RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Washington spectacle continues in the aftermath of President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, and unlike Ringling Bros. it won’t be closing soon. As a service to readers, we thought we’d sort the fact from the suspicion, hyperventilation and bluster and sum up what we’ve learned from the latest tumultuous week in the Trump Presidency.

• Whatever Mr. Trump’s calculations, Mr. Comey’s departure is good for the FBI, the Justice Department and the country. The President and White House first said Tuesday that he had acted based on the recommendation of his top two Justice officials. On Thursday he told NBC News that he was going to fire Mr. Comey anyway, and that he had the FBI’s Russia-Trump probe on his mind.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but with Mr. Trump who knows? He often acts on one impulse then changes his explanation later. The main problem of his Presidency is that he treats his own statements as a form of public entertainment rather than acts of persuasion to build public trust. This is self-destructive, but it means everyone else has to discount what he says and focus even more than with most politicians on the substance of what he does.

Mr. Comey’s political calculations—most of them aimed at preserving his personal standing—had damaged the bureau. His dismissal sent a message that the FBI director is politically accountable through the Attorney General and Deputy AG.

• Rod Rosenstein deserves better treatment—from Democrats and Mr. Trump. The Deputy AG’s memo on Mr. Comey’s 2016 behavior is persuasive and a public service. It bears the hallmark of a straight shooter concerned with the accountability that is essential to a credible rule of law.

Democrats are now saying they don’t trust him, though a chunk of the memo quoted what Democratic legal veterans had written. They should be pleased to have someone of recognized integrity in such a crucial Justice role. So should Mr. Trump, whose initial public statements appeared to load the responsibility for Mr. Comey’s dismissal on Mr. Rosenstein.

The Washington Post report that Mr. Rosenstein threatened to resign has since been contradicted—it doesn’t sound like his M.O.—but Mr. Trump should still apologize to him.

• The various Russia probes will continue with even more vigor. Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, a Comey loyalist, told Congress this week that he has seen no attempt to interfere with its investigation. He said the FBI has ample resources for the job and that he wasn’t aware of a request by Mr. Comey for more. This contradicted another media report.

If Mr. Trump hoped to cover something up, sacking the FBI director is exactly the wrong way to do it. Every G-man with a mediocre lead will leak if he thinks politicians are trying to sit on evidence. The next FBI director will be watched like a Russian agent for any hint of political favoritism. The House and Senate intelligence committees have also been given new impetus for thorough investigations.

• There still is no serious evidence of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 campaign. The worst detail so far is Michael Flynn’s denial (he says he forgot) that he had met with the Russian ambassador. The various other names who’ve flashed as targets of media suspicion are small-timers (Carter Page) or Beltway bandits ( Paul Manafort ) who look more like mercenaries than conspirators.

Perhaps such evidence will emerge. If it does, Mr. Trump’s Presidency isn’t likely to survive. If it doesn’t, he could emerge politically stronger for having his denials vindicated.

Just before the French election I installed the Le Monde app on my phone. French news doesn’t interest me except as it impacts financial markets or (rarely) geopolitics. That was a mistake; the lead story in France’s top national daily yesterday at 7 a.m. EST involved a “tutu protest” against the allegedly homophobic Wyoming senator Mike Enzi, in which men and women donned frilly ballet skirts for a gay rights demonstration. President-elect Emmanuel Macron is scrambling to field candidates for the National Assembly elections and proclaiming a grand reorganization of the European Union–but Le Monde reminds us what the French are really about. Trust them to point up the things we most dislike about ourselves.

Pace James Carville, we need a sign that reminds us: “It’s the culture, stupid.” One big idea unifies all of Nietzsche’s offspring–the Marxists, the Freudians, the French Existentialists, the critical theorists, the Deconstructionists, the queer theorists, and that is the right to self-invention. That is the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on human beings, for we are not clever or strong enough to reinvent ourselves. To the extent we succeed, we become monsters.

In the Judeo-Christian past, human beings had a destiny, men to earn bread by the sweat of their brow and women to bear children in pain. People knew that their impulses must be subordinated to the requirements of God and nature. Since the French Revolution, progressives have sought to overthrow the regime of obligation in favor of the right to self-definition. Before the 2016 presidential election, they thought they had succeeded. Justice Anthony Kennedy enshrined it in common law, in the Obergefell gay-marriage decision: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”

If you choose your identity at whim, your life has no meaning. That is true in the most parsimonious sense of the word: if you can arbitrarily decide to be a gender-fluid bestialist as well as a F to M to F trans-entity, then your life can “mean” any number of different things, all of them equally arbitrary. The term “meaning” implies a unique meaning, which in term implies a meaning that has grounds for being there (“unique” doesn’t imply that you have only one chance to choose your gender self-designation from among the fifty provided by Facebook, after which you are stuck with it forever). The progressives made their stand on transgender issues because it appears to be the triumph of self-invention over nature and tradition. That is a cruel joke on the tiny number of individuals who feel compelled to live their lives in the gender opposite to that of their birth. They have no choice in the matter, and live difficult lives.

Although President Donald J. Trump fired former FBI director James Comey this week, Obama should have sacked him last July. Comey’s behavior in the E-mailgate investigation suggests either staggering incompetence or a clumsy effort to whitewash Hillary Clinton’s crimes.

• During Hillary Clinton’s July 2 interrogation at FBI headquarters, she was not under oath. How could the FBI possibly reach “the last step of a year-long investigation” — as Comey described it at a July 7 House Government Oversight Committee hearing — with the focus of that probe answering questions without a potential perjury conviction hanging over her head? Especially given Hillary’s peanut-allergy-like aversion to the truth, not swearing her in confirmed either the FBI’s grotesque ineptness or a deliberate loophole through which Hillary could slither away.

Clinton’s defenders say that, had she lied, she still could have been prosecuted for making false statements to federal officials. If so, why bother to put any American under oath?

Making Hillary raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God, would have reminded her of her solemn duty to come clean. This also would have exposed her to possible prosecution under both the perjury and false-statements statutes. But Team Comey could not be bothered with any of this. Perhaps they couldn’t handle the truth.

• Former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills participated in this session as one of Hillary’s nine attorneys, even though she is deeply implicated in many of Hillary’s misdeeds. Thus, a potential witness or even co-conspirator in Hillary’s possible prosecution offered legal aid as the FBI quizzed her. None of Comey’s people considered this a problem?

• Comey steered clear of Hillary’s three-and-a-half hour interview. Given the unusual and enormous stakes, he should have faced her or, at least, supervised nearby. From an adjacent room, he could have offered guidance, monitored Hillary for inconsistencies, and instructed his staffers to ask pointed follow-up questions.

• Hillary’s maid, Marina Santos, had regular access to Hillary’s classified documents, via secured communications equipment in her Washington, D.C., mansion. Santos reportedly printed records for the former secretary of state to read at home, apparently including Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief. Regardless, Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post, “It also appears the FBI did not formally interview Santos as a key witness in its investigation.” How could Comey possibly have let Santos go uninterrogated?

• The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills and Clinton campaign aide Heather Samuels. This extraordinary promise was part of Mills’ and Samuels’ immunity deals.

However, veteran Washington attorney Joseph DiGenova told Sirius XM host David Webb that FBI agents refused to destroy these computers, in hopes that congressional investigators would subpoena them. DiGenova said in October that when he learned that these laptops still existed, “I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet.”

Wherever the laptops of these top Clinton henchwomen are today, why on Earth would the FBI even agree to junk evidence in this case — be it damning or exculpatory? If any of the judges involved in this case asked for those laptops, what did the FBI expect to say? “Sorry, your honor. We planned to throw them into a furnace.”

President Trump’s decisive removal of FBI director James Comey predictably triggered an avalanche of Democratic-party criticism. Dropping their own bitter attacks of Comey without missing a beat, Democrats rallied to Comey’s defense. They compared Trump’s decision to Richard Nixon’s discharge of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate investigation and claimed that, in Jeffrey Toobin’s words, the U.S. was undergoing “the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.” “They will put in a stooge who will shut down this investigation,” Toobin sagely opined.

Trump’s critics are the captives of their overwrought imaginations. The Watergate analogy is hackneyed. Trump made the right call. Comey had to go for the nation’s best interests. Indeed, Trump’s biggest mistake was one of timing – he should have told Comey to pack his bags on January 21, 2017, rather than waiting until the White House had become embroiled in controversy over the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Several months ago, we urged Comey to do the nation the service of resigning. We argued that his repeated and clumsy interventions in last year’s presidential election had lost him the confidence of the public at large — left, right, and center. No FBI director – certainly none who professed to be concerned with the Bureau’s integrity and good standing – should have remained in office under those circumstances. By resigning, Comey would not have had to admit any fault on his part. Instead, he chose to stay on, apparently considering himself to be at once politically unassailable and also indispensable to the investigation of Trump’s campaign. He was dead wrong on both counts. His arrogance has cost him dear. Captain Ahab, meet Moby Dick.

Critics claim that, by firing Comey, Trump has attempted to abort the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s files and efforts to influence the presidential election. Color us skeptical about the alleged political collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that any of Vladimir Putin’s schemes actually affected the outcome of the election. We are also unsure what federal law President Trump allegedly violated. Even if some of his campaign aides might have failed to register as foreign agents, or, in a worst-case scenario, even might have colluded with foreign powers, there appears to be no evidence that these alleged ties influenced the Trump campaign or the White House. Hillary Clinton lost because she was a terrible candidate and Trump won because he appealed to parts of the electorate that have suffered from economic globalization.

(Author’s note: In August 2016, I wrote an article entitled “James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor,” warning readers that the Comey fish was already rotting and that things were bound to get worse. Clearly, they just did. And it’s just as clear that the uncontrolled hysteria we are witnessing from Democrats has to do not with bogus accusations about Russia but about the criminal indictments coming down the pike for the people they’ve blindly defended for decades—that would be Bill & Hill Clinton—and possibly against even bigger fish! I’ve updated this article by abbreviating its length but also adding a few sentences. -JS)

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he headed is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world—the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for a far-left Alinsky acolyte like Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient—and also subservient—accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things—“straight-shooter,” “unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”—don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in yet another Clinton fiasco case last summer, allow her to…

1. Create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician––that would be Hillary––off the hook, and,

2. Appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her email account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, said that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy wrote. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that “the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton’s email defense. Then, “in a whiplash-inducing change of narrative, he announced that `no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office.”

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

It is certainly not because he wasn’t taught by his upstanding parents the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral. One could make the case—and many have—that he is as close to a moral man as it gets in public life. According to his bio in Wikipedia, Comey, a lawyer, majored in religion at the College of William and Mary, and wrote his thesis about the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell, emphasizing their common belief in public action.

If a FBI director is doing his job, we probably should neither see nor hear of him much on television.

The FBI director by his very office holds enormous power. And like the IRS director, by definition he or she must show restraint given the vast resources at his discretion and thus the potential for abuse. In other words, we want a FBI director to exude coolness, stay dispassionate, and remain professional. I don’t think that has ever been a description that fit Director James Comey.

Comey’s nadir came in the summer of 2016 when, confused over the investigatory role of the FBI and the prosecutorial prerogatives of the Justice Department, he de facto turned the FBI into investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury in presenting damning evidence against Hillary Clinton, then nullifying it, then reopening the case, then re-reopening it and backing off — all in front of television cameras in the midst of a heated presidential campaign.

And then after doing all that, Comey confused the act with its intent, and as a veritable legislator reinvented statutes about communicating classified information by suggesting that even if one likely committed a felony, but did not intend to (not a proven assertion), then it wasn’t really a felony.

Comey’s behavior was never properly addressed. His recent performance in front of Congress likely sealed his fate. We do not expect our FBI director to whine, in teenager fashion, about being treated unfairly, as he alleged when Loretta Lynch dumped the Clinton e-mail scandal in his lap. (A good FBI director, of course, would simply have run the investigation, presented the findings to the Justice Department, and then have let them deal with it (if not Lynch, then someone else). Comey misrepresented the volume of Huma Abedin’s improper e-mails; and in general always fell back on loud assertions of FBI integrity rather than displaying it through his behavior and statements.

Nor did Comey have a reservoir of good will. Long ago, he acted bizarrely in the John Ashcroft hospitalization melodrama; he was responsible for the career of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald who miscarried justice in the case of Scooter Libby (not to mention Fitzgerald’s own subsequent Conrad Black prosecution). His legacy is that Hillary Clinton paid no price for illegally setting up an improper e-mail server, destroying evidence, and communicating classified material in an insecure fashion.

Comey seems to think that he could freely discuss the charges of Russian collusion, but not so transparently the far stronger evidence of unlawful unmasking of Americans caught up in (or in fact targeted by) government surveillance — apparently in understandable fear that the Democrats and media posed the greater danger to his career.

With all the calls for an independent prosecutor for President Trump after his firing of the FBI’s James Comey, why not move the investigation to the House Judiciary Committee? It could get right down to whether the president has done anything worthy of impeachment.

It’s not that I think the president is guilty. It’s just the only properly constitutional way to investigate this, or any, president. No one has adduced any evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. I’d like to see him cleared. But if he is to be investigated for crimes or misdemeanors, the House, with its impeachment authority, is the venue.

The Democrats are outraged at the thought that Mr. Trump, though he denies it, may have fired the director because the FBI boss was investigating the president. But if Mr. Comey was investigating the president, that would be grounds to take the investigation away from him (or simply to fire him). If the president is the target, the matter belongs to the House.

Like others in my generation, I came to this view through the experience of Watergate, when President Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Whitewater, when President Clinton was pursued by independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

Cox was brought in after Attorney General Elliot Richardson —ignoring the separation of powers—made a deal with Congress to diminish the president’s authority. The deal was that Cox would be dismissed only for cause. Cox subpoenaed Nixon and refused a compromise. The president then ordered the attorney general to fire him. An insubordinate Richardson and his deputy refused. It took Solicitor General Robert Bork to do the constitutional deed.

Eventually, the Judiciary Committee hired staff and went after Nixon, voting out three articles of impeachment (obstruction, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress). Before the House could decide whether to press the charges, Nixon quit. CONTINUE AT SITE

Testifying last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, James Comey recalled a moment that should have held more significance for him than it did. At the height of the presidential campaign, President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had chosen to meet with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac. That, said the now-former FBI director, “was the capper for me.” Hillary Clinton’s emails were being probed, but Ms. Lynch was too conflicted to “credibly complete the investigation.” So Mr. Comey stepped in.

Donald Trump and senior Justice Department leaders might appreciate the impulse. According to Democrats and the media, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is too conflicted to recommend sacking Mr. Comey; the Trump administration is too conflicted to name a successor; the entire Justice Department and the Republican Congress are too conflicted to conduct true oversight.

Entirely missing from this narrative is the man who was perhaps the most conflicted of all: James Comey. The FBI head was so good at portraying himself as Washington’s last Boy Scout—the only person who ever did the right thing—that few noticed his repeated refusal to do the right thing. Mr. Comey might still have a job if, on any number of occasions, he’d acknowledged his own conflicts and stepped back.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo to Mr. Sessions expertly excoriated Mr. Comey’s decision to “usurp” Ms. Lynch’s authority and his “gratuitously” fulsome July press conference. But Mr. Comey’s dereliction of duty preceded that—by his own admission. Remember, he testified that the Lynch-Clinton meeting was but the “capper.” Before that, he told lawmakers, “a number of things had gone on which I can’t talk about yet that made me worry the department leadership could not credibly complete the investigation.”

We don’t know what these things were, but it seems the head of the FBI had lost confidence—even before TarmacGate—that the Justice Department was playing it anywhere near straight in the Clinton probe. So what should an honor-bound FBI director do in such a conflicted situation? Call it out. Demand that Ms. Lynch recuse herself and insist on an appropriate process to ensure public confidence. Resign, if need be. Instead Mr. Comey waited until the situation had become a crisis, and then he ignored all protocol to make himself investigator, attorney, judge and jury.

By the end of that 15-minute July press conference, Mr. Comey had infuriated both Republicans and Democrats, who were now universally convinced he was playing politics. He’d undermined his and his agency’s integrity. No matter his motives, an honor-bound director would have acknowledged that his decision jeopardized his ability to continue effectively leading the agency. He would have chosen in the following days—or at least after the election—to step down. Mr. Comey didn’t.

Which leads us to Mr. Comey’s most recent and obvious conflict of all—likely a primary reason he was fired: the leaks investigation (or rather non-investigation). So far the only crime that has come to light from this Russia probe is the rampant and felonious leaking of classified information to the press. Mr. Trump and the GOP rightly see this as a major risk to national security. While the National Security Agency has been cooperating with the House Intelligence Committee and allowing lawmakers to review documents that might show the source of the leaks, Mr. Comey’s FBI has resolutely refused to do the same.

Why? The press reports that the FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor Carter Page. It’s still unclear exactly under what circumstances the government was listening in on former Trump adviser Mike Flynn and the Russian ambassador, but the FBI was likely involved there, too. Meaning Mr. Comey’s agency is a prime possible source of the leaks.CONTINUE AT SITE

An absurd argument is now being put forward by some Democratic ideologues: namely that President Trump engaged in the crime of obstructing justice by firing FBI Director James Comey. Whatever one may think of the President’s decision to fire Comey as a matter of policy, there is absolutely no basis for concluding that the President engaged in a crime by exercising his statutory and constitutional authority to fire director Comey. As Comey himself wrote in his letter to the FBI, no one should doubt the authority of the President to fire the Director for any reason or no reason.

It simply cannot be a crime for a public official, whether the President or anyone else, to exercise his or her statutory and constitutional authority to hire or fire another public official. For something to be a crime there must be both an actus reus and mens rea – that is, a criminal act accompanied by a criminal state of mind. Even assuming that President Trump was improperly motivated in firing Comey, motive alone can never constitute a crime. There must be an unlawful act. And exercising constitutional and statutory power cannot be the actus reusof a crime.

So let’s put this nonsense behind us and not criminalize policy differences as extremists in both parties have tried to do. Republican and Democratic partisans often resort to the criminal law as a way of demonizing their political enemies. “Lock her up,” was the cry of Republican partisans against Hillary Clinton regarding her misuse of her email server. Now “obstruction of justice” is the “lock him up” cry of partisan Democrats who disagree with President Trump’s decision to fire Comey. I opposed the criminalization of policy differences when Texas Governor Perry and Congressman Tom Delay were indicted, and I strongly oppose the investigation now being conducted against Prime Minister Netanyahu. The criminal law should be used as the last resort against elected officials, not as the opening salvo in a political knife-fight.