How did you mistake a two-sentence paraphrase for an "…extensive legal analysis"? I think again, you missed the point. Anyone with any faith in the justice system would expect the FBI director to stick with what facts he knows at the moment. One would hope he wouldn't reach a conclusion until he has sufficient evidence — we call that conclusive evidence.
You may imagine he and the Bureau do this sort of stuff aimlessly, but don't impute such stupidity to others. The extensive and deep legal experience you preen yourself on may have convinced you the Bureau's case is already made, but if it were there would be no need to hold back from saying so, and he'd be handing the case off. Not still sifting through the thousands of emails to build it. Or not.
You may believe such stuff can be concluded in the span of a few commercials, but I think a weekend's just the beginning.
Thanks again for your supplementary analysis of the legal duties of, and operational policies applicable to of an FBI Director. LOL!
If you understood the process of investigation and the associated process of laying charges, you would find nothing controversial in what I've said.
One thing you clearly don't understand or acknowledge is that law enforcement (FBI) and prosecutors (DOJ) are both very conservative by nature. They don't like to lose. They don't like to bring charges or move forward with a case the very moment they are in possession of the bare
minimum amount of evidence that might suffice for a conviction. On the contrary, they scour for as much evidence as they can possibly gather before they move forward, even if the magnitude of that evidence would be severe overkill. The only time they don't act this way is when they are forced to move forward prematurely by political imperatives (e.g. the Ghomeshi case). [It's not unknown for investigators/prosecutors to "tank" such cases, as a way of teaching their political masters a lesson].
Where Comey is at the moment is that he feels he's found something very significant which might make out a case against Clinton that the DOJ could easily win (which would defeat the howls of political partisanship which would ensue). However, don't expect him to share what he already has until he's fully explored what else there may be.
I also suspect that Weiner tipped the FBI off to the new e-mails in order to co-operate with them in connection with his own charges. Don't be surprised to find that Abedin is prepared to do the same to Clinton in order to avoid taking a fall.
However, there is an art as well as a science to investigation. Sometimes investigators release information/interim reports as a strategy to further evidence gathering. Considering that Comey's July report was so odd as to its legal analysis, and considering that Comey reportedly is a man of integrity and not a political hack, it now appears that the July report was just a step in the FBI investigation. We'll only know the full story when someone close to the case writes their memoirs one day.
Like Al Capone's accountant, it's always the bureaucratic types who hold the best and most reliable evidence.
p.s. Cue the fervent and unjustifiably confident legal analysis by noted non-lawyer mega poster (not you, Oldjones).
