Hillary Clinton and personal honesty

The FBI proved again that she has trouble with the truth

When FBI Director James Comey publicly revealed his recommendation to the Department of Justice last week that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not be prosecuted for espionage, he unleashed a firestorm of criticism from those who believe that Mrs. Clinton was judged by different standards from those used to judge others when deciding whether to bring a case to a grand jury.

The FBI investigation had a bizarre ending to it. FBI recommendations are never made public as this one was. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had been compromised by her politically disastrous but legally consequential meeting out of the view of the media with Bill Clinton just one week before Mr. Comey’s announcement. Whatever they discussed, the overwhelming public impression was such that Ms. Lynch removed herself and her senior aides from the case, effectively leaving the FBI to have the final say. This is unheard of in the post-Hoover FBI.

The Comey announcement itself gave two reasons for recommending against indictment. One was that “no reasonable prosecutor” would take the case. That is not a judgment the FBI gets paid to make. The FBI’s job is to gather, present and evaluate facts and evidence, not predict what prosecutors might do with it. The other stated reason for recommending against indictment was that though Mrs. Clinton may have been “extremely careless” in handling state secrets, she was not “grossly negligent,” which is the standard required by the espionage statute.

Yet Mr. Comey also acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton sent state secrets to nongovernmental colleagues who lacked national security clearances, that those people were hacked by hostile intelligence services and that she used her numerous non-secure mobile devices recklessly while inside the territorial borders of those hostile governments. If all that is somehow extremely careless but not grossly negligent, then many who have done far less than Mrs. Clinton — and have been prosecuted and convicted — were wrongly prosecuted.

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