Breaking news: Clinton isn’t America’s worst criminal after all

Four days ago, the director of North Carolina’s Republican Party dangled a pair of handcuffs on national television and called them “Hillary Clinton’s inauguration jewellery”.

It barely got a mention in the whirlwind of bluster, bile and misinformation that has characterised the last weeks of this presidential race. Somehow, the shocking assertion that a presidential candidate who has never been convicted or even charged with any crime should be in jail has become an accepted motif. The Trump rally cry of “Lock Her Up” found its way into the halls of the Republican National Convention. The Facebook group Hillary Clinton For Prison has nearly 30,000 likes, and t-shirts featuring Clinton’s face above the word “criminal” or behind prison bars have become mainstream.

So it isn’t surprising that, when FBI Director James Comey announced ten days ago that new e-mails were being examined in relation to the Hillary Clinton e-mail case, the narrative that Clinton is a criminal blew up with a force that could derail the election. Clinton’s national lead of 6 points dissolved almost overnight, while Donald Trump leapt on the deliberately vague statement and made the patently false claim that Clinton was embroiled in “the biggest political scandal since Watergate”. Within two days his chances of winning the presidency had tripled.

For the next week, all evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing and blatant ineligibility for office was swept aside to focus exclusively on whether Clinton might be prosecuted for using the same e-mail set up as Secretary of State as her Republican predecessor Colin Powell. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post continued to release evidence that Trump had mischaracterised or flat-out lied about his charitable giving and misused donations to his Foundation for personal gain. No one noticed. Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek published an investigation into the numerous times Trump or his staff deleted documents in violation of court orders to illegally stall lawsuits he was embroiled in. No one cared. A former spy revealed prior connections between Trump and the Russian government that raised the possibility of Moscow blackmailing Trump if he were in office. Nothing.

And then, with just two days to go before polling day, James Comey wrote another letter to Congress, acknowledging that the new e-mails did not change the conclusion the FBI had come to in July, and clearing Clinton of any wrongdoing.

Is this acknowledgement of Clinton’s innocence from the FBI Director who broke protocol and possibly the law by releasing information so close to an election enough to put the genie back in the bottle and quash the narrative that the Democratic nominee belongs in prison? Of course not. Trump seized on Comey’s announcement as more evidence that the FBI and the entire election is “rigged” against him, then continued at a rally in Michigan: “The rank-and-file agents at the FBI won’t let her get away with her terrible crimes.”

And just like the handcuffs dangled on live TV by the NC Republican Party director, that was that. Those “terrible crimes”, never specifically stated, let alone proved, have been the defining feature of a presidential race that has broken all norms of decency. And obsession with crimes that a lengthy investigation has proved Clinton did not commit has masked the numerous illegal dealings – tax fraud, harassment, contempt of court, perjury, sexual assault – that Trump himself is accused of.

Hillary Clinton isn’t a criminal, at least not by the standards of the American justice system. But Trump’s great triumph in this election has been convincing the world that evidence doesn’t matter. If he says “lock her up”, America will listen.