Former FBI Director Comey and acting attorney general Yates were fired for essentially the same reason, namely, usurping authority they did not have. Comey assumed the judgment, authority, and prerogatives of the attorney general to address Hillary Clinton’s crimes last July, only to exonerate her.

Even if he had recommended an indictment and prosecution, he would have been wrong to hold that press conference. His job was to investigate and put his findings quietly in the AG’s inbox. But not only was he wrong to hold that press conference, his recommendation not to indict was wrong as well. We have corrected one wrong. It is time to correct the other.

In a conversation with Fox Mews’ Martha MacCallum, Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano suggested that Comey’s firing was bad news for Hillary Clinton, clearing the way for her indictment for violations of the Espionage Act:

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let me suggest another scenario, that Rod Rosenstein reviewed the Hillary Clinton file, which he had never seen before and decided that Comey's judgment was utterly irregular and inappropriate and that maybe she should have been, and still can be indicted for espionage, the failure to safeguard state secrets while she was Secretary of State.

MARTHA MACCALLUM (HOST): Alright, we will see.

We will see indeed, perhaps sooner than we might expect. While Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorable” was marching to the polls pitchforks and torches in hand to deny her access to the presidency and a new revenue source for the Clinton Foundation, Scooter Libby got his law license back and was reinstated to the bar by the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff when he was charged with obstruction of an investigation into the “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Plame was in fact a desk jockey at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, not a secret agent in harm’s way. As Investor’s Business Daily noted:

Remember the alleged outing of the already known CIA officer and desk jockey Valerie Plame? We were told then that the Vanity Fair cover girl's 15 minutes of fame jeopardized our national security even if everybody already knew who she was.

"Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, went to jail because his memory of events and who said what to whom regarding Plame differed from the recollections of others, particularly news reporters.

Libby in fact did not out Plame, who was not a covert operative. Hillary Clinton, whose faulty memory caused her to say to the FBI she couldn’t recall some 39 times, did in fact endanger the lives of foreign operatives in her “carelessness”, as FBI Director James Comey put it, regarding classified emails.

Hillary’s lies and reckless carelessness included the transmission of emails containing the names of actual CIA operatives in the field involved in clandestine operations. As the New York Post reported:

Hillary Clinton’s e-mails included the names of CIA officers serving overseas and foreigners who are on the spy agency’s payroll -- potentially endangering their lives, it was reported Monday.

“It’s a death sentence,” a senior intelligence-community official told the Observer. “If we’re lucky, only [foreign] agents, not our officers, will get killed because of this.”

The paper said the intelligence community is in panic mode trying to determine which agents may have been compromised.

CIA officials assume foreign agencies intercepted unencrypted e-mails stored on Clinton’s home server while she was secretary of state.

So why was Libby convicted and Hillary Clinton not even indicted? In an interesting historical footnote, Comey, who falsely claimed that no serious prosecutor would take the case of Hillary Clinton, was among those who found sufficient evidence to prosecute and convict Libby. Comey, it appears, has even more explaining to do. As the Daily Caller reports:

Washington D.C.-based former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova believes the Libby decision is a “terrible blow” to FBI Director James Comey, who announced Sunday that the agency had no new conclusions on Hillary Clinton and her private server from the 650,000 new emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

“Scooter Libby was restored to the practice of law by the DC court of appeals because they believed that Scooter Libby presented evidence that his original trial had been corrupted by false testimony. And that false testimony was coerced by Jim Comey’s friend Patrick Fitzgerald and Comey was part of the team to destroy the vice president of the United States and it didn’t happen,” DiGenova said.

He added,” It’s such a smack in the face to Jim Comey.  Comey and Fitzgerald tried to frame Scooter Libby, and they did….”

The evidence against Hillary is damning, and the line of prosecutors willing to take the case would encircle the FBI building in Washington, D.C Judge Michael Mikasey, former attorney general under President George W. Bush, listed the charges that Hillary Clinton could face on Fox Radio’s “Kilmeade and Friends:”

We are looking at a range of things, everything from the misdemeanor that was charged against General Petraeus, which is putting classified information in an unprotected, classified setting, that’s a misdemeanor. Then there is destroying government records. Then there is taking information related to the national defense and treating it with gross negligence such as it becomes disclosed. And finally, there is obstruction of justice.”

There is the destruction of evidence under congressional subpoena. As even Comey admitted, Hillary lied about sending and receiving classified material; about having only one device, and about turning over all her emails. If intent is needed, what is accidental about smashing devices with hammers or using Bleach Bit to render emails unrecoverable? If you need a motive for having a private server, which speaks to intent, the obvious purpose is to cover up the “pay to play” trail that leads from the State Department to the Clinton Foundation.

As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, donations to the Clinton Foundation even played a factor in the refusal of Hillary Clinton’s State Department to designate Nigeria’s Boko Haram as a terrorist organization for two years:

Hillary's emails may be only the tip of an iceberg that could include Clinton Foundation donations to shield Boko Haram from being designated a terrorist group and her brother's involvement in a Haitian gold mine….

Last month, the Washington Post reported on another deal involving Rodham that could prove politically embarrassing and damaging for his sister. It seems that he sits on the board of a company that got a coveted gold-mining contract from the government of Haiti after the Clinton Foundation sponsored relief work in Haiti.

In interviews with the Post, both Rodham and the chief executive of Delaware-based VCS Mining said they were introduced at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, which seems more and more to be an unseemly mix of charitable work with the political and business interests of Clinton Foundation donors.

And then there's Hillary's strange dealings regarding the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, which just recently pledged its allegiance to the ever-expanding Islamic State -- dubbed the "JV team" by President Obama, who has yet to make good on his pledge to degrade and destroy them.

Last May, we wondered why for two years on Hillary Clinton's watch the State Department refused to designate a Nigerian Islamist group as a terrorist organization. This group has murdered thousands as it wages a real war on women. As Josh Rogin at the Daily Beast reports, the Clinton State Department "refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011" after the group bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last week asking for all of Hillary's records relating to Boko Haram and her reluctance to designate it a foreign terrorist organization.

Vitter also requested all of Hillary's communications with Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian construction tycoon who has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. Vitter noted that Chagoury had a financial interest in the potential impact of designating Boko Haram a terrorist group

How many of the more than 30,000 "personal" emails that Hillary deleted from her private account relate to these matters? Is that why she needed a private email server? We need to see that server. It might provide, er, a veritable gold mine of information.

This is but one example. The public corruption of Hilary and Bill Clinton was also on display in Colombia, Haiti, and other places. Hillary Clinton has endangered the lives of our foreign operatives, placed our national security at risk, lied to Congress, the FBI, and the American people, and used her public office to enrich herself and her family without benefit if a business or private sector job.

Various FBI offices are said to still be investigating the Clinton Foundation and we can only hope so. Comey doesn’t think there’s any fire under all that smoke but perhaps a Trump attorney general might think differently. We have hope in Trump’s own remarks in a presidential debate as reported by the New York Times:

About 20 minutes into the debate, Donald Trump delivered a menacing threat to Hillary Clinton. “If I win,” he warned, “I’m going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.” …

 “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton observed.

“Because,” Mr. Trump replied “you’d be in jail.”

This is not a Third World country where leaders incarcerate their predecessors and opponents on a whim. But we are a nation of laws and Hillary Clinton has broken many of them. Her only accomplishment in public office has been to so far avoid prosecution. President Trump should keep his promise to incarcerate this fugitive from justice. The voters have denied Hillary Clinton the presidency. A Trump Justice Department should deny Hillary Clinton her freedom.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.