July 05, 2016 10:50 AM UTC

No Charges Over Clinton Email "Scandal"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Politico reports, the air just came out of one of the Republican Party’s biggest hullaballoos against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton:

FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday announced the agency is not recommending the Justice Department bring charges against Hillary Clinton, despite denouncing the former secretary of state and her colleagues for the way they handled classified information through private email servers.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is information that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey told reporters in Washington, D.C., noting that the probe has found that the former secretary of state used several different email servers and numerous devices during her time in office.

Even so, Comey added later, “Although 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. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges.”

So ends a controversy that has raged for years, as Republicans sought to extract every possible shred of political value from an admitted mistake that wasn’t unique to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State (see: almost the entire Bush White House). There is no evidence of any harm done to American foreign policy or national security from Clinton’s use of a private email server, and the dense technical details about email server security and propriety served mostly to confuse and scare voters in the service of Republican political objectives.

For a core segment of factually impervious diehards, of course, no outcome other than Clinton in a “jailhouse orange pantsuit” would ever have been satisfactory. Decades of scandalization of the Clintons over every conceivable issue, no matter how insignificant, has rendered millions of Americans not just unwilling but unable to give them a fair judgment. The Clintons are very possibly the most character-assassinated political family in modern history, and there is just no coming back from that for Americans in the thrall of the right-wing media machine. You’ll never convince them otherwise.

What matters most now is who will decide the election: low-information voters consumed by Clinton hate, or everybody else. Today’s developments won’t deter the former, but should encourage “sane America” to rally to Clinton’s standard.

Which is still flying, after all the mud in the world has been slung at it.