537
As we saw in the last chapter Comey dragged out the process of informing the public Clinton wasn’t guilty way too long after he and his colleagues knew she wasn’t going to be charged, in fact, it’s questionable that her indictment ever appeared very likely which raises the question of two chapters ago-if there was ever probable cause in the first place.
In this chapter we analyze Comey’s rationale in very belatedly admitting the truth-Clinton was innocent-but via the indefensible press conference that broke all agency protocols and rules and was very unfair to Clinton and all American voters to boot.
It was unfair to voters as the FBI is not supposed to put its finger on the scales of American elections and Comey did so on the date of July 5, 2016 in a very hamhanded way.
In this chapter we look at his own rationale for doing so. What emerges pretty quickly is that Comey’s rationale is constantly shifting and changing without getting any better.
At the time one argument you heard was it was all Bill Clinton’s fault-he and Loretta Lynch made Comey do it. Because of the terrible optics of Bill having a conversation with Lynch in the middle of an airport tarmac no one would ever believe that the process was fair if Clinton was then cleared.
At the time I personally thought that was absurd-if Bill Clinton really wanted to rig the process there were much better ways than on an airport tarmac with all the world watching. As it turns out, this was Clinton’s own thought process as well.
“Approximately 20 to 30 yards from Lynch’s plane was a private plane with former President Bill Clinton on it. Former President Clinton had been in Phoenix for several campaign events, including a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders and a campaign fundraiser, and his plane was preparing to depart. Former President Clinton said that he did not know in advance that Lynch was in Phoenix and was not aware that her plane was close to his until his staff told him. Asked about news reports that he purposely delayed his takeoff to speak to Lynch, former President Clinton stated: It’s absolutely not true. I literally didn’t know she was there until somebody told me she was there. And we looked out the window and it was really close and all of her staff was unloading, so I thought she’s about to get off and I’ll just go shake hands with her when she gets off. I don’t want her to think I’m afraid to shake hands with her because she’s the Attorney General. He said that he discussed with his Chief of Staff whether he should say hello to Lynch, and that they debated whether he should do it because of “all the hoopla” in the campaign. He stated, “I just wanted to say hello to her and I thought it would look really crazy if we were living in [a] world [where] I couldn’t shake hands with the Attorney General you know when she was right there.”\
Pgs. 202-203.
Yes we were living in a crazy world in the 2016 election, at some point in 2015 we wandered through Alice in Wonderland’s Looking Glass and we have never really left, so that what was in fact a nothingburger became this huge faux scandal. But then that more or less describes the Clintons’ 25 years in politics-nothinburgers getting blown up by the GOP and the media into something with no parallel other than the maybe Holocaust.
As Bill notes the email server that generated so much storm and stress-the entire election was about the damn emails-was actually his.
“Former President Clinton said that he did not consider that meeting with Lynch might impact the investigation into his wife’s use of a private email server. He stated, “Well what I didn’t want to do is to look like I was having some big huddle-up session with her you know…. [B]ecause it was a paranoid time, but…I knew what I believed to be the truth of that whole thing. It was after all my server and the FBI knew it was there and the Secret Service approved it coming in and she just used what was mine.” As a result, he said that he never thought the investigation “amounted to much frankly so I didn’t probably take it as seriously as maybe I might have in this unusual period[.]”
I don’t blame him for not thinking it amounted to much-in retrospect it didn’t and never did-as the last two chapters clearly demonstrate Emailgate was always what John Stuart Mill would call nonsense on stilts-there was no probable cause as even Comey admitted he knew before the fact it was exceedingly unlikely to lead to charges and hence it never should have been opened in the first place. The real question is how the tail wagged the dog to this extent, how did a minor email scandal decide a Presidential election? There are many reasons-one was the media a la Cillizza and Dean Baquet chose to blow it up to the crime of the century right up there with the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, some might dismiss this explanation by Bill as self interested-and, and, of course, I’m an admitted partisan liberal Democrat. Here’s what’s interesting though: Comey came to the same conclusion as me and Bill Clinton.
In his own book, Higher Loyalty, Comey dismisses the idea that Tarmacgate was part of any conspiracy between Clinton and Loretta Lynch:
“Then, on Monday, June 27, on a hot Phoenix airport tarmac, Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch met privately aboard an FBI Gulfstream 5 jet for about twenty minutes. When I first heard about this impromptu meeting, I didn’t pay much attention to it. I didn’t have any idea what they talked about. But to my eye, the notion that this conversation would impact the investigation was ridiculous. If Bill Clinton were going to try to influence the attorney general, he wouldn’t do it by walking across a busy tarmac, in broad daylight, and up a flight of stairs past a group of FBI special agents. Besides, Lynch wasn’t running the investigation anyway. But none of these basic realities had any impact on the cable news punditry.”
“As the firestorm grew in the media grew in the media, I paid more attention, watching it become another corrosive talking point about how the Obama Justice Department couldn’t be trusted to the Clinton email investigation.”
Pgs. 178-179.
So Comey himself saw the furor over Tarmacgate as ‘ridiculous.’ But yet because of all the noise on Fox News he decided that while there was no reality to the furor the optics had to be dealt with. This is the original sin of the entire email probe-where in Comey’s concern about the appearance of politicization that favored Clinton he politicized it in fact in a way that unfairly harmed her.
And here’s the irony, you have all these GOPers claiming that Clinton being cleared proved the investigation was politicized and, in a sense, they were right but in the opposite direction: all their claims of politicization led Comey, Andy McCabe, and friends to do what Hillary herself while Secretary of State called overcorrecting. They overcompensated those claiming Clinton was getting special treatment by giving her especially bad treatment.
So in his own telling, Comey gave the press conference not because he really believed that Clinton met with Lynch to clear his wife but because Fox News viewers believed it-kind of like Keynes’ beauty pageant applied to an FBI investigation. If nothing else, the GOP has demonstrated that there is value in gaming the refs.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day the faux outrage over Tarmacgate gave him a handy excuse for the inexcusable presser. So it’s not clear that he was so much pushed by Fox News hysteria as he saw it as a handy excuse for doing what he’d actually intended to do for about three months-a press conference for when he cleared Clinton without any principals from the DOJ at his side.
Per the IG report he had long planned to do this-the furor over the tarmac just gave his indefensible decision more apparent cover.
“Impact of the Tarmac Meeting on Comey’s Decision to Make a Public Statement As described above, Comey began drafting a public statement announcing the conclusion of the Midyear investigation in early May 2016, well before the tarmac meeting, and told the OIG that he planned not to inform the Department. Comey told us that he had struggled with the decision, and that “in a way the tarmac thing made it easy for me” and “tipped the scales” towards making his mind up to go forward with an independent announcement. He stated, “I think I was nearly there. That I have to do this separate and apart…. And so I would say I was 90 percent there, like highly likely going to do it anyway, and [the tarmac meeting] capped it.”
Pgs. 219-220
But let’s be clear he was going to do the presser and he was going to do it alone Tarmacgate or no Tarmacgate.
“As described above, documents and testimony indicate that Comey planned to do the statement independently without advance notice to the Department even before the tarmac meeting between Lynch and former President Bill Clinton. Comey acknowledged that he made a conscious decision not to tell Department leadership about his plans to independently announce a declination because he was concerned that they would instruct him not to do it, and that he made this decision when he first conceived of the idea to do the statement. He stated: Then, come May, and I’m trying to figure out how the endgame should work, to preserve the option that I ended up concluding was best suited to protect the institutions, I couldn’t tell them that I was considering that. Because if I told them that one of the—in my mind I drew this spectrum—at one end of the spectrum is I’m going to announce separate from you what the FBI thinks about this and very practical about it they, I remember thinking this, if I surface that with them, they might well say, I order you not to do that and then I would abide that, I wouldn’t do that. And so I remember saying to the Midyear team when I circulated in May my first draft I said what would the most, one end of the spectrum, what would that option look like? I said keep this close hold, I mean you can have conversations with the Department of Justice about the endgame, but don’t tell them I’m considering this because then that option is going from us. Because if I were the DAG, maybe they wouldn’t have, but what I was thinking was, if I’m the DAG I say, just to be clear, I order you not to make any statements on this case without coordinating it with us. And so to be honest, I would lose that option.”
Pg. 201.
Tarmacgate, then, was a handy excuse-as many MSM pundits bought it-not a reason. Another excuse he has used at times was, if you can believe it, a fake Russian document that falsely tried to give the impression that Loretta Lynch, a member of the Clinton campaign, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were conspiring to help Clinton avoid charges. This fake news from a Russian doc has the inconvenience of being based on clear falsehood-that this Clinton aide and Lyncb knew each other well-in fact they didn’t know each other at all.. But again, 2016 was the election where alternative facts had more currency that real ones.
FN: Kind of tough to disagree arch Trump flunky Lindsay Graham here:
The memo showed Wasserman Schultz describing in a message how Lynch had privately assured a Clinton staffer during the campaign that the Justice Department wouldn’t take the investigation too far. Comey knew the information in the memo wasn’t real, but he feared that the memo would cast doubt on the credibility of the FBI’s investigation if it leaked after Lynch closed the probe, CNN reported.
Comey told lawmakers after the press conference that he had no choice but to go around the Justice Department and answer directly to reporters out of fear that the document might leak, but he did not tell them that the document was probably fake, according to CNN.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN on Sunday that Comey “never once told a member of the House or the Senate that he thought the email was fake” and would have been “incredibly incompetent” to act on a document he knew to be fraudulent.
“I can’t imagine a scenario where it’s OK for the FBI director to jump in the middle of an election based on a fake email generated by the Russians and not tell the Congress,” Graham said.
It would be incredibly incompetent-or-incredibly corrupt and out of line.
Olson said Comey’s decision to bypass his superiors based on the document was even more bizarre.
https://www.businessinsider.com/james-comey-fake-document-russia-fbi-clinton-email-2017-5
Like so many other stands of Comey’s Emailgjate debacle his explanation of this fake Russian doc has been all over the place-while this piece states he knew at the time it was fake he has at times suggested he didn’t-at still others he’s denied such a document ever existed.
Matthew Miller, who was a Justice Department spokesman under Barack Obama, agreed that Comey “absolutely should have briefed” his superiors on the existence of the document before holding the press conference, especially if he thought it was fake.
“If he already knew the document was fake, then he in no way should have relied on it to make decisions about how to handle the case, and he had an obligation to brief his superiors,” Miller said on Tuesday.
“Even if it was a real document, it wouldn’t excuse him acting on his own,” Miller added. “There are procedures set up for handling sensitive information like this when someone is potentially compromised, which is the best-case interpretation of his thinking. He could have briefed his direct boss, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and the two of them could have decided how to proceed.
Of course-but Comey sees going through the proper channels as lacking moral grandeur.
Many Clinton backers felt vindicated by Comey’s revelation in March that the FBI had been investigating ties between President Donald Trump’s associates and Russia since July, but others were outraged that Comey had broken protocol to disclose the existence of new emails days before the election but didn’t tell voters that Trump’s campaign also under investigation until four months later.”
They have every right to feel outrage-another outrage is that Comey chose to ‘conceal’-he’d argued that would have been a terrible thing . to do with Emailgate-the existence of Russian Collusion for eight months.
“A ‘wildly successful’ Russian operation.”
That Comey himself engaged in Russian active measures is itself evidence of just how successful this Russian operation actually was.
UPDATE: There’s another chapter on the fake Russian document
So Comey, believe it or not, has at times cited this fake document of Russian hackers as a reason to violate all FBI rules and protocols and unfairly harm a US Presidential candidate’s campaign-because while the Russian doc was in all likelihood false, the Clinton haters would insist it was true. So we have the surreal situation where a press conference that was against the rules and protocols was given to inform and enlighten the part of the public who believed a fake Russian document by hackers was true. Rather than tell them the document is false, you accept they believe it true and try to reassure them that you’re not taking it easy on Clinton-this was Comey’s playbook for dealing with fake news.
Again we see that those who work the refs and game the system via ‘alternative facts’ are-to use Trump’s words about Russia if they’d only release Clinton’s emails-richly rewarded.
“On June 8, 2017, following his firing as FBI Director, Comey testified about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).154 In an exchange with Committee Chairman Senator Richard Burr, Comey was asked about the Midyear investigation, including whether his decision to publicly report the results of the investigation was influenced by the tarmac meeting between former Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton. Comey replied, “Yes. In—in an ultimately conclusive way. That was the thing that capped it for me that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the Justice Department.”
Good summation of not just Comey but the entire FBI culture during Emailgate:
“At the end of the day, with due respect to notions of transparency, credibility, independence, and ensuring there is not even the appearance of improper conduct, what matters most is executing the role the FBI has in government,” he said. “Appearances don’t matter if reality, if the actual content, is wrong.”
Have no doubt things have gotten ten times worse since the start of Trump’s illegitimate reign-that owes so much-in truth everything-to Comey and Friends.
End of UPDATE
Pgs. 235-236.
An ultimately conclusive way? That’s not what he told the IG-what he told him made it clear he saw the tarmac meeting furor as a convenient excuse not the real reason for the presser.
“Senator Burr then asked whether there were other things that contributed to Comey’s decision that he could describe in an open session. Comey stated: There were other things that contributed to that. One significant item I can’t, I know the committee’s been briefed on. There’s been some public accounts of it, which are nonsense, but I understand the committee’s been briefed on the classified facts.”
Pg. 236
What he’s referring to every so obliquely is the fake Russian document purporting to be between DWS and an aide to George Soros.
UPDATE: In the latest both DWS and Soros received pipe bombs along with Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Bill Clinton, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and virtually ever leading member of the Democratic party by a Trump supporter with MAGA paraphernalia all over his van. I know-don’t call them deplorable! Soros in particular has inspired some very nasty anti semitic attacks by not just Trump’s supporters but Trump’s GOP co-conspirators in Congress.
Comey clearly gave the doc from the Russian hackers short thrift testifying in front of the Senate. But it’s clear that at one point it had been taken seriously as at least another pretext for doing a presser by himself.
“A document obtained by the F.B.I. reinforced that idea.”
“During Russia’s hacking campaign against the United States, intelligence agencies could peer, at times, into Russian networks and see what had been taken. Early last year, F.B.I. agents received a batch of hacked documents, and one caught their attention”.
“The document, which has been described as both a memo and an email, was written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.”
“Read one way, it was standard Washington political chatter. Read another way, it suggested that a political operative might have insight into Ms. Lynch’s thinking.”
“Normally, when the F.B.I. recommends closing a case, the Justice Department agrees and nobody says anything. The consensus in both places was that the typical procedure would not suffice in this instance, but who would be the spokesman?”
“The document complicated that calculation, according to officials. If Ms. Lynch announced that the case was closed, and Russia leaked the document, Mr. Comey believed it would raise doubts about the independence of the investigation.”
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that in the Alice in Wonderland world of post 2016 America there was convergence between Russiagate and Comeygate somewhere.
In any case, Comey decided that Occam’s razor required him to give a press conference to reassure people who read the fake Russian document rather than, you know. point out that Russian document is fake. I guess that seemed simpler to him.
But at the end of the day, Comey had resolved to do the presser in April at the latest.
What’s notable is how he kept everyone not just at the DOJ but on his own Midyear team in the dark about his true intent. It’s obvious why this was-they would have talked him out of it, as he himself admitted to the IG investigators. And this is where the issue of what the IG report calls his insubordination comes into play:
UPDATE: Find the quotes of the of him misleading his team?
“Comey’s decision to depart from longstanding Department practice and publicly announce the FBI’s declination recommendation without coordinating with the Department was an unjustified usurpation of authority.
Pg. 157
Although Comey was aware that the Midyear prosecutors and Department leadership viewed the case as a likely declination, Comey made the decision to announce the conclusion of the investigation before prosecutors had a chance to render their own formal prosecutorial decision. Comey’s views on what a “reasonable prosecutor” would do—while informed by the prosecutors’ views on the likely outcome of the case and the Department’s research on past mishandling cases—were nonetheless made without consulting the Department in advance. Although Comey stated in his press conference that “the prosecutors make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate based on evidence the FBI has helped collect,” by making this public announcement about the FBI’s charging recommendation, and by stating his view that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges, he effectively made the decision for the prosecutors because it would thereafter have been virtually impossible for them to make any other decision. Even if Comey had every reason to believe that Lynch and Yates agreed with him, speaking unilaterally and publicly for the Department about a decision to decline prosecution is not a function granted to the Director. The authority to make such a statement had not been delegated to him by his superiors, the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General. Comey acknowledged this, but argued that “the potential for damage to the institution” outweighed the need to follow Department practice, stating, “[I]n a normal circumstance it’s the right of the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General to make those decisions and the FBI Director should tell them, but this was not the normal circumstance.”
All Comey’s talk of damage to the institution is particularly rich as nothing has done more to damage the reputation of the FBI than his own adventures in .playing God, in, rank ad hockery.
“In our criminal justice system, the investigative and prosecutive functions are intentionally kept separate as a check on the government’s power to bring criminal charges. While Comey’s statement acknowledged those differing roles and responsibilities, his actions violated those separate authorities by arrogating to himself and the FBI the ability to make judgments about whether a case of the highest political consequence should be charged, and he did so by intentionally seeking to prevent Department leadership from being able to stop him based on concerns that he never even gave them an opportunity to consider. In making a statement announcing the conclusion of the Midyear investigation and opining on what the only possible prosecutorial decision could be, Comey made it virtually impossible for any prosecutor to make any other recommendation. He thereby effectively operated as not only the FBI Director, but also as the Attorney General. It is the Attorney General who is accountable to the public and to Congress for prosecutorial decisions made by the Department, not the head of the investigating law enforcement agency. Comey took that accountability away from Lynch and placed it on himself when he decided to deliver a unilateral statement.”
Of course the reality was, as noted above, Comey was not at all sure Lynch agreed with him about him alone making a statement-he knew she likely wouldn’t- which is why he sprung it on her at the very last moment-ie, what the IG calls insubordination.
“Because if I told them that one of the—in my mind I drew this spectrum—at one end of the spectrum is I’m going to announce separate from you what the FBI thinks about this and very practical about it they, I remember thinking this, if I surface that with them, they might well say, I order you not to do that and then I would abide that, I wouldn’t do that. And so I remember saying to the Midyear team when I circulated in May my first draft I said what would the most, one end of the spectrum, what would that option look like? I said keep this close hold, I mean you can have conversations with the Department of Justice about the endgame, but don’t tell them I’m considering this because then that option is gone from us. Because if I were the DAG, maybe they wouldn’t have, but what I was thinking was, if I’m the DAG I say, just to be clear, I order you not to make any statements on this case without coordinating it with us. And so to be honest, I would lose that option.”
So this was a long thought out and premeditated plan to keep the DOJ in the dark until the very last minute when he could offer up the plan as a fait accompli-ie, insubordination.