There’s a remarkably blasé editorial in Tuesday’s Tribune on the latest Hillary Clinton e-mail furor. Faced with some 650,000 e-mails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop, some of them supposedly relevant to the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail that he’d called off months ago, FBI director James Comey was “caught in a vise,” says the Tribune.
The Trib editorial notes that “some observers” say there’s an “unwritten pact” requiring the feds to keep their mouths shut about investigations involving office seekers 60 days before their elections. Seems like a reasonable rule to me, but not to the Tribune. “We can’t get exercised over apparently unwritten mandates,” says its editorial. “A cynic would say nonexistent rules are made to be broken.”
Its readers vote and they are also “on the clock,” as the Tribune puts it. But they don’t factor in as their minds presumably are made up. “By now each of us surely has enough information to decide whether we want Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or someone else in the White House,” the editorial concludes. The Trib already gave its Republican readers permission to leave the reservation by endorsing Gary Johnson, the Libertarian. Maybe that explains the editorial’s detachment. Yet it’s strange to see such an important paper blow off its own choice for president as “someone else.”
