Within hours, Orin Kerr twitted the obvious:
Interesting to see Comey transformed from a pro-Clinton hack to an anti-Clinton hack with just one letter.
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) October 29, 2016
And then the machine of a presidential campaign turned on the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for doing the unspeakable, throwing a sabot into the gears of an apparent downhill slide to victory.
The spin is all about the feelings of the few eligible voters who are either not committed regardless of the news or somehow missed the past 1000 days because they were working hard and feeding their families. To the firmly partisan, the only question is for or against, will Jim Comey’s letter ruin Hillary Clinton’s moment of glory. Nothing else matters.
Did Jim Comey, by sending a letter to Congress to correct his testimony, do wrong? The most thorough discussion has already been written at Lawfare, which brings facts (such as the Lynch/Bill Clinton meeting on the plane just before the first email announcement, which shifted the unpleasant duty from where it belonged, with the AG, to Comey because Lynch got caught playing in the mud with Bill) where partisans want only spin.
When Comey gave his first press conference on the Clinton emails, some of us cringed. Had anyone else been nabbed for the same thing, they would be going to trial. All the talk otherwise was nonsense, and people who do this for a living knew it, even if they preferred to pretend otherwise because of partisanship. There was only one reasonable explanation, that Comey did not want to be responsible for dictating the outcome of a presidential campaign by calling for an indictment.
That was, by some lights, a fair call on his part. Disingenuous to all the people who had been prosecuted for far less, but then, they weren’t running for president.
Does the second letter change things? No one can say, including other “sources” in the Bureau or Main Justice. Neither is in a position to know both the extent of evidence or make a clean, unbiased call, of what should have been done. Comey did his duty to Congress to correct his testimony timely, the way an independent FBI director is supposed to.
If anything, Comey’s letter in compliance with his duty to disclose stands in contrast to Clinton’s intentional destruction of subpoenaed evidence, which would also have caused the weight of the law to come crashing down on anyone else’s head. But not Clinton’s.
Is there smoking-gun evidence of wrongdoing that might justify Comey’s “interference” in a presidential campaign? Frank Bruni gives the whitewash view:
They could also be pleas from Clinton that Huma Abedin fetch her a skinny latte from Starbucks. We don’t know. And the horrifying thing is that the F.B.I. director, James Comey, didn’t seem to know, either, even as he disclosed their existence to the world.
This, of course, is mostly false. Comey wrote that the emails were “pertinent.” While the FBI hasn’t vetted the thousand(s?) of emails, that doesn’t mean Comey hasn’t seen any of them. He must have seen some to make that assertion. If they were demands to fetch a latte, they wouldn’t be pertinent. That Comey hasn’t read and vetted every one doesn’t mean he knows nothing. Not knowing everything isn’t the same as not knowing anything. Bruni should know better.
But what about keeping it a secret from the Clinton campaign? Hillary immediately called for disclosure by the FBI, a smart tactical move both because it gave the right impression, that she has nothing to hide, and she knew it couldn’t possibly happen. It was a very safe bet.
When Anderson Cooper asked her directly whether she had spoken to Huma Abedin, who is attached to her at the hip if not other places, Hillary dodged the question. If Clinton wants to know what dirt is buried, all she needs to do is ask. It’s not as if Huma isn’t on speed dial. Her claims that she doesn’t know are disingenuous. If she doesn’t, it’s because she chooses not to know. And the chances of her not knowing are zero.
So a public who extols the virtues of honesty and transparency is now castigating Jim Comey for his failure to play the delay game, the white lie of keeping this in his pocket until after the election is over. White lies are good lies, and when it helps the candidate you support, it’s a good lie. Of course, it’s still a lie, but given the extent of hypocrisy we’ve endured and embraced, what’s one more lie?
Then again, it’s not like the lie that Hillary looks good in pantsuits. It’s the lie that a person running for president didn’t do what others have done and gone to prison for. Then again, the sitting president smoked weed, and yet others sit in prison for weed. Talking our way out of hypocrisy is as American as mom and apple pie, no matter how many moms you have.
So it all boils down to one question. Why, if Jim Comey made the decision not to call for an indictment of Hillary Clinton last July, after finding ample evidence to support a prosecution, did he send the letter to Congress knowing it would cause an explosion, if not the apocalypse, in the presidential campaign?
Bruni rationalizes away Comey’s decision:
But his desire to be a Boy Scout may have eclipsed sound judgment here, and rectitude is a quaint, shortsighted notion in an election this rife with accusations of bias, this primed for scandal, this frenzied.
The dirtier the election, the more acceptable it is to lie and deceive? This is what we’ve become, a nation of liars and third-string apologists? Wikileaks. Clinton Foundation. Emails. If we’re going to talk about the lack of “sound judgment,” Comey is a piker. And the kicker is that none of this, none, has anything to do with the stench from the Trump side. None of this makes Trump any more qualified to be president than he was before.
We could use some more quaint boy scout rectitude in government. Instead, we have Clinton and Trump, one of whom will become president of the United States of America, elected based on which lies America prefers.
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The cognitive dissonance required to believe this is all Comey’s fault blows me a way.
Emails were deleted. Emails were found. They could only be found BECAUSE they were deleted. Who deleted them again?
– Don’t care, move along citizen. This is Comey coming after the person that should be winning.
But if they weren’t deleted, how would there be any resumption of an investigation? Isn’t this on HRC?
– Why do you want Trump to ruin our Country?
Honestly, I’m getting to the point where I’m for a smaller government out of necessity – we don’t have enough people that can think straight enough to run the joint.
To appreciate the dissonance, it first requires the cognizance. I don’t know whether we still have it.
I wish I had written this so I could make it my pinned tweet.
I think Comey went public with this because Justice was refusing to help him get the warrant(s) that were needed to look at the emails. Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News had a story yesterday about FBI-Justice negotiations to get warrants. So this may be more about internal politics, in spite of national politics.
Once the media adopts the myth, there is no going back to get the “real story,” so chances are poor that we will ever know what “really” motivated Comey.
Comey’s motives are probably complex, somewhat at least. For starters though, it looks to me that he was doing what he felt necessary or prudent to avoid being set up by people in the Justice Department and other parts of government. No matter what heat Comey is drawing now, he has shielded himself from anyone setting him up — for not reporting in a timely manner information which came to him on a matter he has already spoken about considerably in public. To do anything other than what he did do would have opened him up to being engaged in a coverup. In relation to this, I think Comey’s action was an act of prompt, relevant, and advisable transparency, and in fact quite modestly styled despite the predictable hysteria surrounding it. As bad as it may look for Comey, the ball is now thrown into the court of others — most notably, the Department of Justice which now should explain why it believes the information should not have been reported, but apparently according to its policy should have been suppressed. Also there is the matter of Congressional oversight along with the simpler matter of Congressional interest satisfied by the letter Comey sent to members of relevant Congressional committees. Other points are (a) Comey could not expect the information would have remained out of public awareness in the atmosphere of strategic leaking in government these days, and (b) the connection of the Clinton emails to the nut case Anthony Weiner alone is enough to alarm anyone, such as Comey trying to cut himself off from any damage which might arise in appearing to dismiss possibilities of damage that could be done to national security or the careers of any individuals. The connection of the emails to Weiner is probably a strong undercurrent to how things shake out from here. Comey, like many others in the country, is trying to survive and to the degree this is possible, distance himself from and protect himself amid the madness that is overtaking the country.
How long have you been under the belief that you can read other people’s minds?
“Samuel became even more interested in politics than his father had been, served the [] Party tirelessly as a king-maker, caused that party to nominate men who would whirl like dervishes, bawl fluent Babylonian, and order the militia to fire into crowds whenever a poor man seemed on the point of suggesting that he and a Rosewater were equal in the eyes of the law.” Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
That Vonnegut really pisses me off. He used up all the good stories.
Many believe that there’s an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” It’s actually apocryphal, but the meaning still fits. Even with everything else that has happened, could anyone reasonably anticipate that the Weiner dick pix (or at least the investigation) would somehow be roped into the election campaign? Interesting times indeed.
(I read yesterday the excellent Lawfare piece you link to. I have fixed feelz, but no firm conclusions, so I’ll not state my feelz.)
That must be a remarkably obscure curse since no one has ever heard of it before. Oh wait.
I’ve been offline a couple of days with stomach flu, so I didn’t get this from Causes.com:
“James Comey has repeatedly botched his investigations into the emails. His first catastrophe was the press conference when the director said he had no proof to prosecute Clinton, yet he mansplained to, and passed judgement upon, Clinton and women everywhere–subjective opinions that are simply not in his job description.”
JAMES COMEY: RESIGN
James Comey has repeatedly botched his investigations into the emails. His first catastrophe was the press conference when the director said he had no proof to prosecute Clinton, yet he mansplained to, and passed judgement upon, Clinton and women everywhere–subjective opinions that are simply not in his job description.
Sign the petition now
Now, he is too much of a coward to follow FBI protocol and not comment on an ongoing investigation for fear that Republicans will complain after the election.
(link deleted)
Finally, he has no control over the political hacks inside the FBI that will stop at nothing to prevent another Democrat from becoming president.
He encompasses everything that this country hates about Washington–a self-righteous bureaucrat who is incapable of doing anything except covering his own ass.
As Bernie Sanders said, “Enough with the damn emails!”
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How quickly the worm turns when one leaves the approved narrative.
Lee
Team sports is a bitch.