Is the U.S. Becoming a Banana Republic?
Screen Shot of James Comey swearing-in at House Judiciary Committee meeting on why he did not recommend seeking an indictment for Hillary Clinton on July 7, 2016.
James Comey has sullied his reputation. That seems to be the opinion of a growing number of people taking a closer look at aspects of the FBI’s investigation into the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Even more troubling is the thought that James Comey’s actions presage a decay of the United States into a mere banana republic.
Commentators’ Forebodings
Some of the commentators at least partially sharing this thought are Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, Cal Thomas on Newsmax, Tyler Durden on ZeroHedge, Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, Kenneth Timmerman on TheHill, and Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News. In particular, take a look at the Fox News video below concerning the FBI investigation of Clinton.
Also, Napolitano has some very disturbing reports from the intelligence community concerning the results of Clinton’s mishandling of classified material, which he discusses in the video below.
As one final video of Napolitano’s views on the Clinton scandals, consider the one below about some very curious FBI behavior.
As several commentators have pointed out, contrary to Comey’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, there are indeed examples of people who have been convicted and sentenced under 18 U.S. Code § 793, subsection f without having criminal intent. According to the statute, all a prosecutor would need to show to convict the accused is gross negligence leading to the potential compromise of classified material. The relevant section of the Espionage Act of 1917 says:
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
The emphases in this quote are mine. Hillary Clinton, according to Comey, has absolutely certainly committed both kinds of violations. So why did Comey not recommend to the Department of Justice that they seek an indictment? Comey did note that this part of the Espionage Act of 1917 requires a need only to prove gross negligence, not intent. However, concerning this Comey stated there was a lot of concern in the 1917 Congress that enacted it in both the House and Senate
about whether that was going to violate the American tradition of requiring that before you are going to lock someone up, you prove they knew they were doing something wrong, So there was a lot of concern about it; the statute was passed. As best I can tell, the Department of Justice has used it once in the 99 years since, reflecting that same concern. I know from 30 years with the Department of Justice. they have grave concerns about whether it is appropriate to prosecute somebody for gross negligence, which is why they have done it once that I know of, in a case involving espionage.
In short, Comey feared that part of the statute was unconstitutional. In addition, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) set up Comey with a number of questions, listed below along with Comey’s answers.
- She had said she had never sent or received classified email at her unclassified servers. FALSE.
- She said there were no documents sent from her email marked classified. FALSE.
- She said there was no classified material, either sent or received, on her private server. FALSE
- Clinton said she had used only one device to access her emails. Comey said she had used multiple devices over the four year period.
- Clinton said all work-related emails had been returned to the State Department. Comey said they had found thousands of work-related emails that had not been returned.
- Clinton said neither she nor anyone else deleted any work-related emails from her servers. Comey said the FBI had found traces of such deleted emails either in devices or in reclaimed long-term memory (what he called computer “slack space”).
- She said her lawyers had read every email in her system and were overly-inclusive in sending emails back to the State Department. Comey said the lawyers had not read the emails.
Having asked these questions as a setup Gowdy then asked what was the role of false exculpatory statements like these in a trial. Comey admitted they could be used as evidence of consciousness of guilt and of intent. The suggestion was made by Gowdy that there were indeed reasons for prosecuting based on her intent.
Yet, less than a year ago the FBI itself recommended the indictment of Bryan H. Nishimura for committing the same kind of acts as Hillary Clinton’s without any malicious intent! According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, Nishimura pleaded guilty and was immediately sentenced by U.S. Magistrate Judge Kendall J. Newman to “two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. Nishimura was further ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance.”
It has been suggested by some of the critics the main purpose for the FBI’s investigation was to ensure immunity against prosecution for Hillary Clinton and her collaborators. See here, here, here, and here.
So we have to ask ourselves again, why did Comey not recommend an indictment and why did Justice not seek one? Does this not prove the charges by critics there is indeed a double standard between the ruling elite and more common folk? That the United States is no longer a nation ruled by laws, but by the ruling elite who can do whatever they damn well please?
The U.S. Becoming a Banana Republic?
“Banana Republic” is a sobriquet traditionally applied to countries, especially in Latin America, which are unstable both politically and economically. The Wikipedia entry for “Banana Republic” gives some additional characteristics:
It typically has stratified social classes, including a large, impoverished working class and a ruling plutocracy of business, political, and military elites.[1] This politico-economic oligarchy controls the primary-sector productions to exploit the country’s economy.[2]
This picture is distinctly very different from the concept almost any American has of their country. Can it really be true we are degenerating so rapidly?
We do seem to be declining economically with every single year of the past eight years showing less than 3% GDP growth, the first time that has happened since the administration of Herbert Hoover (1929-1933), which coincided with the start of the Great Depression. After 1929 Hoover made matters much worse with the same kinds of interventionist economic policies as used by the Franklin Roosevelt administration from 1933 to 1945. Of course, the blame for the primary cause of the Great Depression belonged to a different part of the Federal Government, the Federal Reserve. In fact, we can see a large number of parallels between the Hoover-Roosevelt administrations and the current Barack Obama administration, with its policies to deeply intrude into the functioning of the economy.
The implicit suggestion, which I now make explicit, is the reason for the great length of the Great Depression as well as for our current economic doldrums is government economic intervention. The problem progressives face when attempting to improve economic results is that the economy is a chaotic system. When an economy is operating at its healthiest, government intrusion is minimal and the economy is a set of innumerable balances between individual pairs of suppliers and consumers. All of the economy is made up of these local supply-demand balances at a microeconomic, not macroeconomic, level. Imagine the economic system as a giant bell. When the government disturbs the economy by hitting that bell with the hammer of either Keynesian monetary or fiscal policies, signals propagate throughout the system, upsetting many, if indeed not most or all, of those supply-demand balances. Every time a single supply-demand balance is upset, the resulting imbalance causes either a shortage or a surplus of the good in question, causing more unemployment and decreasing economic output. Unbalance enough of them and an economy has a recession; disturb even more of them and a depression is created.
Central and South American banana republics are very familiar with this phenomenon, even if they do not understand its nature. To the very last one, each of those banana republics has limited their economic growth with dirigiste economic policies. It is why Cuba is frozen in a permanent state of economic stagnation. (All fans of Keynesian secular stagnation, take note!) It is the reason why Venezuela is falling apart as a nation before our very eyes, while Chile prospers. American progressives seem blind to what is happening south of our borders, since they are taking us down that very same road.
Readers of this website should be familiar with this road, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. If you are familiar with the metaphor, you know it implies an increasing government control over the economy generating increasingly fascist government control over the society at large. The American loss of the rule of law in the Hillary Clinton emails affair demonstrates we have traversed that road far more than I had feared.
May God save us all, because we do not seem to be inclined to save ourselves.
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