OPINION:
Barack Obama is always eager to “help” detectives trying to solve complicated disputes assigned to the cops. The president thinks of himself as someone who leaps tall buildings in a single bound, who can put Sherlock in the shade.
Sometimes his police work sets off sensations and controversies, as in his putting himself in the middle of what the police thought was merely an attempted housebreaking on the campus of Harvard in the Boston suburb of Cambridge. The cops thought they were protecting the home of Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor and friend of the president, but he made a racial controversy out of it when one of the detectives routinely asked him to identify himself.
Most presidents busy themselves with war, peace, the economy and matters of high state. Mr. Obama has time to work the police blotter. On other occasions he applied his powers of sleuthing to the streets and even military courts martial, offering something mere policemen can’t, a verdict before assembling all the facts. Last week he gave a little “help” to the FBI agents conducting the expanding investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email mysteries.
The FBI is still collecting facts, trying to discern whether her reckless use of a private email server to conduct official business might have put the nation’s most important security secrets at risk. The president demonstrated again that all that fact-collecting and witness-gathering is a waste of taxpayer money. The president went on television to render his verdict.
“I don’t think it posed a national-security problem,” he told an interviewer for the CBS program “60 Minutes.” It was a mistake, but a secretary of State can’t be expected to keep up with the rules and the fine print in the instruction manual for secretaries of State. “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered,” the president said. With that, and the fact that Bernie Sanders is “sick and tired” of reading and thinking about emails, the case can be closed.
The FBI, which has a reputation for keeping bias and politics out of its conclusions, was livid. Spokesmen predictably declined to say anything for the record, but Ron Hosko, who retired as a senior official at the agency last year to become president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told The New York Times that it was not “appropriate” for the president to “suggest what side of the investigation he is on” while the FBI is still working the case. Other law-enforcement officials agree, including some in Mr. Obama’s administration, though most are careful to keep their remarks off the record. Mr. Obama sometimes confuses the office of the president with the throne of the king.
The president backed down, as he usually does after relieving himself of an extralegal pronunciamento. The White House said the president was merely talking about the public emails that everybody else is talking about. He didn’t mean to say that he was privy to all the stuff the FBI has collected so far. He’s for fair and impartial, of course.
But the Justice Department surely got the message about what to do with a recommendation to proceed with a criminal indictment of Hillary, if it comes to that. Loretta Lynch is not Eric Holder, her compliant predecessor, but she’s sleuth enough to know who buttered her bread.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.