Today’s hearing by the House Committee on Government Oversight provided the American people with a familiar tableau showing just how dysfunctional their political system has become. As we’ve seen in virtually every investigation of Obama administration wrongdoing since the Republicans won back control of Congress, the session was a partisan mess. GOP members tried in vain to get FBI Director James Comey to admit that Hillary Clinton had been given a break when he chose not to recommend she be charged in spite of her negligence and lies. Democrats spent their time praising Comey, defending Clinton, and claiming the whole thing was just a Republican witch-hunt. In other words, Capitol Hill business as usual.
Or, at least, that’s the assumption on the part of many Democrats, who have effectively changed their main talking point in the last 48 hours from “Hillary did nothing” to “nobody cares about any of this outside of Washington.” But despite the inability of the committee’s Republican majority to get the best of Comey should not be any cause for Democrats to celebrate.
It’s entirely possible that the GOP would have been better off not hauling Comey before Congress and merely letting his Tuesday announcement stand on its own without giving him more chance to explain his decision in depth in a way that can be interpreted as favorable to the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. But the real issue is not Comey’s controversial decision; it’s that Clinton played fast and loose with national security and lied about it.
Like his Tuesday announcement, Comey’s testimony provided a number of difficult moments for the Clinton campaign. He reiterated that her use of a private email server was unauthorized and that it exposed U.S. secrets to hostile powers. Most importantly, although he said she didn’t lie in her interview with the FBI, he also made it clear that her repeated denials about transmitting classified information in her emails were untrue.
That has already led to a Republican referral to the FBI to investigate whether Clinton committed perjury when she testified before the House Benghazi Committee because her statements at that time were contradicted by Comey. Of course, after failing to charge her for her conduct, there’s no chance that the Obama administration will ever consent to trying her for lying about it. But even if they are in the right, the GOP should not invest much effort in continuing to follow Clinton down that rabbit hole, and attacking Comey (though his judgment in this matter is questionable) is a waste of time.
The only judges and jury Clinton will ever face are the voters who will go to the polls in November, and it is to them alone that Republicans who are outraged by this scandal should address their concerns. And what was said by Comey this week undermines the case both for Clinton as a competent public servant and a responsible guardian of America’s national security.
By choosing to have another hearing, House Republicans were using one of the few levers of power they control. But as they should have learned from their similarly dismal efforts to hold the IRS accountable and past tries to get to the truth about Benghazi, the willingness of every Congressional Democrat to treat any investigation into misconduct or untruthfulness on the part of one their own as anything but a GOP plot has undermined the usefulness of these exercises. The fact that most of the Republicans who serve on these committees (with a few exceptions such as Rep. Trey Gowdy) have no ability to conduct a cross-examination gives an advantage to the Democrats in their effort to obfuscate the issues and put it all down to partisan bickering.
Yet what those frustrated about these proceedings must remember is that the GOP already has mined political gold from Comey’s findings even if his assertions that she didn’t break the law is illogical. Comey said anyone who behaved in this manner would need to be given serious discipline, and that is what the voters can provide if Republicans stick to what is already on the record and continue to point out that she lied and endangered national security in Comey’s own words.
The GOP problem isn’t that Comey was too able a witness to be pinned down on his faulty judgment or that the Democrats’ defense of Clinton was persuasive. It’s that Clinton’s opponent is too flawed and too obsessed with defending his mistakes and offensive comments to focus on Clinton’s unfitness for office. If the election is a referendum on Hillary Clinton’s untrustworthiness, negligence, paranoia about transparency, and corrupt conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation, the Republicans have all they need to win. But since Donald Trump has shown his unfitness in other ways and can’t stay on message enough to make that case, Clinton may get away with it. As long as he is distracting the voters from the truth about Clinton, she will be off the hook.
