IF THAT WAS A BRIBE, IT WAS KIND OF STINGY

I guess this story isn't going to die for a while:

Hillary Clinton headlined a major fundraiser for a political action committee shortly before the group steered nearly $500,000 to the wife of the FBI official who oversaw the Clinton email investigation, DailyMail.com has learned.

Clinton's ties to the Common Good VA - a Virginia state PAC run by Clinton's long-time friend and advisor Terry McAuliffe, its governor - came under scrutiny this week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the group donated heavily to the state senate campaign of Jill McCabe.

Her husband Andrew McCabe led the FBI investigation into Clinton's emails.

... In June 2015, she headlined a key fundraiser for the group, which reportedly brought in over $1 million for the PAC and the Democratic Party of Virginia.

Here's a detail from this story this story that isn't getting enough attention:

[Jill McCabe] was the third-largest recipient of money from the group....

Right -- this was allegedly a big, fat bribe, and yet somehow the bribee got less money than people who aren't married to top officials at the FBI. Explain the logic of that to me.

As Gregory Schneider explained a couple of days ago in The Washington Post:

... McAuliffe’s support of Jill McCabe was part of a much broader effort at the time to try to win back a Democratic majority in the state Senate -- an effort that ultimately fell one seat short.

I'm not a Virginian, but if Republican legislators there are as intransigent and obstructionist as Republican members of the U.S. Congress, then of course McAuliffe would want to pull out all the stops in order to flip the state senate.

McAuliffe’s PAC, Common Good VA, was spreading money to many candidates, as was the state Democratic Party. McCabe was not the top beneficiary; Common Good VA gave $792,000 to state Senate candidate Jeremy McPike and $770,000 to Dan Gecker, as well as lesser amounts to a host of other office-seekers.

In fact, Schneider's numbers are a little low. According to the Virginia Public Access Project, McPike received $803,500 from Common Good VA and Gecker received $781,500. (McCabe received $467,500.)

(Oh, and as the Post's Norman Leahy notes, Gecker got all that money even though he was Kathleen Willey's attorney in the 1990s when Willey was accusing Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct.)

More from the Daily Mail story:

[McCabe's] campaign also received an additional $207,788 from the Democratic Party of Virginia, a group over which McAuliffe exerts significant control.

Omigod! A Democratic candidate got money from her state's Democratic Party!

Again, McCabe was the not the senate candidate who received the most money from the state party. Jeremy McPike got $535,162 from the party and Dan Gecker got $214,456.

Some of you may know all this. But it's being whispered, and the CLINTON SCANDAL DEEPENS nonsense is being shouted. The Clintons and their circle have close ties to McAuliffe. McAuliffe wants Democrats to win, nationally and in his state. Elections cost money. End of story.