That's A Lot of Zeroes

Oh, heaven's to Betsy!

As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee.

Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.

The FBI has had to await a court order to begin reviewing the emails, because they were uncovered in an unrelated probe of Mr. Weiner. 

The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the previous probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter.

What is shows is that (a) Hillary Clinton is unbelievably corrupt and (b) that the powers-that-be are slogging through this for appearance's sake, hoping to get as little done before the election.

That's not what you're paid for, fellas.



Also:

Nadia Murad had tears in her eyes as she described the power that individual MPs can have when they stand up to vote.

A few minutes earlier, she had watched 313 MPs vote unanimously in favour of a Conservative motion to recognize that the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant against the Yazidis constitutes genocide — and commit to providing asylum to women and girls from the persecuted minority group within 120 days.

Speaking through an interpreter last week, Murad — a 23-year-old Yazidi activist who had escaped sexual slavery by the Islamic militant group after they raided her village in northern Iraq — told reporters she felt ISIL losing power with every MP who stood up to vote for the motion. ...

(Sidebar: I would like to take this time to remind one that the Trudeau government not only called prioritising groups like the Yazidis "disgusting" but that they refused to call what was happening to the Yazidis genocide.)

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, the immigration critic who had put forward the opposition day motion, was one of them.

For months, the Liberals had skirted her increasingly loud calls for asylum, saying they were concerned about the level of danger in Iraq and the need to work with the UN Nations High Commission on Refugees, which refers refugees for resettlement. But last week, the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP were all on the same side, backing Rempel’s motion.

“It was one of those things where it renewed my faith that Parliament can do something that resembles work,” the Calgary MP said of how she brought everyone onside. ...

(Sidebar: oh, I'm still not sold on the idea that the Parliament is a force for good. Miss Rempel.)

Rempel remembers first hearing about the plight of the Yazidis two years ago after ISIL captured the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, forcing nearly 50,000 people to flee to a mountaintop where they were under siege for weeks.

(Sidebar: this prompted Trudeau to suggest that children fleeing ISIS needed parkas as opposed to solid action that would have prevented them from running in the first place.)

Advocacy groups pushing the Liberal government to bring Yazidis to safety in Canada have argued they had been forgotten in the efforts to make good on their promise to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Motivated in part by the mounting frustration of the Yazidi community and their supporters, Rempel convinced her Conservative colleagues to use a rare opposition day to put forward a motion on the issue.

Rempel said she then reached out to a handful of unnamed Liberal MPs she thought might be sympathetic, to see if they could suss out the likelihood of getting government support for the motion. But she said they came back with the impression it was not going to fly. ...

Meanwhile, Rempel had some quiet — and some not-so-quiet — support from Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who had been one of four Liberals to break ranks and vote in favour of a failed Conservative motion in June declaring the atrocities committed by ISIL to be a genocide.

(Sidebar: all four of them?) 



(Merci beaucoup)