RUTHFULLY YOURS

(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.”

In his memoir, James Comey cites a “development still unknown to the American public to this day.” This mysterious development, he says, was central to his decision to intervene publicly in the Hillary Clinton email case.

Now this is strange because the big mystery was apparently disclosed in a flurry of reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN a year ago. His insistence in his book that the secret is likely to remain classified for decades also seems a bit hilarious when so much of the story was spontaneously declassified by anonymous leakers last spring, likely including Mr. Comey or people working for him.

Let’s recall what spawned that year-ago leakfest. It’s a question Mr. Comey leaves untouched in his book. Many in the FBI thought the intelligence was fake, possibly a Russian plant. The final reporting word was CNN’s, which cited sources saying Mr. Comey knew the evidence was probably fake but still considered it a threat to discredit the Justice Department’s handling of the Clinton email case.

A few weeks later, though, Sen. Lindsey Graham told CBS that Mr. Comey (presumably in closed hearings) had twice confirmed that the secret intelligence inspired his actions in the email case but “as early as a month ago, he never mentioned it was fake.”

Let us guess that this matter will remain classified for “decades” because it is embarrassing to Mr. Comey and the FBI. It’s also embarrassing, perhaps fatally so, to the intelligence agency that presented the intercept to Mr. Comey. The implication ought to set your hair on fire. Mr. Comey’s first intervention led to his second intervention, reopening the Hillary investigation 11 days before the election, which he now concedes he might have resisted if he had not been sure Mrs. Clinton was going to win anyway.

Many analysts, including Mrs. Clinton, believe Mr. Comey’s actions—possibly driven by fake Russian intelligence—changed the outcome of the election.

In brief, an intercepted Russian document cited a Democratic Party email that, in turn, referred to a private conversation in which Attorney General Loretta Lynch assured a Clinton aide that Ms. Lynch would sit on the email investigation.

In his book, Mr. Comey says of this unnameable intelligence that political opponents of Mrs. Clinton could use it to cast “serious doubt” on the credibility of the Justice Department investigation.

Let’s roll back the tape because Mr. Comey’s original intervention makes even less sense now. If the email was fake, how does it compromise Ms. Lynch? And whether or not it was fake, how did Mr. Comey improve matters? In fact, by intervening, didn’t he just confirm that Justice couldn’t be trusted? Finally, if the intel wasn’t fake, where are the subpoenas and obstruction-of-justice indictments that naturally follow? CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump said he wanted Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia, and on Tuesday he got his wish. Though Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the four liberals on an immigration case, his logic would have made the late Justice proud.

In Sessions v. Dimaya, the government sought to deport a legal resident twice convicted of first-degree burglary. The Immigration and Nationality Act lets the government deport any immigrant convicted of a “crime of violence.” The question is whether first-degree burglary is a violent crime.

Section 16b of the criminal code includes a residual clause that defines a violent crime as “any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan invoked the Court’s Johnson precedent and held that the residual clause was void for vagueness. In Johnson (2015), Justice Scalia’s majority opinion rejected a similar residual clause in the Armed Career Criminal Act and ruled that its vague language produced “more unpredictability and arbitrariness” than the Constitution allows.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s minority opinion tries to distinguish the residual clauses in the two cases to save Section 16b, which he notes “is incorporated into many procedural and substantive provisions of criminal law.” But he appears as concerned with the policy results of the Court’s decision as the legal merits.

The big news is Justice Gorsuch’s elegant concurring opinion that joins the majority result but for different reasons. “Vague laws invite arbitrary power,” he writes, “leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up.” (See Comey, James nearby.)

Justice Gorsuch writes that Congress is free to define 16b with more specific crimes. But until it does the vague statute violates the due process right of individuals by giving license to police and prosecutors to interpret laws as they wish. This defense of individuals against arbitrary state power was a Scalia staple. Justice Gorsuch adds that vague laws also threaten the Constitution’s ordered liberty because they “risk allowing judges to assume legislative power.”

Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is sending a useful message that Congress should write clearer laws that aren’t subject to arbitrary interpretation. Congress can rewrite immigration law, and the President should be pleased with his nominee for doing what he promised.