Why Hillary Skated

I’ve always been a bit puzzled at why Doug Macgregor has consistently pooh-poohed the integrity of our current CIA Director—whose name he consistently gets wrong. Radford, Radcliffe, whatever. He has several times stated that under Radford, er, Ratcliffe, it will simply be business as usual at the CIA. I get that a liberal like Chas Freeman would call him a political hack, but why Mac?

Anyway, this plays into the post from yesterday—Shipwrecked: Smart Comments Re FBI, Politico—in which I insisted that it’s the prosecutors who make the call on arrests and prosecution and not the FBI. Smart readers may well have wondered, Hey, just a minute, what about Comey declining to prosecute Hillary? Wasn’t that the FBI making a prosecutive decision?

Of course, everybody knows what really happened, and John Radford, er, Ratcliffe has now released authoritative information to clear up that misconception. Let me add that, among the ‘everybody’ who knew what really happened I include USAID funded media covering the DoJ beat.

RealRobert @Real_RobN

And this is, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe, the FBI was ordered by Barack Obama not to arrest Hillary Clinton for espionage in violation of — 18 U.S. Code § 793. Gathering, transmitting or los[ing] defense information. In fact, James Comey effectively served as Hillary Clinton’s personal attorney.

Note that a higher authority than the FBI made the decision—investigators don’t decide these matters.

James Comey: “What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done honestly, competently and independently. No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.”

I don’t doubt that the investigation was honest, competent, and … damning. Independent? No outside influence? Well, that depends on what you consider the word “outside” to mean. Influence from outside the government? No. Influence from inside the government—you can take that one to the bank. Comey was simply fronting for Barry and what’s her name—the one who occupied the AG office at the time.

Note that in what follows Ratcliffe, a former prosecutor, gets this exactly right and requires Page to state the facts correctly. The decision came to FBI from DoJ

CIA John Ratcliffe: “Lisa Page confirmed to me under oath that the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information,"

Transcript excerpt of his interview with Page:

John Ratcliffe: Okay. So let me if I can, I know I'm testing your memory, but when you say advice you got from the Department, you're making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You're not going to charge gross negligence because we're the prosecutors and we're telling you we're not going to –

Ms. Page: That is Correct.

https://x.com/i/status/1887189852636196959

11:21 AM · Feb 5, 2025

So here’s how that worked. When the FBI considers its investigation to be final they present the results to the prosecutor, and they are free to make a recommendation based on their findings. So, they could have said, we believe that our investigation shows that Hillary violated 18 U.S. Code § 793, the Espionage Statute. We recommend that she be prosecuted for those violations. Then the prosecutors—and in a case at this level the AG is bound to be involved in the decision—are free to respond: ‘Well, we’re the prosecutors. We disagree so you can take your report and shove it.’

Except that’s not the public face Barry and the AG wanted to present. So they told Comey, Look, we’re telling you there won’t be any prosecution. However, to cover our behinds from a PR perspective, we’re also telling you to publicly state that you see no basis for prosecution. We’ll accept our own recommendation that you will publicly state. And Comey followed orders rather than acting with integrity and refusing to act as a frontman for a decision that he knew was political and not legal—a course of action which was entirely predictable based on his past career.

That’s the scenario that, er, Ratcliffe presented to Lisa Page, and Page responded: That is correct. Which it was. And everyone who knew that Comey’s performance was a farce—basically everyone in DC—kept their mouths shout. Or praised Comey’s performance.

If this is any indication of what we can expect from what’s his name, I think we can look forward to confirmation of much of what had to have been true with regard to the Russia Hoax. And that will feed into the entire USAID and CIA conglomerate.