I'm more willing to go with lapse of judgement. God knows I've made them. Haven't you done something really stupid and then wondered how you could have done it?
Not like that I haven't.
And if Lynch is on it, you have to also get Comey in on it, and that means all the agents who have worked on this won't leak the-fix-is-in to reporters... it's just too crazy.
First off, again, the messages don't need to be explicit. The meeting IS the message. And it's got "plausible" deniability. I don't know if Comey is in on it, but this is a major problem regardless. And what are the agents going to say? There's no
proof that Comey was influenced.
Ziggurat, suppose you had to cast the deciding vote between Trump and Clinton becoming president.
Would this email story make you vote for Trump? For me, the answer is obvious: no.
My answer is yes. And it's not just about the emails themselves, though I consider that pretty bad. But not only did she badly mishandle classified information, and probably in order to shield herself, she lied about it at every single step. Again and again, she lied. And what have been the consequences of those lies? Nothing. She has paid no price for her lies, and not really even for her mishandling of classified information. And so this is what we can expect from her as president: she will make bad choices, and then she will lie to cover them up. This will be routine.
Trump will make bad choices too, and he might lie to cover them up as well. He's a terrible candidate, and I really wish someone else had been nominated. But there's a difference: the press won't cover for Trump the way it covers for Hillary, and Democrats in general. He won't get as much leeway from the rest of the government either. But Hillary will get a pass. If you value the press as a check on government power, then vote Republican, because that's the only way you'll get it.
Bad policies can be changed. But corruption, once it takes root, is harder to remove. Trump is no paragon of virtue, but the mere fact that he has not held office before while Hillary is part of a long-standing machine stretching back decades means that Trump cannot infect the government with corruption to the same extent that Hillary can, even if Trump wants to.
Maybe it's the straw that broke the camel's back, maybe it's just symptomatic of everything that's wrong with Hillary, but no, I cannot vote for her, and yes, I will vote for Trump over her. Trump is terrible, but Hillary is worse.
ETA: I would vote for Bernie over Trump.
