555

Here are three theories.

1. The theory of the IG Report:

“Instead of referring to and being guided by longstanding Department and FBI policies and precedent, Comey conducted an ad hoc comparison of the risks and outcomes associated with each option. He described the potential consequences “concealing” the existence of the emails as “catastrophic” to the FBI and the Department, because it would subject the FBI and the Department to allegations that they had acted for political reasons to protect Hillary Clinton. Instead, Comey said he chose the option that he assessed as being just “really bad.

Even on his own flawed ad hoc terms his analysis of risks was flawed as IG documents.

“Even within the flawed analytical construct that Comey set up, he did not assess risks evenhandedly. He assigned paramount significance to avoiding the reputational risk of staying silent: that he and the FBI would be unfairly accused of hiding the emails to protect candidate Clinton. But he appears to have placed no comparable value on the corresponding risk from making the public statement: that he and the FBI would not only be accused of violating long-standing Department and FBI policy and practice, but that he also would be unfairly accused of hyping the emails in a manner that hurt candidate Clinton.”

Pg. 374

Indeed, he still to this day doesn’t seem to get this-that all the feared reputational damage to the FBI has happened precisely because he is seen as unfairly hurting Clinton.

We believe that Comey’s unequal assessment of these risks was the product of his belief that Clinton was going to win the election. Comey told us, “I am sure I was influenced by the tacit assumption that Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next President.” This expectation likely led him to focus too heavily on what he perceived to be the consequences of not revealing the new information, namely undermining the legitimacy of Clinton’s presidency and harming the reputation of the FBI. Ironically, in his effort to avoid the FBI or himself being seen as political, Comey based his decision, in part, on his assessment of the likely outcome of the political process.”

This is a commonly asserted theory of the Comey letter-Comey did it because he thought Clinton was going to win anyway and he was trying to cover himself. In this telling what Comey later claimed to be the catastrophic consequences of what he misleadingly calls ‘concealing’ was little more than Comey’s extreme anxiety about being grilled by Trey Gowdy again.

Evidently he doesn’t see what happened the last three years as cataclysmic or at least not as cataclysmic as being raked over the coals by Trey Gowdy if Clinton won.

 

Another theory is:

2. Seth Abramson’s Trumplandia Conspiracy theory. We looked at this in a previous chapter but here it is in a nutshell.

You might call it the True Pundit made me do it theory of the Comey letter. By the way this is not to make light of it, I do believe that rogue agents forced Comey’s hand and that’s what the future Dem Congressional Select Committee on Comeygate must investigate.

3. However, E. Randall Schoenberg’s theory of the Comey letter is also very worth looking at. He’s much more critical of Comey than anyone else who’s so far waded into this debate. I appreciate it as I do think Comey has gotten something of a pass by most commentators until now. His general goodwill is assumed. Schoenberg questions his motivations. Here he has fun with Comey’s claim that he had to do the letter because the emails on the Weiner laptop might be the ‘golden emails’ that would somehow show Clinton was guilty of a crime though it was obvious from the outset-even before the opening of the investigation-that she was unlikely to be guilty of crime-ie, there was no probable cause as we saw in Chapter A.

“Comey explained to the Senate today that he was interested in those early e-mails because the FBI was still looking for evidence that Clinton intentionally set up her private server to violate the law. At one point during today’s testimony, Comey called that evidence “the golden missing e-mails,” as if they were searching for a prize in a chocolate bar. It was precisely the lack of any evidence of Clinton’s intent that Comey had relied on in July when he declared the investigation over.”

He mocks this belief in the ‘golden missing emails’ as the Golden Ticket to Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

“When Comey and his investigative team held their “great debate” on October 27, did they even discuss whether there was probable cause?  That’s something we don’t yet know. There is no good answer for Comey. If they didn’t even consider the issue, that’s pretty damning.  If they did consider it, why did they get it wrong? Why did they think they’d find their Golden Ticket?”

“A lot of people have challenged me on this argument by saying that there had been probable cause all along.  But that’s not true.  This FBI investigation was not the result of the discovery of a crime, or a report from a victim.  Rather, it was a referral from another branch of government to investigate whether there had even been a crime. The FBI should have been neutral on that question.  But they weren’t.  They got caught up in the endless Republican fishing expedition that set off the investigation, and were disappointed that they didn’t find what they were looking for. It never even occurred to Comey or his agents that Clinton might be innocent and that no crime had actually been committed.  No, as I suggested already last November, they considered Clinton a criminal who had not yet been caught.  And it is worth pointing out that until October 30, the FBI had not yet obtained a search warrant in the case.  Until that time, it was just an ordinary investigation of public sources, department materials and cooperating witnesses.”

We covered the fact that there was never probable cause for the investigation in the first place in Chapter A and Schoeberg does a great job of showing that the search of Weiner’s laptop was also without probable cause and quite possibly illegal.

I like this very tough analysis of Comey here because Schoeberg highlights something that almost all commentators have whitewashed: the fact that Comey is-or at least was-a partisan Republican. He’s now apparently joined the #Resistance calling for a Democratic Congress. A future Congress I’m calling on to investigate himself!

But Schoenberg is right to look to focus on Comey’s record as a partisan Republican.

“It could be that Comey, like most Republicans, believed that there was a sufficient cloud of suspicion over Hillary Clinton to justify pretty much any investigation. Think of how the FBI might treat a notorious gangster like Al Capone. “Get me something on him! Anything!” the FBI director might tell his subordinates. That certainly seems to be how many in the FBI thought of Clinton, even after Comey had reported in July that there would be no prosecution. Some agents were already in open revolt over the e-mail probe three weeks prior to Comey’s surprise announcement. So maybe they never even thought much about the probable cause requirement, and perhaps the judge signed the search warrant, mindful of the intense public attention to the issue, without really considering the legal standard of whether the suspicions raised were reasonable.”

Comey is a lifelong partisan Republican-until now. It’s ironic that Trump talks about ’18 angry Democrats’ when there aren’t 18 Democrats in the entire FBI. He contributed to both of Obama’s Presidential opponents. Comey’s at the time deputy Director-Andy McCabe-was also a life long Republican-who’s also now left the party. When Trump is making up his yarn about the 18 angry Democrats one ‘Democrat’ he has in mind is McCabe whose wife ran as a Democrat in 2016.

Yet when Comey had that ‘great debate’ on doing the Comey letter, he asked McCabe to recuse himself from this discussion based on leaks the rogue agents had made asserting McCabe was a Clinton loyalist. So even though McCabe was a life long Republican his wife running as Democrat makes him a Democrat.

It’s pretty rich for Comey who donated to both Obama’s opponents, and who’d spent much of the last 20 years investigating the Clintons in one fishing expedition or another to claim that McCabe had to recuse himself from this momentously terrible decision because of his wife.

By this standard shouldn’t Comey have had to recuse himself from the entire Emailgate investigation?

So I appreciate Schoenberg’s depiction of Comey as a rank partisan Republican hack. It’s a healthy corrective. I think when assessing Comey’s motivations you can’t leave out that he is-has been-a partisan Republican. Comparatively even Abramson who has done such great analysis seems to give Comey too much benefit of the doubt. Perhaps this is because Abramson was a Bernie supporter during the primary-he reluctantly supported Hillary in the general-in which time he was positively disposed to the Emailgate investigation as he like many Bernie supporters particularly notoriously HA Goodman-hoped Clinton would be indicted? So while Abramson is rightly highly critical of what happened in the run up and aftermath of the Comey letter-calling it worse than Watergate-he still doesn’t admit that the Comey presser was also beyond the pale and that the entire probe was nothing more than a GOP fishing expedition just like Whitewater was.

But as Schoeberg and Lanny Davis have documented, there was never any basis for the Emailgate investigation from the start-as the chances she’d be found guilty were remote.

Indeed, in assessing Comey’s motivation for writing the Comey letter I see three motivations.

1. A life long Republican who in 2015 spoke up for the very controversial Ferguson Effect. But this motivation is tempered by some other and countervailing motivations.

2. An overweening sense of moral vanity that he is the world’s last honest man.

3. His sincere and genuine concern and love for his agency.

While he was a partisan Republican he was also an institutionalist who cared more about his own reputation as an institutionalist than using his position to satisfy his partisan preferences. This is what makes him different than the rogue anti Clinton agents. They were-are-perfectly willing to use the agency to settle partisan scores.

What made him do the presser and letter-was the interplay of these three conflicting motivations.

Note that 2 often conflicted with 3-his moral vanity led him to scorn things that a true institutionalist needs to do. The IG report documents how he seemed to scorn the idea of simply of following protocol as somehow small and uninspiring, lacking in courage, and almost unmanly. But at the end of the day both his sincere love of his agency and his moral vanity about his reputation as the a great man of integrity were a check on 1. I do believe if not for 1 he wouldn’t have made many of the decisions he did but I think this was also checked by 2 and 3. It led him into his erratic ad hockery in decision making and made him easy prey for those rogue anti Clinton agents who had no problem totally using the agency to achieve their own partisan GOP agenda.

Even so I’d say Comey is not as bad as the rogue agents he got played by. But this entire fake scandal about the damn emails was a great temptation to him and he didn’t handle the test very well. Throughout his career his reputation as an impeccable agent of integrity who is above such crude partisanship was precious to him. Indeed, what’s clear about Comey is this: in cultivating this reputation as being nonpartisan and nonpolitical-that clearly seduced Obama-required him to be pretty savvy politically. Comey certainly showed this that time President George W. Bush tried to get Ashcroft to sign the extension of the Patriot Act on his sickbed. 

The trouble is that Comey always took pains to be give the appearance of being nonpolitical. But in 2016 in his zeal to be nonpolitical in appearance he was totally political in fact.

And Emailgate was his great temptation. While much of his sterling public reputation that so appealed to President Obama was on the idea that as a Republican he’d fought back at W’s attempt to ram a renewal of the Patriot Act down Ashcroft’s throat as he lay on his sickbed, Emailgate allowed Comey to have his cake and eat it too. As the Director of the FBI he could strut about as so independent and above fear or favor that he relentlessly investigated the campaign of Obama’s-the President who appointed him-handpicked successor-Hillary Clinton.

But, of course, it wasn’t really hard for him to investigate the Democratic nominee for President-he was a lifelong Republican. What this potentially did is allowed him to align his partisan preferences, his moral and reputational vanity, and his genuine concern for his agency all on one side. In ruthlessly doing something that aligned with his partisan preferences he at the same time did right by his agency and further buffered his reputation as fiercely independent. In the end it allowed him to fool himself, and take himself down the rabbit hole dug by the anti Clinton pro Trump rogue agents.

UPDATE: After reading him I think Kevin Drum deserves the last word on why Comey wrote the Comey Letter.

“Once again: Clinton did nothing particularly wrong in her campaign. She didn’t ignore working-class whites. She wasn’t too cautious on policy. She didn’t overestimate the impact of educated voters. She wasn’t complacent. What happened was simple: 12 days before the election, the FBI director released a letter saying he had found a brand-new trove of emails and implying that this might finally be the smoking gun about her private email server. That’s it.”

“We’ll never know for sure if James Comey did this because he’s terminally stupid and didn’t realize what impact it would have, or if he did it knowing full well what impact it would have. But he did it. And that’s why Donald Trump is president.”

If we have any hope of ever knowing which scenario it is the Dems need to have him over to Congress in Comeygate hearings-that should be part of the larger impeachment inquiry.

I believe Comey’s own previous testimony and attempts to justify have been something of a mishmash-he seems to suggest he knew it could have an impact but that somehow that didn’t matter all that mattered was because he’d allegedly promised Trey Gowdy.

He claimed that there was no good choice that there were two bad choices-one was very bad and one was catastrophic and that somehow he didn’t see the catastrophic choice as the one where his actions flip a Presidential election in favor of the candidate who he knew was under investigation for colluding with a Russian interference effort which was potentially endangering our national security-no that in Comey’s mind is merely very bad-catastrophic we’re supposed to believe was having Trey Gowdy yell at him.

 

 

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