James Comey’s Passion Play The former FBI director should have resigned if he believes what he now says.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comeys-passion-play-1496964267
James Comey’s first post-FBI appearance in front of the Senate on Thursday turned out to be a political anticlimax, with no major revelations about the alleged Trump-Russia nexus or the President’s supposed attempt to derail the investigation. But nearly three hours of testimony did expose the methods of the highly political former FBI director.
To wit, Mr. Comey is trying to have it both ways. He worked to leave the impression that Mr. Trump had committed a crime or at least an abuse of power, even as he abdicated his own obligations as a senior law-enforcement officer to report and deter such misconduct.
Mr. Comey confirmed that Mr. Trump never tried to block the FBI’s larger probe of potential Russian entanglement in the election and even encouraged the FBI, noting that “if some of my satellites did something wrong, it’d be good to find that out.” Despite this probative evidence, Mr. Comey claims that in an Oval Office meeting in February Mr. Trump importuned him to close the case on Michael Flynn, the National Security Adviser who had recently been fired for misleading the Vice President.
Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Comey, defended Mr. Flynn, saying “he is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Mr. Comey explained that “I took it as a direction to get rid of this investigation.”
But he wouldn’t answer when Senators asked if such a direction was illegal. “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct,” Mr. Comey said. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that’s an offense.”
Mr. Comey also admitted that after he was fired he leaked his personal memos about his Trump conversations, via a cutout at Columbia Law School, “because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” So Mr. Comey triggers Robert Mueller’s new assignment and then tosses him responsibility while still intimating that Mr. Trump violated the law.
This legerdemain is an awfully convenient self-defense. The important question is whether Mr. Comey believed Mr. Trump was obstructing justice at the time, and Mr. Comey’s behavior then doesn’t confirm his Senate tale.
Mr. Trump had expressed the same sentiments about Mr. Flynn’s bona fides in public and on Twitter , so his preferences were no secret. But if Mr. Comey really believed Mr. Trump was trying to block the Flynn probe, then he had a legal duty to report Mr. Trump’s conduct to his Justice Department superiors or the White House counsel. Obstruction of justice—intentionally attempting to impede an investigation—is a crime.
Mr. Comey said that he was “so stunned” that he lacked “the presence of mind” even to tell Mr. Trump that his request was improper. But he was able to gain enough composure to write up the experience in the car after the meeting, and to discuss the meeting, by his own testimony, with his chief of staff, the FBI deputy director, the associate deputy director, the general counsel, the deputy director’s chief counsel and the head of the FBI office of national security. But he never informed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Deputy AG or any other supervisor.
This abdication is especially remarkable for someone as experienced in the corridors of power as Mr. Comey. This is a government veteran who served three Presidents in senior positions and in 2004 predrafted a letter of resignation as Acting Attorney General to threaten President Bush over wiretapping.
Quitting and going public after his meeting with Mr. Trump would have let the country know what was happening in Washington, as many other civil servants have done over the years. Yet in an exchange with Senator Tom Cotton, Mr. Comey averred that “I didn’t find, encounter any circumstance that led me to intend to resign, consider to resign. No, sir.” In other words, Mr. Comey thought he was serving a corrupt President but wanted to keep that news a close hold.
Mr. Comey’s admirers want everyone to take this at face value. But an alternative reading is that Mr. Comey didn’t resign or tell Mr. Sessions because he liked his job and wanted to keep it. He also knew he could write that memo and share it with his FBI comrades as a form of political insurance. As the fictional President says to Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford ) in “Clear and Present Danger,” “you’ve got yourself a chip in the big game now.” Only after he was fired did Mr. Comey choose to share his moral outrage with the public, while setting up the President who dismissed him as a target for Mr. Mueller.
Mr. Trump acted like a bullying naif who doesn’t understand the norms of presidential behavior, but Mr. Comey is no Jack Ryan. He’s a government official motivated by political self-interest who should have resigned if he believed what he now says he did. That he failed to act at the time suggests his motive now is more revenge than truth-telling.
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