“Events, my dear boy, events,” the slow British prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied when asked what he feared most. And events can certainly make a difference, as was evident this week: Prime Minister David Cameron moved out of No. 10 Downing Street, and Theresa May moved in. This happened after British voters, against Cameron’s advice and against popular expectation, voted to leave the European Union on June 23.
But the extraordinary machinations in London aren’t as compelling to American voters as what’s happening here. In the midst of a tumultuous and often surprising presidential campaign, with the candidates seemingly decided (though some Republicans still hope to stop Donald Trump in Cleveland), two major events have shaken up the American political landscape over the past week.
One was a remarkable statement by FBI Director James Comey on July 5. In agonizing detail, he described how Hillary Clinton had ignored laws and regulations requiring a secretary of state to utilize government email and turn it over to the government after leaving office. She had been “exceptionally careless,” he concluded.
He also showed beyond any possibility of contradiction how she repeatedly lied about it. And then announced that she would not be prosecuted for obvious violations of section 793(f) of the federal penal code.
Comey is not a prosecutor, of course, but he found himself in that position when it was revealed that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had met with Bill Clinton for 30 minutes on her official plane on the tarmac in Phoenix on June 28. How was that meeting arranged? Did they expect it to go unreported, which it almost did?
One could be forgiven for thinking that this time Donald Trump was right on Twitter: “It’s a fix.”
Comey said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges because Clinton had no criminal intent. But the statute requires only “gross negligence,” which sounds a lot like “extreme imprudence.” Lynch, after her cursory ratification of Comey’s decision not to prosecute, didn’t even try to explain the difference to a congressional committee.
Democrats breathed a sigh of relief. They wouldn’t have to find a novel candidate. But they have a challenging time claiming Clinton has been exonerated. Polls show that a majority of voters believe she should be impeached. And Quinnipiac polls this week showed Donald Trump leading or tied with her in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, three states without whose electoral votes Barack Obama would not have been reelected.
Then came the killing of five police officers in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter protest by a man who said he hated white police. That followed video footage of police shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana in circumstances that may have been unjustified.
At a funeral service in Dallas on July 12, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama gave excellent speeches — until Obama once again suggested that black men were being killed by racist police and that the problem could somehow be solved with gun control legislation.
This harks back to a meme Obama has championed since the August 2014 shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri, a shooting his own Justice Department ultimately ruled justified. The resulting “Ferguson effect”—officers retreating from proactive policing—has been described by Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. It has led to a horrifying spike in homicides in major cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago—and to the cold-blooded killings of police officers in Dallas and elsewhere.
It is a fact documented by Harvard economist Roland Fryer that there is no epidemic of unjustified police killings of black people. Another fact: Local law enforcement and prosecutors, like in North Charleston, South Carolina, have demonstrated an ability to act quickly in appropriate cases.
In the meantime, those planning to attend the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia should be aware of the possibility of violence. Things seem to be getting out of hand.
These are not favorable conditions for a presidential candidate from the party in power, especially a candidate like Hillary Clinton, who has echoed Obama’s statements about the police and whose lawlessness has gone unpunished by those in power.
It evokes memories of the chaos of urban riots in the 1960s and the lawlessness of Watergate in the 1970s. Clinton’s one powerful argument—the inadequacy of Donald Trump—might be enough to elect her president. But maybe not.
