If you look at significant federal investigations you find they tend to follow a pattern. The associates of the main target, the bit players, are targeted. They are presented with the option of fighting a criminal indictment that could, upon conviction, result in decades in prison OR they can plead guilty to felonious mopery with the intent to lurk, take a misdemeanor conviction, and give evidence against the main target. Via POLITICO:

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most trusted confidante, is increasingly becoming a central figure in the email scandal that’s haunting her boss on the campaign trail, as Republicans and federal judges seek information about Clinton’s communications while she was running the State Department.

The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday told a federal judge that Abedin — long considered her boss’s keeper and even dubbed her “shadow” — had her own email account on Clinton’s now infamous home-brewed server, “which was used at times for government business,” Clinton acknowledged. That’s an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department.

Abedin has hired a team of lawyers, one of whom is a former Clinton aide, who are responding to information requests from the courts and State. They’ve denied any wrongdoing on the part of their client and said Abedin is cooperating with requests for official emails in her possession, aiming to turn over all her correspondence by the end of August.

Abedin is a pretty obvious pressure point in this investigation. She is a Clinton crony who was brought into the State Department as deputy chief of staff despite having no qualifications other than editing “Muslim Minority Affairs” journal while in college and performing… hmmm… services for Clinton.

What makes Abedin particularly vulnerable is that during part of her tenure as a senior State Department official she was given dispensation to hold two other jobs at the same them. She has been under some degree of federal scrutiny for a while over this arrangement and her refusing to disclose the arrangement on her financial report:

While continuing her work at the State Department, in the latter half of 2012, she also worked for Teneo, a strategic consulting firm, which was founded by Doug Band, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. Teneo has advised corporate clients like Coca-Cola and MF Global, the collapsed brokerage firm run by Jon S. Corzine, a former governor of New Jersey.

At the same time, Ms. Abedin served as a consultant to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and worked in a personal capacity for Mrs. Clinton as she prepared to transition out of her job as secretary of state.

It is not clear what role Mrs. Clinton played in approving the arrangement. Some good-government groups have been critical of such situations, saying public employees’ loyalty should be solely to the public and their government work, rather than private firms and figures.

The question now becomes whether Huma Abedin, Mrs. Anthony Weiner, Mrs. Carlos Danger, is willing to take a bullet for Hillary Clinton. And even if she is, the fact that Sid Blumenthal is involved and stands to be completely free and clear of jeopardy if he is capable of telling the truth, she has to wonder if her cooperation would actually do more damage.

The person whose judgment Hillary most trusted in handling sensitive information was a woman who married Anthony Weiner. Think about that.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 13, 2015