Vox Sentences: We are sick of emailing you about Hillary Clinton's damn emails

The FBI says Clinton was "extremely careless" but not criminal; Australia gets in on the political dys-fun-ction; a deadly month for ISIS.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Carelessness is not a crime (on this particular occasion)

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

• FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that his agency is recommending that prosecutors not file charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Prosecutors at the Department of Justice still have the ability to contravene the FBI's recommendation, though they probably won't — Comey asserted no "reasonable prosecutor" would think there was enough evidence of a crime to bring charges.

  [FBI]

• To many conservatives, this looks like an act of pure petty tyranny: President Obama's administration declining to prosecute his preferred successor.

  [The Blaze / Matt Walsh]

• But it's hardly an out-of-the-blue decision. As Politico's Josh Gerstein noted months ago, people are usually only charged under the statute Clinton was accused of violating if there's evidence that they deliberately broke the law for malicious reasons.

  [Politico / Josh Gerstein]

• That kind of criminal intent standard (also known as mens rea) is absent from many federal laws, and Republicans tend to be more interested than Democrats in restoring it. But in this case, it saved the presumptive Democratic nominee.

  [Reason / Scott Shackford]

• (It's worth noting that when it comes to protecting government secrecy, the Obama administration isn't always so deferential to precedent.)

  [The Intercept / Glenn Greenwald]

• Ironically, Comey is a Republican. And he's been investigating alleged misconduct by Clinton since her husband was president.

  [Time / Massimo Calabresi]

• Comey did, however, have enough evidence to deliver a several-minute tongue lashing on Clinton's "extremely careless" behavior — a phrase you can probably expect to hear in anti-Clinton attack ads for the rest of the campaign.

  [Chicago Tribune]

• Comey's comments might also feature in ongoing civil litigation against Clinton over her emails — which just got a lot more complicated, as the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that private emails can sometimes be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

  [Politico / Josh Gerstein]

Politics in 2016 are populist and dysfunctional, Down Under edition

Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

• An unexpectedly close federal election over the weekend has left Australia several steps away from forming a functional government.

  [NYT / Michelle Innis]

• The right-wing Liberal Party had been expected to maintain its majority. Instead, it might not even have a plurality (the opposition Labor Party might win more seats).

  [CNN / Ben Westcott]

• Australians appear to agree that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is to blame for his party's poor performance. Turnbull took over the position by successfully challenging then-PM Tony Abbott in an intra-Liberal coup — then tried to run the 2016 campaign on the promise of "stability" in government.

  [The Australian / Janet Albrechtsen]

• But this isn't just a Turnbull problem, or a Liberal problem. Both major parties are in trouble. Thirteen percent of Australians voted for neither — which is highly unusual.

  [ABC (Australia) / Chris Uhlmann]

• This means that whoever ends up with more seats will probably have to work with one of the ideologically disparate minor parties to form a coalition government.

  [DoesAustraliaHaveAGovernment.Today]

• Then the victor will have to navigate what the press is already calling a "restive" Senate — in other words, the new class of senators voted into office by the anti-establishment wave.

  [WSJ / Rob Taylor]

• Among these: Senator-elect Pauline Hanson, who was dismissed as a fringe figure and whose One Nation party is distinguished by opposition to Islam, but who was elected via support from economically struggling, culturally anxious regions. Is this story getting familiar yet?

  [The Age / David Wroe]

A terrible way to celebrate Ramadan

Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

• At least 215 people were killed in Baghdad Monday when a truck bomb exploded in a crowded shopping area. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack.

  [CNN / Mohammed Tawfeeq, Joe Sterling, Tiffany Ap, and Hamdi Alkhshali]

• For Iraqis, it's another sign that the government is incapable of protecting them from terrorism; the country's interior minister has offered his resignation.

  [AP]

• But it's also part of a bigger wave of ISIS violence as Ramadan draws to a close. Three smaller (and much less lethal) bombings happened in Saudi Arabia Monday, including one outside a mosque in the holy city of Medina.

  [NYT / Ben Hubbard]

• That's not to mention the cafe hostage attack in Bangladesh last week (although the Bangladeshi government denies that ISIS is responsible, even though ISIS said it was) and other attacks throughout the holy month.

  [ABC News / David Caplan]

• This isn't an unexpected development. ISIS used to be a territorial group. It's lost most of its territory. Terrorism is easier than recapturing land.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• One way to look at this is that the physical "caliphate" is being replaced by a virtual one.

  [National Interest / Brian R. Moore and Sim Vireak]

• Another way: ISIS can claim to "inspire" attacks without actually planning them, or can put would-be attackers in touch with associates without planning the attack itself. This blog post by Clint Watts explains the distinctions well.

  [War on the Rocks / Clint Watts]

MISCELLANEOUS

The FDA's war on raw cookie dough is alarmist and harmful to all that is good and delicious in this world. [Slate / LV Anderson]

• The "obesity paradox" — that thin people in certain cases have worse health outcomes than overweight or even obese people — appears to go away when you account for the fact that smokers and sick people are likelier to be thin.

  [Whole Health Source / Stephan Guyenet]

• Today in "good news that's framed as bad news," McDonald's and Walmart shareholders are upset because of increasing wages for workers — wages that are translating not into higher prices but lower profits.

  [FT / Lindsay Whipp and Sam Fleming]

• George W. Bush went to bed at 10 pm. Bill Clinton stayed up late talking with friends. Barack Obama stays up late, because he takes four to five hours a night to be alone and think.

  [NYT / Michael Shear]

• Peter Langman is a psychologist who specializes in studying school shooters, compiling a database of 133. He classifies them into three types: traumatized, psychopathic, and psychotic.

  [Washington Post / Michael Rosenwald]

VERBATIM

"We just did the hardest thing NASA’s ever done." [Rick Nybakken to the Atlantic / Adrienne LaFrance]

• "We’ve been celebrating the Declaration as people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we should, but not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, if not more, about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable rights."

  [NYT / Robert Parkinson]

• "Of the 52 common foods that we asked experts and the public to rate, none had a wider gap than granola bars. More than 70 percent of ordinary Americans we surveyed described it as healthy, but less than a third of nutritional experts did."

  [NYT / Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz]

• "Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers."

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• "There was a noticeable comfort, as if they had been encouraged by not just Mr. Trump’s rhetoric but also their shared proximity to so many people of a similar mind. And then it dawned on me: For them the arena, and then the parking lot, had become their own safe spaces, where these people, who had long been reined in by changing societal expectations and especially the heavy burden of political correctness, felt they were finally free of the ridiculous expectations of overly sensitive liberals."

  [NYT / Jared Yates Sexton]

WATCH THIS

Proxemics: the study of personal space [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

Edward T. Hall

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