Via Fox News‘ Catherine Herridge and Pamela K Browne comes this statement from the FBI. The statement concerns a subject exposed in the FBI’s release to Congress of several more 302s IFBI interview summaries) last Friday:
allegations of a “quid pro quo” between a senior State Department executive and FBI agents during the Hillary Clinton email investigation, two congressional sources told Fox News.
The FBI statement follows:
Prior to the initiation of the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server, the FBI was asked to review and make classification determinations on FBI emails and information which were being produced by the State Department pursuant to FOIA. The FBI determined that one such email was classified at the Secret level. A senior State Department official requested the FBI re-review that email to determine whether it was in fact classified or whether it might be protected from release under a different FOIA exemption. A now-retired FBI official, who was not part of the subsequent Clinton investigation, told the State Department official that they would look into the matter. Having been previously unsuccessful in attempts to speak with the senior State official, during the same conversation, the FBI official asked the State Department official if they would address a pending, unaddressed FBI request for space for additional FBI employees assigned abroad. Following the call, the FBI official consulted with a senior FBI executive responsible for determining the classification of the material and determined the email was in fact appropriately classified at the Secret level. The FBI official subsequently told the senior State official that the email was appropriately classified at the Secret level and that the FBI would not change the classification of the email. The classification of the email was not changed, and it remains classified today. Although there was never a quid pro quo, these allegations were nonetheless referred to the appropriate officials for review.
This sure sounds like the State official (separately identified as Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy) and the FBI discussed a quid pro quo—those extra overseas slots. That the FBI seems in the end to have rejected the quid is irrelevant to the apparent existence of the discussion.
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Nobody has the courage to press charges, convict and throw the criminal in jail.
A Total lack of courage
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was right about our country when he made this observation aout our lack of courage.
………..If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world’s rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?…………
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolzhenitsynHarvard.php
I’m not sure it’s a loss of courage, per se, at least in the form of a battlefield courage or a faintness of a generalized courage, so much as it’s an outcome of being too rich, too soft, too comfortable–and an unwillingness to get off that comfortable couch.
Eric Hines