks or other way-stations for former U.S. government employees to become hired by private firms.<\/span><\/p>\n

The authors of the only empirical scientific research-study that has been done of whether the United States is a democracy<\/span><\/a>, or instead a dictatorship, excluded the very term \u201caristocracy\u201d (or \u201ccollective dictatorship\u201d such as an \u201ceconomic elite\u201d is if that \u201celite\u201d actually is in control of the given nation\u2019s government) from their article. They did this so as for the meaning not to be clear to the U.S. public. In any country in the modern world where an aristocracy exists, aristocrats nowadays try to hide<\/i> their power, not (like in former eras) display<\/i> their power by crowns and other public symbols of \u2018the nobility\u2019. The closest the study\u2019s authors came to using that term, \u201caristocracy,\u201d was their only<\/i> sentence that employed the pejoritave term for an aristocracy, \u201coligarchy.\u201d That obscure lone sentence was: \u201cJeffrey\u00a0Winters has posited a comparative theory of \u2018Oligarchy,’\u00a0in which the wealthiest citizens\u00a0\u2014\u00a0even in a ‘civil oligarchy’\u00a0like the United States\u00a0\u2014\u00a0dominate policy concerning crucial\u00a0issues of wealth and income protection.11″<\/span><\/p>\n

Their 11th footnote made clear that they were referring here to the book\u00a0Oligarchy<\/i><\/span><\/a>, by Jeffrey A. Winters, which stated the \u2018theory\u2019 that this article had actually just confirmed in the American case. Their article mentioned the book \u2014 and the \u201coligarchy\u201d \u2014 only in this one footnote, so that the authors of the article (whose own careers are dependent upon America\u2019s \u2018oligarchs\u2019) won’t be able to be accused by oligarchs (or in any way thought by their own financial benefactors \u2014 America\u2019s aristocrats) to have called<\/i> the U.S. an \u201coligarchy\u201d (a collective dictatorship by the few super-rich and their agents).\u00a0To apply either term \u2014 \u201caristocracy\u201d or \u201coligarchy\u201d \u2014 to one\u2019s own country, is now viewed as negative, an insult to the country\u2019s controlling elite. Neither scholars nor scholarly publishers wish to insult the people who ultimately are their top funders.<\/span><\/p>\n

This article was written in the standard unnecessarily obscurantist style of social \u2018scientists\u2019 who want to be comprehensible only to their peers and not to the general public. Doing it this way is safer for them, because it makes extremely unlikely that their own benefactors would retaliate, against them or else against the institutions that hire them, by withdrawing their continued financial and promotional support (such as by no longer having them invited onto CNN as an \u201cexpert\u201d). (This type of fear prevents theory in the social \u2018sciences\u2019 from being strictly based upon the given field\u2019s empirical findings: it\u2019s not authentically scientific. The physical sciences are far less corrupt, far more scientific. The biological sciences are in-between.) <\/span><\/p>\n

One particular reason why the authors never called the people who control the U.S. government an \u201caristocracy,\u201d is that everyone knows that the Founders of the U.S. were opposed to<\/i>, and were engaged in overthrowing, the existing aristocracy, which happened to be British, and that they even banned forever in the U.S. the use of aristocratic titles, such as \u201cLord\u201d or \u201cSir.\u201d Consequently, within the U.S., the only term that the aristocrats consider acceptable to refer to aristocrats, is \u201coligarchs,\u201d which always refers only to aristocrats in foreign countries<\/i>, and so is considered safe by the aristocrats\u2019 writers (including scholars and political pundits) to use. <\/span><\/p>\n

Everyone knows: in accord with the clear intention of America\u2019s Founders<\/span><\/a>, the U.S. should eliminate from its citizenry any aristocrat (any self-enclosed and legally immune group that holds power over the government), but Americans naturally accept the existence of \u201coligarchs\u201d in other<\/i> countries (and \u201cgood-riddance to them there\u201d), typically the ones in countries U.S. foreign policy opposes and often overthrows by means of coup or outright military invasion (any form of conquest, such as in 2003 Iraq, or 2011 Libya). It\u2019s fine to refer to other<\/i> countries\u2019 aristocracies as \u2018oligarchies\u2019, because any such foreign aristocracy can therefore be declared to be bad and \u2018deserving\u2019 of overthrow. Thus, any aristocracy that is opposed to America\u2019s aristocracy (especially one that\u2019s opposed to being controlled by the U.S. aristocracy), and which wants to be controlling instead their own independent<\/i> nation, can acceptably be overthrown by coup (such as Ukraine 2014<\/span><\/a> was) or invasion (such as Libya 2011<\/span><\/a> was). Thus, calling a foreign aristocracy an \u201coligarchy\u201d is supportive of, not oppposed to, the U.S. aristocracy \u2014 and, so, \u201coligarchy\u201d is the term the authors used (on that one occasion, and they never used the prohibited term \u201caristocracy\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, despite the cultural ban on describing the U.S. as an \u201caristocracy,\u201d the authors were \u2014 as obscurely as they were able \u2014 proving that the U.S. is<\/i> an aristocracy, no authentic democracy at all. Or, again, as they said it in their least-obscurantist phrasing of it:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate\u00a0the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans \u2014 though useful, and\u00a0the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases \u2014 is probably less consistent with the relevant\u00a0preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups.\u00a0Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of\u00a0elites upon public policy may be still greater.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Greater\u2019 than what? They didn\u2019t say. That\u2019s because what they were saying (as obscurely as possible) is that it\u2019s probably \u2018greater\u2019 than is shown in the data that was publicly available to them, and upon which data their clear finding is that the U.S. is an aristocracy, no democracy at all. Or, as they also put it: “Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis.\u201d But, actually, \u201cEconomic Elite Domination theories\u201d (virtually all of which come down to positing an aristocracy that consists of the billionaires \u2014 and centi-millionaires \u2014 and their corporations, and their think tanks, and their lobbyists, etc.) did phenomenally<\/i> well, in their findings, not just \u2018rather well\u2019 \u2014 they simply can\u2019t safely say<\/i> this. Saying it is samizdat, in the U.S. dictatorship.<\/span><\/p>\n

They were allowed to prove it, but not<\/i> to say it. So, that\u2019s what they did. They didn\u2019t want to \u201cupset the applecart\u201d from which they themselves are feeding.<\/span><\/p>\n

The simplest (but no less accurate) way of stating their finding is: the U.S., at least during the period the researchers probed, which was 1981-2002, was an aristocracy, no democracy at all. The U.S., in other words, was (even prior<\/i> to the infamous Citizens United<\/i> Supreme Court decision, which is making the aristocracy even more concentrated among even fewer people) a country of men (and women \u2014 that\u2019s to say, of individuals<\/i>) not of laws; it\u2019s a dictatorship, in short; it is not<\/i> a country \u201cof laws, not of men\u201d<\/span><\/a>. America\u2019s Founders have finally lost. The country has been taken over by an aristocracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

And one of those \u201cmen\u201d now, is actually Hillary Clinton, even though she is no longer officially holding governmental power. They know she soon might be. That\u2019s why, the FBI cannot really, and seriously<\/i>, investigate her.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not for legal<\/i> reasons at all. It\u2019s because of whom she is. In fact, purely on the basis of U.S. laws, she clearly ought to be in prison<\/span><\/a>. Any honest lawyer, inside or outside the FBI, has long known this, because the actual<\/i> case against her is \u2018slam-dunk\u2019<\/span><\/a>, even though the FBI has refused to investigate it and has limited its \u2018investigation\u2019 only to peripheral \u2018national security\u2019 issues. (The #2 person at FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, right below Director James Comey, specified this limitation to his \u2018investigators\u2019. They simply weren\u2019t allowed to investigate her, except on the hardest-to-prove crimes that she probably but not definitely<\/i> did also do. The slam-dunks were just off-limits to them. McCabe\u2019s wife\u2019s political campaign had received $675,000 from the PAC of Terry McAuliffe<\/span><\/a>, a close friend of the Clintons, who chaired Hillary\u2019s 2008 Presidential campaign. And, even on the harder-to-prove matters, which FBI Director Comey declined on July 5th to pursue, they stood a strong chance of winning, if only Comey hadn\u2019t prevented their moving forward to try \u2014 but those<\/i> issues are tangential to the basic<\/i> case against her, anyway.) <\/span><\/p>\n

There are at least six federal criminal laws which accurately and unquestionably describe even what Ms. Clinton has now publicly admitted having done by her privatized email system, and intent isn\u2019t even mentioned in most of them nor necessary in order for her to be convicted \u2014 the actions themselves<\/i> convict her, and the only relevance that intent<\/i> might have, regarding any of these laws, would be in determining how long her prison sentence would be.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have already presented <\/b>the texts of these six laws<\/b><\/span><\/a> (and you can see the sentences for each one, right there), and any reader can easily recognize that each one of them describes, unambiguously without any doubt, what she now admits<\/i> having done.<\/b> Most of these crimes don\u2019t require any intent in order to convict (and the ones that do require intent are only \u201cknowingly \u2026 conceals,\u201d or else \u201cwith the intent to impair the object\u2019s \u2026 use in an official proceeding,\u201d both of which \u201cintents\u201d would be easy to prove on the basis of what has already been made public \u2014 but others of these laws don\u2019t require even that); and none of them requires any classified information to have been involved, at all<\/i>. It\u2019s just not an issue in these laws. Thus, conviction under them is far easier. If a prosecutor is really seeking to convict someone, he\u2019ll be aiming to get indictments on the easiest-to-prove charges, first. That also presents for the prosecutor the strongest position in the event of an eventual plea-bargain. As Alan Dershowitz said<\/span><\/a>, commenting on one famous prosecution: \u201cThey\u00a0also wanted a slam-dunk case. They wanted the strongest possible case.\u201d Comey simply didn\u2019t; he wanted the hardest<\/i>-to-convict case. His presentation was a brazen hoax. That\u2019s all.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the real scandal, and nobody (other than I) has been writing about it as what it is \u2014 a hoax. But what it shows is that maybe the only way that Clinton will be able to avoid going to prison is by her going to the White House. Either she gets a term in the White House, or else she gets a (much longer) term in prison \u2014 or else our government is so thoroughly corrupt that she remains free as a private citizen and still above the law, even though not<\/i> serving as a federal official.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if she is convicted only<\/i> on these six slam-dunk statutes (and on none other, including not<\/i> on the ones that Comey was referring to when he said on July 5th<\/span><\/a> that, \u201cAlthough there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case\u201d), she could be sentenced to a maximum of 73 years in prison (73 = 5 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 3 + 10 + 10). Adding on others she might also have committed (such as the ones that Comey was referring to, all of which pertain only to the handling of classified information), would mean that her term in prison might be lengthier still, but what\u2019s important in the email case isn\u2019t that; it\u2019s to convict her on, essentially, theft and\/or destruction of U.S. government documents by means of transferring them into her private email and\/or smashing hard drives. No one, not even a U.S. federal official, can legally<\/i> do that, and those six laws are specifically against it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Motive is important in Ms. Clinton\u2019s email case, because motive tells us why she was trying to hide from historians and from the public her operations as the U.S. Secretary of State: was it because she didn\u2019t want them to know that she was selling to the Sauds and her other friends the U.S. State Department\u2019s policies in return for their million-dollar-plus donations to the Clinton Foundation<\/span><\/a>, and maybe even selling to them (and\/or their cronies) U.S. government contracts, or why? However, those are questions regarding other crimes that she might have been perpetrating while in public office, not the crimes of her privatized email operation itself;<\/i> and those other crimes (whatever they might have been) would have been explored only after an indictment on the slam-dunks, and for further possible prosecutions, if President Obama\u2019s people were serious about investigating her. They weren\u2019t. Clearly, this is selective \u2018justice\u2019. That\u2019s the type of \u2018justice\u2019 an aristocracy imposes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why, then, did Comey finally switch to re-open the Clinton case? It wasn\u2019t merely the discovery of some of her previously unknown emails on the computer of Anthony Wiener, husband to Hillary\u2019s closest aide Huma Abedin. As Politico on October 28th reported<\/span><\/a>, \u201cAnother former Justice official said Comey’s letter [announcing the re-opening of Hillary\u2019s case] could be part of an effort on his\u00a0part to quiet internal FBI critics who viewed him as burying the Clinton probe for\u00a0political reasons.\u00a0\u2018He\u2019s come under a lot of criticism from his own people for how he\u2019s handled this.\u00a0He\u2019s trying to gain back some of their respect,\u2019 former Justice Department\u00a0spokeswoman Emily Pierce said. \u2018His ability to do what he does largely depends\u00a0on the respect within his own ranks.\u2019\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Joachim Hagopian at Global Research headlined on October 30th, \u201cThe Real Reasons Why FBI Director James Comey Reopened the Hillary Email Investigation\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and reported:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFormer federal attorney for the District of Columbia\u00a0Joe diGenova\u00a0spelled it all out in a\u00a0WMAL radio interview\u00a0last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. \u2026 Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday\u2019s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key\u00a0<\/i>Clinton aides<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly\u00a0<\/i>granted immunity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: Comey was between a rock (the resignation-letters piling up on his desk from subordinates who felt that no person should be above the law) and a hard place (his ability to stay on at the FBI and not have a scandal against himself bleed out to the public from down below). The U.S. wasn\u2019t yet that kind of dictatorship \u2014 one which could withstand such a public disclosure. In order for it to become one, the aristocracy\u2019s control would have needed to be even stronger than it yet is.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also on the 30th, Ed Klein in Britain\u2019s Dail Mail<\/i> bannered<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

EXCLUSIVE: Resignation letters piling up from disaffected FBI agents, his wife urging him to admit he was wrong: Why Director Comey jumped at the chance to reopen Hillary investigation<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

James Comey revived the investigation of Clinton’s email server as he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents, sources say<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim <\/i>[Comey] announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So, does this now mean that, finally, the FBI will bring before a grand jury the evidence that Hillary Clinton blatantly violated those six federal criminal laws against stealing and\/or trying to destroy federal documents?<\/span><\/p>\n

There has never \u2014 at least since 1981 \u2014 been so severe a test of the extent to which this nation is (as those researchers found it to have unquestionably been between 1981 and 2002) an \u201coligarchy.\u201d However, a serious criminal prosecution of Ms. Clinton would potentially start an unwinding of this dictatorship. <\/span><\/p>\n

The present writer will make no prediction. However, obviously, the results of the election on November 8th will certainly have an enormous impact upon the outcome. Since I think that anyone but a complete fool can recognize this much, I\u2019m confident enough to assert it \u2014 a conditional about the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org The power above the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the U.S. Attorney General, and, above that person, the U.S. President. That\u2019s whom the FBI actually serves \u2014 not the U.S. public. This is the reason why the FBI is having such internal tensions and dissensions over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":277219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[30,96,41,698,753,804,524,754,6257,523,49,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-277405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"tag-big-brother","9":"tag-cover-up","10":"tag-fbi","11":"tag-hillary-clinton","12":"tag-police-state","13":"tag-politics-2","14":"tag-russia","15":"tag-syria","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-ukraine","18":"tag-usa-news","19":"tag-white-house","20":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}