The House GOP's "emergency" hearing to interrogate FBI director James Comey on Hillary Clinton's emails will be played both ways depending on political affiliation, but the sole apolitical guy in the room who by most counts possesses "unimpeachable integrity" found the Republican overreach maddening. NYT writes:
“It’s just not accurate,” said Mr. Comey, who has served both Republican and Democratic presidents. “We try very hard to apply the same standard whether you’re rich or poor, white or black, old or young, famous or not known at all.”
He angrily denied suggestions that he had consulted with members of the White House or the Justice Department or coordinated his conclusions about Mrs. Clinton with them. His face turned red as he insisted that he had not spoken with anyone before announcing his conclusions earlier this week. In a raised voice he said that he wanted to make something very clear to anyone watching the hearing in their local cafe: “I did not coordinate that with anyone,” he said.
Republicans flat out failed to make any progress on their main source of frustration—that Clinton won’t be criminally prosecuted.
"There's all kinds of folks watching this at home or being told, well, lots of other cases were prosecuted and she wasn't," Comey said. "I want them to know: That's not true!"
The best Republicans could do was turn up three emails out of tens of thousands where certain paragraphs within the body may have been marked "C," for “classified,” “confidential,” although they technically should have had a header denoting them as classified. Comey concluded Clinton may not have even known they were classified because they were improperly marked.
"I think it’s possible, possible that she didn’t understand what a C meant when she saw it in the body of an email like that," Comey said. "I don’t think our investigation established she was particularly sophisticated with respect to classified information and the levels."
On the other hand, Comey thoroughly debunked Donald Trump's talking point that Gen. David Patraeus got charged for doing "far less" than Clinton.
"In that case, you had vast quantities of highly classified information" that was "shared with someone without authority to have it," Comey said. "And then he lied to us about it during the investigation."
Per usual, House Republicans think it was such a win that they plan to press the FBI for further investigations into whether Clinton told the truth in her congressional testimony under oath. In many ways, they had no choice after deluding the GOP base into believing Clinton would be indicted. In politics, they say, you gotta give 'em hope. But in the GOP's case, you gotta give 'em false hope.