Hillary Clinton insisted on calling the FBI investigation into the private email system she established to conduct official business as Secretary of State a “security review.” She elaborated: “[T]here are lots of those that are conducted in our government all the time and you don’t hear about most of them.”

Well, of course, as with all things Clintonian, the words are terms of art. It depends on the meaning of “security review.” For “security review” read “criminal investigation.” The FBI doesn’t do security reviews. But “criminal investigation” also needs to be understood in a Clintonian sense.

When Judicial Watch announced earlier this week that subpoenas had been issued in an underlying investigation and that Hillary had (of course) been the subject, I wondered what former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy would make of it. Andy has followed the ins and outs of the “security review” with a jeweler’s eye. He addresses the disclosures by Judicial Watch this week in his NRO column “Revealed: Eleventh-hour subpoenas in the Clinton e-mails investigation.”

As for the “investigation,” Andy deepens the analysis of his previous columns exposing the pretense that permeated it. As befits an “investigation” of Obama’s desired successor under the auspices of Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Obama Department of Justice, it was an “investigation” in the Clintonian sense. It was the cubic zirconia of criminal investigations, a synthetic semblance of the real thing. Andy explains: “Mrs. Clinton’s friends at the Justice Department chose not to subpoena Mrs. Clinton’s friends from the State Department and the campaign. The decision not to employ regular criminal procedures — i.e., the decision not to treat the case like other criminal cases — was quite deliberate.”

In his penultimate paragraph Andy observes: “At the very same time it was bending over backwards not to make a case on Hillary Clinton, the Justice Department was pushing very aggressively — on much thinner evidence — to try to prove that the presidential campaign of Donald Trump was in cahoots with the Putin regime. For Clinton, the Obama Justice Department ran away from the grand jury, notwithstanding that its use in investigations of obvious crimes is standard. For Trump, the Obama Justice Department ran to the FISA court, notwithstanding that its use in an investigation of the opposing political party’s presidential candidate, based on sketchy information, is extraordinary.”

Reading Andy’s column will make you angry all over again, but I highly recommend the whole thing here. It is a superb exposition of a complicated subject by someone who knows what he’s talking about and, coincidentally, it makes a good companion to the adjacent post assessing President Trump’s first hundred days in office.