New Hope for the Truth of 2016? Hints that congressional investigators may finally pull back the lid on James Comey’s actions. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-hope-for-the-truth
Two men will be key in the next Congress to getting to the bottom of the remaining mysteries of the 2016 election. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, likely chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has indicated he’s not going the let the biggest sleeping dog of the 2016 race lie.
“Totally,” he told CNN when asked whether he would probe FBI actions during the campaign. “The oversight function will be very much front and center.”
On the Democratic side, Rep. Adam Schiff told the Los Angeles Times that his first goal is to restore “comity” to his own fractious House Intelligence Committee. (Presumably the Times reporter didn’t mishear the word “comedy.”) Less felicitously, Mr. Schiff added, “We’re going to be defending the independence of the Justice Department,” by which he meant protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by President Trump.
Except the Mueller investigation is expected to wrap up soon, and it appears to have found nothing particularly exciting. Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff has finally shown some interest in the truly explosive unfinished business of 2016. He told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that if former FBI chief James Comey’s account of his actions during the 2016 race is accurate, then his intervention likely represents the “most measurable” and “most significant way in which the Russians may have impacted the outcome of the election.”
Mr. Schiff’s acknowledgment is especially interesting because, unlike the rest of us, he would have seen a classified Justice Department report on this episode, which remains withheld from the public.
Mr. Comey, we now know, was acting on dubious, possibly planted Russian intelligence when he intervened in the Hillary Clinton email matter. He was acting from a counterintelligence motive (he was worried about a Russian effort to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s victory), not the criminal investigatory motive he pretended at the time. In adopting this spy vs. spy rationale, he surely would have consulted with his Obama administration colleagues, CIA Director John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
And when Mr. Comey intervened a second time, reopening the investigation days before the election, he did so to protect the credibility of the original operation. This step, even Mr. Comey now concedes, may have tipped the Electoral College to Mr. Trump. CONTINUE AT SITE
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