HILLARY VS. THE UNDEAD

A few months ago, we were told by FBI director James Comey that Hillary Clinton would not face charges as a result of her handling of emails as secretary of state. She seemed to be in the clear. But some current and former law enforcement officialsnever accepted that conclusion. At the Daily Beast, Wayne Barrett names some of the names:

Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: “I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” ...

The man who now leads “lock-her-up” chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani’s security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress....

Along with Giuliani’s other connections to New York FBI agents, his former law firm, then called Bracewell Giuliani, has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group, born in the New York office in the early ’80s, was headed until Monday by Rey Tariche, an agent still working in that office. Tariche’s resignation letter from the bureau mentioned the Clinton probe, noting that “we find our work -- our integrity questioned” because of it, adding “we will not be used for political gains.” ...

[James] Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.” ...

Go read the story -- there's more. A cabal of current and former law enforcement operatives has made this a live issue again. We think the likes of Giuliani and Kallstrom have been banished to cigar lounges and cable news greenrooms, where they can strut their supposed expertise while recalling the good old days when they had power. But they have power. They're the undead, and they're working with some of the living to undermine Amrican democracy and either install a psychopath as president or hobble the psychopath's opponent if she manages to win.

And they're spreading disinformation via Fox News -- which a lot of smart people told us was on its last legs. Roger Ailes is gone, Bill O'Reilly might retire, Sean Hannity might soon leave for Trump TV, Megyn Kelly might jump ship, and Rupert Murdoch might finally cede full control to his less ideological sons. And yet when this cabal wanted to spread its story, Fox was still the obvious venue:

In a November 2 report, [Fox's Bret] Baier cited “two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation” to claim that the investigation “into possible pay-for-play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation” is a “‘very high priority'” and that “agents are actively and aggressively pursuing this case.” Baier said FBI agents “had collected a great deal of evidence” to suggest wrongdoing -- though his reporting did not indicate what the alleged evidence concerned or who it suggested committed a crime....

Baier’s reporting on the Clinton Foundation investigation is taking one side of a two-front battle, and thus leaving out critical context that senior DOJ and FBI officials believe there to be no case in the Clinton Foundation investigation.... His reporting also ignores context reported by the [Wall Street] Journal that FBI agents have repeatedly been told to drop the investigation specifically because information gathered was “weak” and unimpressive....

His claim that FBI officials are “99 percent” sure that the server “had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies” flies in the face of the FBI’s public statements that there is “no evidence” Clinton’s server was hacked....

We wanted to believe that the old order was dying -- that were Republicans about to face their third straight presidential drubbing and Ailes and Murdoch were about to give way to a defanged Fox, with all the rage rechanneled to an upstart news channel named after a guy whose businesses routinely fail.

But beware of the living dead. They're hard to kill.