Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Those of us familiar with the intelligence community and laws governing the handling of classified information were appalled when Hillary Clinton got away with some serial abuses of the Espionage Act during her tenure as Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

The number of times she ‘allegedly’ mishandled classified emails and other materials would have led to multiple convictions and decades in prison for lesser mortals.

And so, equally appalling was the fact that the James Comey-led FBI flatly refused to charge her, and Obama’s Justice Department refused to indict her for obvious violations of the law that most likely led to incalculable harm to our national security.

But why did Hillary Clinton ‘get away with it’ again? The FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker, says it’s because ranking officials in the bureau and DoJ believed she’d beat Donald Trump and then be indicted as a sitting president, something the country ‘couldn’t handle,’ the Washington Examiner reported.

According to Baker, after discovering the scope and breadth of Clinton’s treachery, Comey came to him and asked if the FBI director should inform Congress of the discovery.

Baker “had been told that FBI agents discovered between 600,000 and 1 million emails on disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop relating to Clinton,” the Washington Examiner reported. “The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee’s top aide, Huma Abedin, was married to Weiner, who was being investigated for sending illicit texts to an underage girl.”

The former lead counsel for the bureau told author David Rohde he felt like “fates had thrown him a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball.”

Baker “believed it was likely that the FBI could find new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton,” Rohde wrote in his recently released book, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State.”

“She wins the election, we go to DOJ, and we recommend that they indict her before she becomes president,” Baker said, describing his situation at the time. “That’s not a good place for the country. That’s not a good place for the FBI.”

So — letting her off the hook for obvious and blatant violations of federal law is better? And remember, Clinton knew she was violating the law when she set up her own personal email server. She was attempting to escape open records requirements for federal officials and public servants while conducting her ‘own business’ away from prying eyes.

“I thought, ‘What is best for the law enforcement and judicial system?’” he said. “I said, ‘I thought the director had an obligation to notify Congress.’ Director Comey agreed with my advice.”

Comey did his job in that he sent letters to the heads of the eight committees that were investigating Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as Obama’s secretary of state.

But then, that was the end of it.

Sure, Republicans did the right thing by continuing to pursue leads, to get to the bottom of what Clinton had done. But soon, they became preoccupied by another premeditated distraction: The ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ narrative hatched in the months before the November 2016 election.

Clinton’s campaign played a role in that by paying for the bogus “Steele Dossier” using funds laundered through the Perkins Coie law firm. And of course, she’s gotten away with that, too.

If you recall, the FBI reopened its Clinton email case — closed in July of 2016 without charges — 11 days before the November election. Clinton would go on to blame her loss to Trump on Comey’s re-launch. But whether that’s true or not is irrelevant, because she still wasn’t charged with violating the Espionage Act after her loss, despite the fact that the FBI and the DoJ knew she was likely guilty.