RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jim Comey has been a good friend to me over the years. I have disagreed strenuously with a number of decisions he made in connection with the Hillary Clinton investigation — with his rationales and with the fact that he was presuming to exercise authority that was not his to exercise. The independence of law enforcement is critical, but at times he seemed to redefine “independent” as beholden to only those institutional guidelines he subjectively judged worthy of following. Still, I personally know him to be a good man. I know that he loves the country and the FBI, and that every decision he made — regardless of whether it was right or wrong — was made in what he sincerely believed was the best interests of both.

Last week, he testified that he was made “mildly nauseous” by the thought that his decisions had an impact on the outcome of the election. I know what he means: It describes how I’ve felt in criticizing someone I’ve been fond of since we started out as young prosecutors three decades ago — except I’d have omitted the “mildly.” The only solace I take in it is that I know Jim did what he understood his job required — and he knows he is not the only one who goes about things that way.

The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey’s dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey’s much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation — viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch’s conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey’s “gratuitous” release of “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.” That “subject,” of course, would be Mrs. Clinton.

This (as I noted in a recent column) is exactly the line of attack Democrats have adopted since Clinton lost the election: Conveniently forget how ecstatic they were over Comey’s confident public assessment that the case was not worth charging, and remember only his scathing public description of the evidence — even though both were improper. Significantly, Rosenstein avoids any suggestion that Comey was wrong in concluding Clinton should not be indicted; nor does he in any way imply that Comey’s errors made it impossible to bring a wrongdoer to justice. That is, Rosenstein leaves unstated the partisan Republican critique of Comey. Instead, Clinton is portrayed as a victim. This will appeal to Democrats — especially since it will keep alive the fiction that Comey, rather than Clinton herself, is responsible for the Democrats’ stunning electoral defeat.

Rosenstein leaves unstated the partisan Republican critique of Comey.

Moreover, Rosenstein makes a point of quoting condemnations of Comey by Democrats prominent in law enforcement: former Obama attorney general Eric Holder and Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick. Recall that Comey endorsed Holder for AG. This was an important seal of approval at a time when critics (like yours truly) were arguing that Holder’s key participation in the Marc Rich pardon scandal was disqualifying: Comey had not only been a respected deputy attorney general in a Republican administration; he had for a time inherited the Marc Rich investigation as a prosecutor in New York, when Rich was among the FBI’s most wanted fugitives. Yet, Holder has blasted Comey for breaking with “fundamental principles” of the Justice Department, and thus undermining “public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI” (in a way, I suppose, that Holder’s own citation for contempt of Congress did not).

If ever there were an example of why a congressional committee is a terrible vehicle for investigating misconduct with alleged criminal or national-security implications, it was Monday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. The session, a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, featured the much-anticipated testimony of Democratic diva Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General fired for insubordination by President Trump in the early days of his administration. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that the proceedings were heavy on politically charged innuendo and light on substance.

If you were looking for hard evidence of Trump collusion in a Russian influence operation, there was none to be found. And if you were hoping for insight into the only known crime to have been committed in this escapade — namely, the leaking of classified information to the media — the hearing chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) was a disappointment.

What we mainly heard was that the Obama administration really does not like Michael Flynn. Not exactly the late-breaking news.

President Obama fired Flynn after making him head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn was a naysayer on Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Middle East — especially Iran and radical Islam. Flynn also made enemies throughout the so-called “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies because he called out our spooks on politicizing their analyses to paper over Obama’s policy failures. How surprising that many of these officials have no use for him either.

Thus, the schadenfreude runneth over in the Obama camp, which is clearly enjoying the general’s fall from grace. And one can hardly blame them for bursting into “I told you so” mode over lapses in judgment by President Trump’s original (and short-lived) national-security adviser — e.g., taking money in his post-military security-consulting career from enterprises tied to the murderous Putin regime and the government of Turkey’s Islamist thug, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Flynn defenders will get only so far observing that the autocratic Erdogan was beloved of the Obama and Bush administrations, too, and that the haul from Flynn’s Russian speaking gigs was a bare fraction of the cool $500,000 Bill Clinton got from a Kremlin-tied investment bank shortly before his wife, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, signed off on a government ruling that gave Russia control of one-fifth of U.S. uranium supplies. I myself have pointed out that Flynn (with co-author Michael Ledeen) wrote a bestselling book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies, in which he describes the Putin regime as a determined enemy bent on America’s destruction, and radical Islam as the ideology that animates the terrorist threat against our country. Given the general’s awareness of these facts, if he couldn’t perceive the unseemliness of profiting off the Russian and Turkish despots, then Democrats surely can’t be faulted for questioning his fitness, or Trump’s judgment in retaining him. Such critiques can hardly be dismissed as baseless, even if they are hypocritical, motivated by politics rather than security concerns, and grossly incomplete in the portrait they paint of Flynn’s distinguished military career.

Three years after the 2014 Veterans Health Administration scandal erupted in headlines, outrage, investigations, and the resignation of then-secretary of veterans’ affairs Eric Shinseki, veterans still must contend with an agency that provides less than stellar service.

A government report issued in February found that the VA’s shift to using more private-sector care for veterans has its own problems. They include cumbersome authorization and scheduling procedures, inadequate provider networks, and the potential for veterans having to pay their own treatment costs. Plus wait times for care, the heart of the 2014 scandal, are still long: an average of 45 days for 53% of veterans.

Problematic health care, as well as the descent into homelessness for a growing number of our nation’s veterans, belies our posture of national pride in our troops. We label them heroes, and then we fail to properly provide for them.

The problems of inadequate health care began to surface in 2012 and 2013, when two doctors at the Phoenix VA Health Care System voiced concerns. The whistleblowers said they had witnessed substandard care, that VA officials had falsified health service wait times, and that 40 veterans died while waiting for health care. These claims were later verified by the Veterans Administration, and investigations began nationwide.

A 2014 General Accounting Office audit of 731 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics reported that roughly 100,000 veterans nationwide were experiencing long wait times for health care. Another VA report detailed specific techniques used to falsify wait times.

Still other allegations of mismanagement surfaced in 2014, when a congressional committee revealed that more than $380,000 in bonuses were awarded to directors and top executives of 38 VA facilities where falsification of records and delays in care were being examined. The money was part of $2.7 million in extra pay given in 2013 to top-ranking VA officials.

Further, a 2015 VA report found that the VA had such sloppy record keeping that 307,000 veterans out of 867,000 pending cases on the VA’s list of electronic records were actually deceased. VA officials could not conclude if the veterans had received care, were still waiting for care, or had even applied for care. Nonetheless, some concluded that those veterans had died while waiting for medical help.