Was the FBI's interference in this election a bigger scandal than Watergate?

Rank-and-file FBI investigators on the Clinton case seem to have said, "If we can't indict her, we'll deny her the presidency." So they did.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) December 14, 2016

So the columnist whose tweet is posted above wrote a rather long and expansive examination into what exactly the FBI did to interfere in the 2016 election.

You can read the entire thing here, but for the purposes of this post I will concentrate on the twelve most important bullet points:

(1) Abedin told people after the discovery that “she [was] unsure how her emails could have ended up” on the computer the FBI found them on, suggesting that if she’d ever been contacted by the FBI in early October she could have helped them dialogue through the situation (as the idea that she had deliberately withheld these emails from the FBI never made any sense, given the Bureau’s unwavering insistence that Abedin had always been cooperative with them, and the pointlessness of Abedin risking federal Obstruction of Justice charges and federal prison time to hide emails that were—as we now know—not just without any evidentiary value but in fact duplicates of emails she had already turned over to FBI investigators); 

(2) consensus in the media and beyond, as summarized by The Washington Post, was that “an announcement from the FBI in early October, when the emails were discovered, might have been less politically damaging for Clinton than one coming less than two weeks before the Nov. 8 election,” a fact no one in the FBI could have failed to appreciate, given its obviousness (even notwithstanding the agents’ enormous, day-to-day professional investment in the situation); 

(3) a report in The New York Times indicated that, during the more than three weeks the Weiner investigators kept their discovery from Director Comey, they nevertheless shared their new information with the ”tremendously angry” (see #6, below) rank-and-file FBI investigators from the Clinton email-server case (the New York Times having reported on October 30th that the discovery of “new” Abedin emails in early October “prompted a renewed interest among agents who had investigated Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State” [emphasis supplied]); 

(4) after the late-October revelation that the FBI had found new emails on Weiner’s computer on October 3rd, rank-and-file FBI agents told the media that “there was no chance the email review could be completed before Election Day” (thus ensuring it would disrupt the Clinton campaign through the casting of all ballots, early and in-person), only to be overruled by Director Comey within 24 hours, with Comey decreeing that the relevance of the new emails would be determined by Election Day (as it ultimately was, after many millions of Americans had voted early, and before many more millions could hear about the second, exculpatory Comey letter; nevertheless, the stark disparity between the rank-and-file’s comments to the media and Comey’s comments remains unexplained); 

(5) a member of Trump’s inner circle, Rudy Giuliani, confessed on the Lars Larson radio program that current FBI agents working on the Clinton investigation had illegally leaked information to him about the Abedin emails before it became public and before Director Comey had been told of the emails, and, moreover, were intending to leak this information—if they were unable to get Comey to do it via the implicit threat of a leak—as an (in Giuliani’s words) pro-Trump “October Surprise,” thereby establishing a political motive among a faction of the FBI in the timing and dissemination of information about the emails (”Darn right I heard about it,” said Giuliani, “[and] I can’t even repeat the language I heard,” referring with this latter remark to the agents’ anger at not being able to indict Hillary Clinton for multiple federal felonies in July of 2016; concurrently, Jim Kallstrom, who headed the New York field office of the FBI in the 1990s, also admitted to Fox News to receiving leaks about the Clinton investigation from current FBI agents working on the case); 

(6) Giuliani further disclosed that a faction of rank-and-file FBI agents within the New York field office felt “tremendous anger” toward both Director Comey, Hillary Clinton (the subject of their investigation, who they believed should have been indicted in July), and “a pretty corrupt Obama Justice Department” (many of whose officials might have retained their posts if Clinton were to win election to the presidency), and we know from The Chicago Tribune that Comey wrote “the Comey Letter” only because he believed these same rogue FBI agents in New York were planning to leak the “new” evidence in the Weiner case (which leak would have violated numerous federal criminal statutes, and which plan to leak would already be regarded as a criminal conspiracy by law); 

(7) the Abedin emails turned out to have no evidentiary value, and indeed were in many instances duplicates of emails already held by the FBI, which fact Comey likely could have determined himself even from meta-data alone (had he been given the opportunity to do so during the first week of October); 

(8) Giuliani mysteriously took himself out of the running for any position within the Trump administration on the very same day (December 9th) that The Washington Post and The New York Times ran stories about Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, thereby beginning a period of heavy scrutiny for both the FBI and CIA’s actions before and during the election, with the stated reason for Giuliani’s demurral from a once-certain Cabinet position being his potential conflicts of interest abroad (which conflicts are reportedly far fewer in number than those of either the President-elect or the President-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State, and occur in the context of an administration that has thus far expressed no concern at all about foreign business entanglements); 

(9) as reported by The Chicago Tribune, a Los Angeles attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, is now asking a New York City judge to release, on Thursday, the search warrant the FBI sought for the Abedin emails on Weiner’s computer—with what probable cause to believe they contained evidence of criminal conduct one can, in view of the facts in this article, only begin to imagine—with Schoenberg’s stated purpose being to determine whether “someone in the Manhattan orbit of then-candidate Donald Trump may have provided a false lead to the FBI” regarding the Abedin emails (alternatively, as observed by The Gothamist, the search warrant could turn up “funny business by overly zealous conservative FBI agents”); 

(10) the lawsuit in New York was made necessary by the FBI’s inexplicable refusal to turn over its FOIA-eligible investigatory materials to Attorney Schoenberg in the 20-day window mandated by law, or even to respond to Schoenberg’s request at all, which refusal would have assured, absent Schoenberg’s lawsuit, that this information would remain under wraps prior to the Electoral College vote; 

(11) the judge in the New York lawsuit now says he may release the entirety of the search warrant prior to the meeting of the Electoral College on Monday, December 19th, acknowledging thereby the potential political relevance of the material; and 

(12) if the search warrant is in any way irregular, or the FBI’s redactions from it suspicious, this could confirm political collusion at the FBI and thereby increase the number of “Hamilton Electors” from their current reported 20 to the 38 needed to throw the 2016 presidential election to the House of Representatives—which temporary delay in Trump’s ascension to the presidency would allow ample time for investigations of both FBI collusion with the Trump campaign and multifaceted Russian interference with the presidential election.

There is actually a lot more in the post, but these points alone are more than enough to suggest, if not prove, that there was a definite conspiracy to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency.

Then add to that the Republican witch hunts over Benghazi and the private server, Russian hacking, and voting irregularities, and there simply is no longer any doubt.

In my opinion Watergate was child's play compared to this, and what is even more troubling is that it is about to be swept under the rug by a media that is desperate to maintain access to the new president at the expense of reporting the most egregious attack on our democracy perhaps in our entire 240 year history.