OLBERMANN SUGGESTS THAT COMEY AND CHAFFETZ CONSPIRED

Keith Olbermann called for the immediate resignation of both FBI Director James Comey and Rep. Jason Chaffetz for their handling of the latest Hillary Clinton email revelations.

A furious Olbermann said Comey and Chaffetz — who had rescinded his endorsement of Donald Trump over a hot mic recording that revealed him boasting of sexual assaulting women — appear to have colluded on the release of the statement Friday afternoon for partisan political gain.

“Why did (Chaffetz) late Wednesday night suddenly pivot back to supporting Trump?” Olberman said. “Why did he reverse 36 hours before Comey’s historically slovenly, craven note that left Pandora’s box unjustly unlocked so that a sniveling little coward like Chaffetz could peek inside (and) then deliberately exaggerate what he saw and fuel Donald Trump’s latest delusion rage.”

Olbermann said Chaffetz put words in Comey’s mouth by saying the investigation, which had never been officially closed, had been reopened, although other FBI agents have said Clinton did not send or receive the newly recovered emails.

VIDEO COURTESY OF GQ

“Then Donald Trump said that — and lied,” Olbermann said, and then much of the media reported those inaccurate claims throughout the weekend. “By the time they started backtracking, the toothpaste was already out of the tube.”

Olbermann said the timing suggests that Chaffetz is either a prophet or he knew Comey’s note was coming.

“If Chaffetz knew Comey’s note was coming, then he and Comey or other sources in the FBI have colluded to try to manipulate the election, in which case Mr. Chaffetz and Mr. Comey may need the best criminal defense attorneys that money may procure,” Olbermann said.

He wondered whether Chaffetz tipped off Trump about Comey’s note, and Olbermann wondered who could “clear this up a week and a day before the most important election since before the Civil War?”

“(Chaffetz) and James Comey may have been the lynchpins in a plot to turn over this country by treachery to Donald Trump,” Olbermann said. “It is a plot that is indeed, as Trump boasted, worse than Watergate.”

[h/t rawstory]

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STAFF WRITER

COMEY DOESN"T WANT THE SYSTEM TO "LOOKED RIGGED"

Pete Williams reported on Sunday that Donald Trump’s baseless claim of a “rigged” election influenced FBI Director James Comey to break with the Justice Department’s policy against taking actions that could influence elections.

Although longstanding Department of Justice guidelines have cautioned against disclosing investigative steps within 60 days of an election, Comey recently informed Congress that he had directed the FBI to investigate newly found emails that may or may not be relevant in the probe of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Williams explained on Sunday that Comey, in part, broke with tradition — just 11 days before the election — because of Trump’s bogus warnings about a “rigged” system.


VIDEO COURTESY OF NBC

“They believe that they did the right thing by telling Congress about this development,” Williams said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And their logic goes something like this, that the fact that the discovery of these emails was going to leak, that if it leaked it would come out in all sorts of different ways and be interpreted in all sorts of different ways and that the best way to handle it was just to get out in front of it.”

“And secondly,” he continued, “they thought that if they waited until after election and then it was discovered that they had found these emails, that would play into this whole scenario about how the system is rigged.”

Williams also pointed out that Comey and the FBI still did not know what was in the emails.

“They don’t know whether they are significant to the question of the email investigation,” he explained

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STAFF WRITER

IN UNPRECEDENTED ACTION, JAMES COMEY BREAKS PROTOCOL TO MEDDLE IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PROCESS

FBI Director James Comey acted against the directives of U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials when he sent a letter to members of Congress on Friday about new emails that may or may not relate to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, according to three media outlets.

The New Yorker, Washington Post, and ABC News all report that DOJ officials, who oversee the FBI, made it clear to Comey that the letter would go against long established protocol.

An anonymous DOJ official who spoke to the Post told Comey that the letter would go against the position that the agency doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations, nor that it takes any actions that could be seen as influencing an election. “It was conveyed to the FBI, and Comey made an independent decision to alert the Hill. He is operating independently of the Justice Department. And he knows it,” the source said.

The New Yorker even reports that the issue went as high as Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who, according to an anonymous administration official, told Comey that her preference would be not to send the letter for the same reasons.

“You don’t do this,” a former senior Justice Department official told the magazine. “It’s aberrational. It violates decades of practice.”

That practice was codified even further in 2012, when then-Attorney General Eric Holder sent a memo to all DOJ employees about “election year sensitivities.” It reads, “As Department employees…we must be particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and nonpartisanship.” It instructs anyone with questions “regarding the timing of charges or overt investigative steps near the time of a primary or general election” to contact the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment to the New Yorker as to whether Comey contacted that division.

According to the New Yorker’s source, Comey told Lynch that he had to break with the agency’s protocols because he had told Congress he would inform lawmakers of any developments in his investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information by using a private server. He also “felt that the impending election created a compelling need to inform the public,” New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer writes.

In his own explanations of his actions to FBI employees in a letter he sent to them on Friday obtained by the Washington Post, he wrote, “Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.”

The Clinton campaign has already accused Comey’s letter of being “long on innuendo and short on facts,” as campaign Chairman John Podesta put it in a call with the press, and called on him to give more information to the public. “His first duty is to the American people,” Podesta said. “We hope that he will take the occasion to explain why he decided to take this extraordinary step.”

[cross-posted from thinkprogress]

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STAFF WRITER

JUST HOW DID THIS IDIOT GET A WEAPON

Dylann Roof, the man accused of killing nine people at an historic black church in South Carolina, was able to purchase a gun — despite the fact that a background check should have prevented him from doing so. Shortly after this news became public, early reporting relied upon in a previous draft of this post indicated that Roof obtained a gun because “data was not properly entered in federal criminal justice computer systems.” The implication was that he may have managed to arm himself with a murder weapon because of a clerical error. In reality, however, the failure in the background check system stems from a more systemic problem.

According to a statement by FBI Director James Comey, Roof obtained the gun he allegedly used in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church murders due to a rule that permits gun dealers to transfer firearms under certain circumstances even if a background check on the person seeking to buy the gun has not been completed. As Comey explains, “under federal law, a Federal Firearms Licensee must submit biographical information about a potential purchaser to [the National Instant Criminal ann RooBackground Check System], and NICS has three business days to perform a background check and clear or deny the purchase.” If the background check is not completed within three days, however, the gun dealer “has the discretion to proceed with the transaction.”

In this case, Roof attempted to purchase a firearm on April 11, a Saturday. The federal employee began the background check on April 13, which was the next business day after Roof attempted to buy a gun. According to Comey, the federal examiner’s “initial check of Roof’s criminal history showed that he had been arrested in South Carolina March 1 on a felony drug charge.” but “[t]his charge alone is not enough to deny proceeding with the transaction.” Thus, the examiner continued to investigate whether Roof was, in fact, ineligible to buy a gun.

On Thursday, April 16, the examiner had not yet completed the background check. Had she possessed all the information about this case, she would have known that “Roof admitted he was in possession of drugs,” and this fact would have been sufficient to deny him permission to buy the gun. Because the examiner did not have this information on April 16, however, “the case was still listed as ‘status pending,’ so the gun dealer exercised its lawful discretion and transferred the gun to Dylann Roof.”

Though it is impossible to know whether Roof would have obtained a gun through different means if he’d been prevented from making this particular purchase, it is possible that the nine people allegedly killed by Roof would be alive today if the examiner had been able to prevent the sale from happening until after she’d completed Roof’s background check. Instead, because the current legal standard prioritizes speed over completed background checks, Roof was able to obtain the gun he attempted to purchase on April 11.

[h/t thinkprogress]

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STAFF WRITER