Much is being made of Comey recommending no prosecution, when so many others were prosecuted for similar crimes.

John Lott says it is bureaucrats afraid of losing reputation:

I worked frequently with prosecutors. The reputational loss public officials face from criminal charges can be so great that prosecutors feel that they need to be sure of a conviction before going forward. For someone running for president, such as Hillary, that loss of reputation would be tremendous. — It isn’t as if she will be able to pick right back up where she is now in the 2020 presidential race.

Probably played a part. There is another possibility. Hillary knows how the game is played. If you want to operate at that level, you need to create a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario, whereby anyone and any agency who comes at you will only be able to do so if they are willing to see you destroy them. Under those circumstances most people will choose to coexist in a state of mutual blackmail, rather than fall on their own sword to take you down.

Don’t forget, Hillary is the one who was pulling FBI raw intelligence files by the hundreds illegally, to get the unverified scuttlebutt captured in those catch-all raw files. Hillary was even running her own personal intelligence program in Libya, some allege while trying to find Khadafi’s gold and quietly disappear it before anyone else knew where it was. She understands more than anyone that secrets and leverage are what control the power in Washington. Add to that the fact that the entire domestic intelligence apparatus has been under the thumb of Obama’s ideologues for the last eight years. If there are secrets, the left has them right now.

So does Comey secretly have a couple of prepubescent Guatemalan slave children he keeps locked in his basement, and Hillary has the videotape of them being beaten for not polishing his loafers shiny enough? Probably not. Comey is however loyal to the FBI as an organization, and probably believes in its overall mission ardently.

Being a full fledged intelligence operation, the FBI is purely results-oriented, and a fair chunk of it views itself as only marginally bound by the law as a practical matter. As a result, the FBI probably has hundreds, if not thousands of instances occur each year in the course of their operations which, if brought to light, would produce immense embarrassment and perhaps congressional action to severely rein in their mandate. Their job is an unusually dirty one.

My guess is the Democratic machine, and Clinton in particular, have been assigning people to dig up and catalog as many of those instances as they can, because they know that cards like that are priceless when you are playing the game at the outer edges of the envelope.

My guess is that the reason Obama felt confident enough to schedule his appearances with Hillary was not because he was briefed on what Comey intended to say. I think Comey was telling the truth when he said nobody had been briefed on his findings.

My guess is that Obama knew what secrets of the FBI were being brought to bear behind the scenes, and thus knew that Comey could not go after Clinton without a counter-leak of something the FBI could not allow to be aired out publicly. Thus Obama knew Comey could not, as a practical matter, rule any other way due to his loyalties to the Bureau. To do anything but what Comey did would be to sacrifice hundreds of FBI operations and risk letting a lot of really bad people run free.

So Comey took his rhetorical shots, made the entire conference as critical of Hillary’s criminal ineptitude as he could, and then backed away from pushing for charges at the very end. Then he hightailed it out of there before anybody could utter a question with the word “Petraeus” in it.

David Petraeus probably didn’t grasp that such a game was common in DC. He had spent his time overseas in the Military, and though book smart, he was a sitting duck when the hammer fell. Had he proceeded to inform the Bureau through back channels that he was going to publicly release information he had been accruing that would have destroyed the FBI’s ability to operate domestically, his case would have been handled exactly as Clinton’s was. There would have been no other choice. You don’t let hundreds of hardened criminals go free and unpunished to punish a guy like Petraeus for minor stupidity.

At some point, either the good guys will have to insulate themselves from such blackmail better and then clean out the hornet’s nest that is DC or more likely, the entire system will gradually devolve into chaos and anarchy. Those willing to take the risks and get their hands dirty in the intelligence game will consistently be held above the law in what looks like a rigged system of political backscratching, while every other rube who believes in the honest America they teach you about in school will be punished for every little transgression unmercifully by a corrupt system desperate to demonstrate its honor and trustworthiness.

It is yet one more form of Apocalypse laying on our horizon.

Trump would be wise to make note of this, as he heads to DC. He needs to get patriotic ex-FBI and CIA operators on his staff as much as he needs political science and communications support. The last thing he needs is to be taken down like Petraeus by a game he wasn’t even aware everyone was playing.