Commentary
By Larry O'Connor - The Washington Times - Tuesday, January 2, 2018

OPINION:

President Donald Trump took to Twitter Tuesday morning and called for the Justice Department to fully investigate Huma Abedin and James Comey: 

The Washington Times’ Sally Persons, provides context on the president’s targeting of Abedin and Comey:

Reports over the weekend showed Ms. Abedin forwarded emails that included passwords to government systems to her Yahoo email account before millions of Yahoo accounts were hacked. The emails were released as part of a Judicial Watch lawsuit.

Mr. Trump also mentioned former FBI Director James B. Comey in his tweet saying that he too needs to be looked into for his actions in the Clinton email case. Mr. Comey drafted a letter clearing Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, of any wrongdoing prior to the investigation’s completion in 2016.

Indeed, the Judicial Watch revelations are damning of Abedin’s reckless actions with State Department secrets as well as basic security protocols, as The Daily Caller points out: 

Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, regularly forwarded work emails to her personal humamabedin@yahoo.com address. “She would use these accounts if her (State) account was down or if she needed to print an email or document. Abedin further explained that it was difficult to print from the DoS system so she routinely forwarded emails to her non-DoS accounts so she could more easily print,” an FBI report says.

Abedin sent passwords for her government laptop to her Yahoo account on Aug. 24, 2009, an email released by the State Department in September 2017 shows.

And let’s not forget, the owner of the laptop Mrs. Clinton’s closest and most-trusted aide sent that classified information to is now serving a federal jail sentence for carrying on a cyber relationship with a minor. That’s the kind of behavior a hostile foreign government could easily exploit for their own nefarious purposes and it was happening right under the former Secretary of State’s nose.

The president is right in publicly asking what any normal American learning of these revelations is asking himself: “How is Huma Abedin not in jail?” Further, Trump asks the secondary question that begs to be answered: “What in hell was James Comey doing with his investigation and how could Clinton and Abedin be exonerated by the former FBI Director?”

Average Americans are asking those questions, and that’s why Trump’s tweet resonates. 

When I interviewed President Trump at the White House two months ago on WMAL radio here in Washington, the president expressed his frustration over the fact that he wasn’t able to direct the DOJ to fully investigate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, unsecured server for her official correspondence as Secretary of State: 

O’Connor: You know, whenever I open up the phone lines in northern Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia, Pennsylvania, here in the greater Washington area, saying ‘What do you want the administration to be doing? What do you want the President to be doing?’ This may shock you, one of the things they keep asking for is for the Justice Department to really truly honestly investigate Hillary Clinton, the Uranium One…They don’t feel like justice has really been done there and they really want … and the leaks by the way… What’s stopping the Justice Department?

Trump: Well the leaks have stopped from the White House pretty much but they are all over Washington. They have been for years and some of the leaks are really very very bad leaks. They are bad for our country. But you know, the saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing and I am very frustrated by it. I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier, and the kind of money… I don’t know, is it possible that they paid $12.4 million for the dossier…which is total phony, fake, fraud and how is it used? It’s very discouraging to me. I’ll be honest, I’m very unhappy with it, that the Justice Department isn’t going…maybe they are but you know as President, and I think you understand this, as a President you’re not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something and at some point, maybe we are going to all have it out.

The reaction to that exchange was enormous driving the news cycle here in The Swamp for several days. Beltway and Manhattan journalists and pundits went insane over the president feeling “very frustrated” and “sad” that he couldn’t direct one of the agencies under his constitutional jurisdiction to carry out an investigation into seemingly criminal behavior. 

But outside The Swamp, in the places where sane, rational Americans dwell, the president’s lament sounded perfectly reasonable and normal. 

Of course there should be an investigation. Most Americans would face disciplinary action from their employer if they did what Abedin did. Most companies have strict rules and safe practices pertaining to the dissemination and control of passwords. Surely, most Americans would think, the United States Department of State would have similar protocols. 

And surely the penalty for blatantly flaunting those protocols would involve, as the president tweeted, “Jail!”

This is reasonable and logical so, naturally, denizens of pundit/media class don’t agree:

And so it goes. The president takes to Twitter to voice a basic, logical idea that resonate with multitudes of silent Americans and media elites in Manhattan and DC scream from rooftops over how wrong he is. 

Welcome to 2018. They still don’t get it. 

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