Hillary defenders will point out that Michael Mukasey served as Attorney General under Bush. But Mukasey was a Schumer pick. A compromise between Senate Democrats and Bush.
Back then Schumer said of him, "If Attorney General Gonzales steps down, the White House has a real chance to clear the air, to restore faith that the rule of law will come first and politics second in the Justice Department, not the other way around, if they nominate somebody who, by their reputation and career, shows that they put rule of law first, a person like a Michael Mukasey, a person like a Larry Thompson, a person like a Jim Comey. These are conservative Republicans, but they put the rule of law first. And I hope that's what the White House will do."
So dismissing Mukasey as a partisan hack won't work. He's a Jewish former judge from New York. He's certainly not Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton. And his Wall Street Journal piece is sober and sensible.
Addressing some of the latest revelations, he writes...
The current news, reported in the Journal and elsewhere, is that her server contained information at the highest level of classification, known as SAP, or Special Access Program. This is a level so high that even the inspector general for the intelligence community who reported the discovery did not initially have clearance to examine it.
The server also contained messages showing her contempt for classification procedures. This was bred at least in part by obvious familiarity with exactly “how it works”—such as when, an email shows, she directed a staff member simply to erase the heading on a classified document, converting it into “unpaper,” and send it on a “nonsecure” device.
And oh yes...
Whatever the findings from that part of the probe, intelligence-community investigators believe it is nearly certain that Mrs. Clinton’s server was hacked, possibly by the Chinese or the Russians.
And he lays out the case against her...
No criminality can be charged against Mrs. Clinton in connection with any of this absent proof that she had what the law regards as a guilty state of mind—a standard that may differ from one statute to another, depending on what criminal act is charged.
Yet—from her direction that classification rules be disregarded, to the presence on her personal email server of information at the highest level of classification, to her repeated falsehoods of a sort that juries are told every day may be treated as evidence of guilty knowledge—it is nearly impossible to draw any conclusion other than that she knew enough to support a conviction at the least for mishandling classified information.
This is the same charge brought against Gen. David Petraeus for disclosing classified information in his personal notebooks to his biographer and mistress, who was herself an Army Reserve military intelligence officer cleared to see top secret information.
If the law were followed, this is pretty straightforward. The larger question is whether there's a bigger game here. Why did Obama pick Comey, a man who is fairly outside the template for the kinds of people an administration that routinely violates the law likes having in the top position. Maybe it was sloppiness. Or maybe this was the endgame all along. In which case, the election will change dramatically.