The Comey Reprieve Trump keeps the FBI director on the job. Good luck. (Bad Move)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-comey-reprieve-1485302939
Regrets, they’ll have a few. That’s our prediction for the Trump Administration on news that the White House has asked James Comey to stay on as FBI director.
“Extraordinarily competent” is how Chief of Staff Reince Priebus described Mr. Comey in a TV interview earlier this month. The director even got something approaching a hug from President Trump at a weekend event to honor law enforcement officials and first responders.
If experience is a guide, Mr. Comey is the sort of man to be embraced with extreme political caution. Democrats cheered last summer when he invented a legal distinction between extreme carelessness and gross negligence to give Hillary Clinton a legal pass for mishandling classified information. Now they blame him for throwing the election to Mr. Trump for informing Congress, 11 days before the election, that he was reopening the investigation.
Republicans have also been burned by Mr. Comey, not just over his Clinton gymnastics but also his efforts to undermine the Bush Administration’s antiterror efforts during a prior stint as Deputy Attorney General. Now he will be responsible for current investigations into suspected links between the Russian government and some of Mr. Trump’s close associates.
We believe as much as anyone that FBI directors should be willing to go after criminality irrespective of politics. The trouble with Mr. Comey is that he is nothing if not political, especially when it comes to opportunities to burnish his personal reputation by going after the objects of liberal wrath.
Ask Frank Quattrone, the investment banker wrongly targeted by Mr. Comey in the post-Enron prosecution frenzy; or Scooter Libby, victim of the Javert-like exertions of Mr. Comey’s close friend Patrick Fitzgerald during the Plamegate hysteria.
It’s possible the Administration decided to keep Mr. Comey to spite Democrats who want him fired, or perhaps to avoid another nomination battle, though former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly would probably sail to confirmation. Maybe the Administration is also betting Mr. Comey will be a more pliable director if he feels a debt to the President for not firing him.
If so, that’s a bad bet. Mr. Comey has repeatedly demonstrated that he is willing to abuse his authorities in order to court Beltway favor. Whether or not that someday comes to haunt the Trump Administration, it makes him unfit to lead the FBI.
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