RUTHFULLY YOURS

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