They do strange in the Swamp

Evidently neither Obama nor Hillary nor Lynch nor Holder nor Sotomayor have any concept of legal stability.  They will fall apart back there, and we are going to get more mass migrations out here.

Ms. Lynch’s abdication began when she and her prosecutors declined to empanel a grand jury. It continued in June after her supposedly coincidental rendezvous with Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac. She could have told Hillary Clinton’s husband that the appointment was inappropriate, or refused to let him board her plane. She says the conversation was “social,” but she allowed the ex-President to create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” Ms. Lynch conceded at an Aspen forum in July. The Clinton campaign compounded the problem by gossiping to the press that Mrs. Clinton would keep Ms. Lynch on as AG if she wins.

Ms. Lynch also abandoned her post when Mr. Comey staged his July media event dissecting the evidence in the Clinton email case and exonerating the Democratic nominee. The FBI’s job is to build a case, not make prosecutorial decisions. Yet Ms. Lynch later told Congress that rather than make up her own mind on the evidence she would merely “accept the recommendation of that team” at the FBI “and there was no basis not to accept it.”

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Meanwhile, the Journal’s Devlin Barrett broke the news Sunday that senior Justice officials and FBI officials disagreed over how aggressively to pursue the Clinton Foundation for financial fraud and influence peddling.

FBI field agents—in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Arkansas—wanted to pursue subpoenas and empanel a grand jury. Senior officials at Justice, likely political appointees, refused to give the FBI agents permission. But the agents continued to investigate under their current authorities, even after Justice denied their request to read the Clinton-related emails that the national-security team had uncovered.

In August a “very pissed off” Justice official dressed down Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command who oversaw the Clinton email investigation, for looking at the Clinton Foundation in an election year. According to the Journal story, Mr. McCabe replied, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” The official said no, but the message down the FBI chain of command was to “stand down.”

This follows Mr. Barrett’s previous scoop that Mr. McCabe’s wife received $675,000 in campaign donations from Clinton comrade Terry McAuliffe for a Virginia legislature race. The FBI says there was no actual conflict of interest because Mr. McCabe detached himself from his wife’s campaign, but the appearance of a conflict is egregious. Mr. McCabe should have been removed from the FBI probe.

Democrats and their media allies are now in attack-and-deflect mode, assailing the FBI agents on the Clinton cases as “conservative.” But considering that the Journal story is the first public confirmation in the heat of election season that the Clinton Foundation is under investigation, the agents were handling the matter professionally and discreetly despite Washington interference.