If you think this is bad, wait until Obama preemptively pardons her the night before the Democratic convention.

The FBI’s got a funny idea in its head that the president and his political cronies at the DOJ won’t follow through on prosecuting Hillary even if they recommend that charges be filed. I can’t imagine why.

“I don’t think it posed a national security problem,” Mr. Obama said Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He said it was a mistake for Mrs. Clinton to use a private email account when she was secretary of state, but his conclusion was unmistakable: “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.” Those statements angered F.B.I. agents who have been working for months to determine whether Ms. Clinton’s email setup had in fact put any of the nation’s secrets at risk, according to current and former law enforcement officials… “Injecting politics into what is supposed to be a fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the F.B.I.’s mouth and makes them fear that no matter what they find, the Justice Department will take the president’s signal and not bring a case,” said [former senior FBI official Ron] Hosko, who maintains close contact with current agents. Several current and former law enforcement officials, including those close to the investigation, expressed similar sentiments in separate interviews over several days.

Jazz accused Obama yesterday of “working the refs” with what he said about Hillary’s server. The Bureau itself agrees, apparently. There’s no way to spin this as an innocent blunder either — not after Obama’s gotten into trouble before for prejudging an open police investigation, from the famous but minor case of Henry Louis Gates being arrested in 2009 (“the police acted stupidly”) to the far more serious case of David Petraeus sharing classified information with his mistress. The NYT notes that the Petraeus investigation was on the mind of FBI officials this week, not just because it’s another instance of a top natsec officer mishandling state secrets but because Obama also seemed to prejudge that investigation while it was in process in 2012 (“I have no evidence at this point, from what I’ve seen, that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security”). The guy’s had multiple opportunities to learn his lesson and hasn’t, which makes it hard to believe this wasn’t deliberate.

Presumably he felt it was more important to vouch for Hillary and risk his own deputies at the FBI making him look like a fool than remain scrupulously noncommittal about Hillary’s guilt and risk the press having a field day with “OBAMA HEDGES ON CRIMINAL CHARGES FOR HILLARY” headlines. That’s the second example in the span of a few days — Bernie Sanders’s pitiful defense of Hillary at the debate was the other — of a top Democrat concluding that he’s better off politically by defending her than by casting doubt, even though she really might be guilty of a criminal offense. As much as they may disdain Hillary’s politics, the stupid liberals in the Democratic base simply will not tolerate a Democratic pol giving aid and comfort to the Republican wingnuts who’ve been sniffing around her server for scandal for months now. Even though it’s the FBI, not the RNC, that’s doing most of the sniffing.

And when I say she really might be guilty, that’s not idle partisan blather. Go read Fox News’s write-up of what an intelligence source claims that the FBI is focusing on. It’s 18 U.S.C. 793(f), a provision you’re already familiar with if you’ve been following this story but which, reportedly, is about to get a lot more public attention. That’s the part of the federal criminal code that says you’ve committed an offense if, through “gross negligence,” you either allow information related to national defense to be removed from its proper place of custody or you know that the information’s been removed and you fail to report it. The information does not have to be classified and you don’t have to have intentionally removed it yourself. Given what a cosmic disaster Hillary’s server set-up was, with hackers potentially able to log in remotely due to her lack of basic security, I can’t imagine how she avoids a “gross negligence” charge — but then, that’s what Obama’s little shot across the FBI’s bow was all about, right? She’ll walk. The only question is how.