101 The Bill E Buckner of American Politics of American Politics: Comey IS the 500 Year Flood
UPDATE 2.0: This chapter is pretty much set on substance too
UPDATE 3: At most a little more light editing but this chapter is very close to primetime
UPDATE: Monet Power Book 2 S1 E8: You don’t get credit for putting out a fire you started
He’s the GOAT-and I don’t mean the greatest of all time. But James “500 year flood” Comey believes-or claims to believe the opposite-he’s laboriously contrived to create the opposite narrative-with no little success.
FN: Needs to believe? Maybe needs to persuade himself more than anyone not to mention his wife who voted for Clinton and who had tried to talk Comey out of his letter?
This success is not surprising-all things being equal the Savvy MSM seems to congenitally prefer bad and false narratives-maybe because it shows their power? In a perverse sense getting the public to believe lies-like that Mueller found no collusion or that Comey should have indicted Hillary Clinton-better shows the MSM’s power. If people believe you when you tell the truth that’s one thing but getting them to believe your lies is next level?
So Comey has had many friends among the Savvy. They were his friends when they fomented his unpredicated Emailgate investigation like coke fiends in 2016 and they have been his friends during his desperate attempts to repair his image post his Emailgate fiascos-the Comey Presser and Comey Letter.
To be sure, the Savvy have had their own reason for this beyond the fact that they tend to like bad narratives-especially bad narratives that are anti Clinton. But post 2016 the Dean Baquette media has had the same interest as Comey-memoryholing their shared Emailgate fiasco.
Jeff Whitewater Gerth’s recent 23,000 word glittering peon to the Russiagate fiasco opens up with an alleged quote of Dean Baquette post the release of the Mueller Report Bill Barr’s fake exoneration letter.
“The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.
“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.
“Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.”
“That would prove to be more than an understatement. But neither Baquet nor his successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War.”
There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. EW did her own piece on Gerth’s follies and found his first error at word 18
She also takes issue with Gerth’s use of the word “collusion” at word 12.
FN: I haven’t always used the precision in this book she has with the word collusion. For a few reasons-one is that in a sense it really doesn’t matter: with all the storm and drang regarding “collusion” vs “coordination” vs “conspiracy” at the end of the day, the Mueller Report found evidence of all three. Since the MSM following the lead of the Russiagaters have focused on the NO COLLUSION narrative I’ve used the phrase too. In her post she notes the distinction between legal and political accountability.
The battle over “collusion” is at the end of the day about politics not legal distinctions so I’ve trained my fire on the political target. As Giuliani noted when he took over as Trump’s lawyer in the Mueller probe in 2018 the Trump hacks have always focused on the political fight over the legality of it.
As EW also rightly notes focusing solely on the narrow question of wether something is prosecutable essentially destroys accountability in a democracy. Even if “collusion” with a hostile foreign power isn’t prosecutable it’s very wrong, about a great a betrayal of the public trust as one can imagine.
Also note that this narrow focus on wether something is prosecutable only applies to Republicans-with Democrats even very trivial accusations of small bore graft are weaponized into the crime of the century-Whitewater, Hillary’s emails, Andrew Gillum’s $50 dollar theater tickets, the idea Biden got his son a job through his own connections-if that’s a crime almost no one is “without sin” to paraphrase the Bible…
End FN
I actually take issue with Gerth at word 5.
“The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.”
In this first sentence there are like three material false statements-aka lies. But at word 5 he calls the Russian Collusion investigation long. This doesn’t pass the laugh test-or it wouldn’t if the Savvy did its job-again they like bad narratives.
In truth by any standard the Mueller investigation was short. Compared to other investigations. As we saw in Chapter Barr-Durham Fiasco, the Russiagate counternarrative has already gone on over twice as long.
We know how long Whitewater-Jeff Gerth’s original obsession-went on for (7 years). The Hunter Biden fiasco has probably been investigated longer-despite the fact that there’s no crime; getting your son a job through powerful connections isn’t actually a crime though apparently this is too subtle a point for the conventional wisdom.
The other two lies in just this first sentence was that the investigation ended the day Mueller testified-as EW documents-and that Mueller “said no.” No to what exactly?
Back to Jeff Whitewater Gerth:
“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.
Mueller was never going to “pursue Trump’s outster” and no one ever claimed he would so the very premise is flawed. Talk about hitting a straw man. What exactly is Gerth claiming to believe Mueller was supposed to say? By definition ‘pursuing Trump’s ouster’ isn’t something Mueller even had the ability to do-only Congress could as anyone with even basic political literacy knows.
You might wonder how Gerth lacks this basic literacy but in truth he probably knows this perfectly well which means he’s not writing this in good faith
“Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.”
“That would prove to be more than an understatement. But neither Baquet nor his successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War.”
Again-wow. Where to start? What strikes you right off the bat is how ungrateful Gerth sounds. Baquet did everything to take down Hillary Clinton, he and Comey essentially elected Trump-and both in their own way completely buried the fact of Russian Interference and Collusion prior to the election, yet Gerth and his fellow GOP co-conspirators claim that Comey and Baquette were unfair to Trump?!
Again they elected him-how much more friendly do you need to be to please Gerth and his Republican friends?
FN: If Gerth wants to dispute my characterization of him as a GOP co-conspirator all I can say is if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
And to the extent that Gerth’s characterization of Baquette’s reaction to Mueller’s testimony is accurate-and with all Gerth’s misstatements of fact on this I tend to suspect he is accurate-it speaks pretty badly of Baquette-as so many of the former NYT executive’s statements and actions do. It would show that yet again the Dean Baquette MSM accepted a bad GOP narrative as the truth.
Did he actually go into Mueller’s testimony expecting ‘Mueller to pursue Trump’s ouster’?
FN: There have been so many Dean Baquette howlers over the years-remember we won’t be goaded or applauded into criticizing “President Trump” too much?
So-back to Comey-he has had many friends in his rehabilitation project among Dean Baquet’s mainstream media as they are as complicit in their own way as Comey was-not legally but certainly ethically-much like they have been with Bill Barr’s rehabilitation project. In Barr’s case they also want to forget-they had told us Barr would play the Mueller Report straight.
When news of Showtime’s movie The Comey Rule came out, I’ll admit I was somewhat intrigued. I certainly was very interested in watching it-which I did the night it was released.
This was in large part due to the fact that there has been precious little news about Emailgate once it did it’s job and took down that woman. When I heard that it was based on Comey’s own Higher Loyalty I should have known better-but again there was such a vaccuum regarding Emailgate cum Comeygate post election-there had been a veritable flood before the election-Comey talks about a 500 year flood but here was the flood-pre election coverage.
OTOH hope is not a strategy but OTOH it was all I had as slender a reed as that is and proved to be. Indeed, in Chapter Why the Comey Letter we saw that there were like four Comeygate stories-in yet another impressive “coincidence” three came in the few months surrounding Trump’s firing of Comey.
FN: The 4th was the best work on him from Who.What.Why. To be sure there were a few other writers who did great work-note that there were all kind of indie researchers-Seth Abramson in the immediate aftermath of November 8, 2016-talk about a day which will live in infamy, the day Comey elected Trump; Randol Schoenberg who did some truly excellent work; and, yes, Louise Mensch’s coverage of what she called The Carolina Conspiracy is a must read.
The big picture then tells the story: for the most part it was the independent journalists who did truly good work on Comeygate-but again the story is too embarrassing for Dean Baquet and his Savvy Friends.
Based as it was on Higher Loyalty, I should have seen it coming. In that-almost entirely forgettable book-there was literally one (important)thing I learned that I hadn’t known before reading it-which is why I say it’s almost entirely forgettable.
But this important thing was very important-Comey confessed that he knew perfectly well that all the storm and stress over “Tarmacgate”-Bill Clinton says hello to Loretta Lynch! Scandal of the century-was signifying nothing. But he further goes on to say that he decided Tarmacgate was a useful excuse for doing the Comey Presser-as he’d always intended to do-when he say how much faux outrage there was about it on The Fix is in Fox News.
FN: Chapter Presser Fake Russian Document
As it turns out the book had one more important think I learned from it than the movie would. The subtitle of Showtime’s The Comey Rule could easily be Hagiography Run Amok.
“The first character we hear speak in “The Comey Rule,” Showtime’s two-episode limited series about the unhappy tenure of the former FBI director launching Sept. 27, is not James Comey at all. (Fear not! It should come as no surprise that he’ll have plenty to say later.) Instead, it’s former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, played by Scoot McNairy, who starts us off, pulling Comey’s memoir “A Higher Loyalty” from a shelf and complaining about its author’s flair for self-dramatizing antics. “In governance, there are people who do the work and there are showboats,” Rosenstein says. “Jim was always a showboat.”
This was the movie’s first scene and the great irony is that in retrospect it was probably the best scene.
FN: It wasn’t that good-as Rosenstein’s comment here is a little superficial as a criticism-later the movie undermines even this as it represents Rosenstein as being motivated by petty jealousy of Mr. 500 Year Flood.
But it did have a little honesty in it and perhaps suckered me into hoping that maybe this movie even if sympathetic to Comey would play it at least a little straight and at least look-a little as I knew not to expect much-seriously at the-legitimate-criticism of Comey. As it turns out this was all she wrote for any honestly regarding Comey or his role in 2016-and after the fact.
As the Variety article goes on to say:
“Rosenstein’s critique of Comey as blowhard at the film’s outset seems to have been made to get it out of the way, as Comey is unrelentingly portrayed as morally correct…”
Regarding Rosenstein’s critique:
“Not even most Comey fans might contest this point. Comey’s late reopening of the case against Hillary Clinton is seen by many (including the onetime candidate herself) as decisive in delivering the election to Donald Trump. But the man himself has tended to depict it as a personal drama in which he played hero — an argument compelling enough to a segment of the audience to have made his book a bestseller, and to have generated this show. The title of his memoir says it all: For Comey, the most recent presidential contest came down to a war staged within himself, in which pragmatism or a willingness to cede the stage was superseded by a devotion to ideals that he doesn’t mind telling you are lofty. That makes Jeff Daniels, who on HBO’s “The Newsroom” played a media figure who became famous and beloved for lecturing people, an apt casting choice.’
Regarding these ‘James Comey fans…’-I mean the question begs: why would anyone be a James Comey fan? Well this brings us to yet another fascinating paradox of American politics. Post 2016, one of the two parties has come to be Comey fans and see him as a kind of hero, the other party sees him as a morally preening “showboat” who substituted his own his own Kantian moral preferences for DOJ rules and procedures and through his moral vanity and secret partisan preferences put his thumb on the scale to flip a Presidential election. This is actually not surprising seeing Comey’s historic role in 2016. What’s not just surprising or shocking but downright surreal is which party thinks he’s a hero and which a moral preening partisan showboat who flipped an election. The Democrats agree with the former, the Republicans the latter.
This is truly amazing as “Comey’s late reopening of the case against Hillary Clinton is seen by many (including the onetime candidate herself) as decisive in delivering the election to Donald Trump.”
This underscores Matthew Miller-Obama’s former DOJ Spokesman warning back in 2018 on the Dems obsequious attitude towards Trumpland the FBI.
FN: See chapter Matthew Miller
His crucial point is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease though the other piece of it is the FBI is predisposed to be on Team Republican-again every Director in its history has been a Republican.
Yet the Dems continue to show this timid deference-Adam Schiff actually celebrating Biden retaining Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer Christopher Wray as Director despite Wray’s history of ignoring Democratic Congressional requests while GOP requests get VIP treatment; Biden retaining Wray in the first place.
Comey’s post 2016 fiasco has been a paradox-he certainly has seemed to be trying to ingratiate himself to Blue State America-the lifelong Republican called for a Democratic House in 2018, he publicly donated to Jennifer Wexler for Congress, etc.
Then there’s the t-shirt:
There’s more here than “The Comey Rule,” with its rubber-faced Trump resembling a comic-book villain, lets us see. In Trump, Comey found someone whose blind avarice provided a mirror image to his rigid insistence upon protocol; that neither party would bend made it inevitable that one would get snapped. But this series fails to find anything provocative or narratively rich in Comey’s dismissal from government, in part because we at home know the man never really went away. Beyond his memoir, he remains a presence on social media, where he contributes self-aggrandizing and gaseous posts (recently, with a startling lack of self-awareness, suggesting that this nation elect more women) and, until recently, on the lecture circuit. He’s crafted a role for himself as Comey-in-Chief: A figure outside the government and frankly outside real relevance whose voice demands to be heard. This need for attention and ability to procure it has proven Comey unusually fluent in the language and the new social mores of the Trump moment, which is a chewily complicated side of the man that the self-satisfied, inert “Comey Rule” fails to reckon with. The man himself was possessed of the belief — not a novel one in recent years — that when it came to American crisis, he alone could fix it. The show, in his thrall, agrees.”
His attempts-the nadir being “elect more women”-suggest he’s desperate not just for relevance but absolution, redemption. The problem is he to this day insists he did nothing wrong. How do you get redemption without repentance?
When he attempts yet again in his clumsy, hamhanded way to justify 2016 he always ends up sounding like The Fonz. He can say anything but s-s-s-..
He goes into his signature linguistic and logical contortions-it was a 500 year flood, a choice between conceal and reveal, doing the letter-and electing Trump whose campaign, as Comey knew was the subject of investigation over Russian interference and collusion-which Comey claims was merely very bad while not electing Trump would have been cataclysmic.
The charitable view here-which mostly has until now held the day in discussions of Comey-is he’s just an American man with Fonzi-itis-dude just can’t say he’s sorry. But that’s not quite true. In 2019 we saw that he can apologize when he wants to.
“Comey admits he was wrong about Carter Page wiretap: ‘There was real sloppiness”
“I was wrong,” Comey said in an interview with Fox News Sunday. “I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough.”
“During congressional testimony last week, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his inquiry found 17 inaccuracies and admissions in the four applications to conduct surveillance against Page.”
I was wrong. I was overconfident. Not robust enough. There was real sloppiness.
So he can apologize-to Republicans. Implicitly he doesn’t see any comparable “sloppiness” in how the Emailgate was conducted…
And the reality was it’s never been clear what the substance of the alleged sins in with the Carter Page were supposed to be-substance as opposed to nitpicking over arcane procedures. The question that begs is was Page’s wiretap treated differently than the wiretaps of other suspects or persons of interest are? Horowitz’s later report-he did so many Trump cum GOP co-conspirator investigations and reports while shelving the investigation into the rogue anti Clinton agents-an investigation that predated the GOP co-conspirator investigations by over a year.
I mean unlike-really any of the investigations of HRC by Comey and his GOP Friends at the FBI and DOJ starting with Whitewater-the investigation into Page was actually-more than-adequately predicated.
FN: EW among others has made this point.
End FN
Beyond that it’s not clear exactly what Comey’s own role was in the Page investigation. Did he personally approve the wiretap? Well actually no that’s approved by a federal judge.
FN
Again while the alleged “17 errors” were made a lot of it also became clear that this wasn’t unusual in wiretaps. So once again Page didn’t get especially bad but good treatment-being a friend of Trump-as most wiretap suspects don’t get the POTUS, US AG, and IG all going to bat for him.
Regarding the alleged ‘specialness’ of Carter Page’s case EW has done a lot of work.
IT TURNS OUT CARTER PAGE WAS NOT SPECIAL
DOJ’s IG released a Management Advisory Memorandum reporting on its results to date of the Woods File review promised in the wake of the DOJ IG Report that found (in part) that 8 (in the first) and 16 (in the last) claims made over the course of four FISA applications to surveil Carter Page were not backed by the Woods file meant to ensure the integrity of FISA applications. (The table starting on PDF 460 lists these errors.)
“I’ll have more on its methodology and findings, but the key takeaway is that Carter Page was not special, nor specially targeted by a Deep State intent on taking down the President.”
“Of 29 FISA applications DOJ IG selected for review, the Woods File was missing for four applications.”
“And for the 25 Woods Files there were able to review, there were an average of 20 issues identified per application, a higher rate than that found in the Carter Page review.”
So in asking why Comey was so quick to admit he was wrong in the Carter Page wiretap but not Emailgate-the IG saw a lot wrong with Comey’s personal conduct-two answers come to mind-he only apologizes to Republicans-fittingly he apologized on Fox which he says helped him decide to do the Presser-and Comey really didn’t have much to do personally with the decision to wiretap Carter Page.
So in reality he’s apologizing for nothing.
But to circle back to the question as to why Comey fans resonate almost entirely in the Democratic not the Republican base-indeed, GOPers pillory Comey as Deep State and of rigging the 2016 election and they’re right-he rigged it for them.
It’s the result of manifold factors. Beyond the timid diffidence of elected Dems-a la Schiff-Biden et al-that Matthew Miller warned of-to no avail-you have the crucial fact of Trump firing the man who elected him in early May, 2017 in a stunning fit of ingratitude to the man who elected him.
Since then Republicans have pilloried Comey following Trump in his total lack of gratitude and amnesia while Dems have embraced him-in a similar fit of amnesia. If Trump and his GOP co-conspirators have been shockingly ungrateful, Democrats have shockingly willing to forgive and forget.
FN: As we saw in Chapter Why the Comey Letter, Randol Schoenberg was a notable exception.
Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the firing, Trump and the GOP co-conspirators contrived to accuse Dems of inconsistency-ie hypocrisy-after all they-at least some of them had-(rightly) castigated Comey in the immediate aftermath. So why then weren’t the celebrating Trump’s firing of the man who elected him?
Interestingly it was Scott Sumner-of all people-who best summed up why there was no actual hypocrisy-as process matters a point way too subtle for Trump and the GOP co-conspirators-while Comey arguably deserved to be fired, the process and intent matters. Despite the howler Trump and Rod Rosenstein tried to sell us, obviously the reason Comey was fired was not because of Emailgate-ie because Comey in fact elected Trump-but because he wouldn’t end the Russia investigation.
“It is not secret that I have long thought that James Comey must be terminated as Director of the FBI. See my previous blogs from November 14, January 22, and May 3. His grave errors of judgment last year single-handedly threw the election to Donald Trump, the most unstable, mean-spirited and incompetent President in the history of our great country.”
“I was therefore elated with the news this week that Comey had been fired. I was invited to speak on CNN International in two segments ( 1, 2) on Tuesday, and was obviously gleeful. But it turns out I was just about the only Democrat who was truly happy with the news. Almost instantaneously, Democratic politicians and commentators flooded the airways with statements denouncing the President’s dismissal of Comey. I felt, and still feel, that this reflexive “if he’s for it, I’m against it” response was misguided, both on the merits and as a matter of politics.”
His point is taken but I don’t think it was quite that simple. To be clear I agree that Comey deserved to be fired and would have been all for it if a President Hillary Clinton-had narrowly survived Comey’s October Surprise-and fired him. In this I’m probably a minority-you suspect even within the party there’d have been plenty of savvy commentary that she simply couldn’t do this as the “optics” were too bad…
But the conventional wisdom on this would be wrong-as is often the case.
FN: Schoenberg points out the “optics” fallacy Comey seemed to harbor during Emailgate:
“Comey’s decision-making seems to have been driven by a desire to appear impartial. I’ve seen a lot of people, even judges, make this mistake. The law often requires officials to avoid the appearance of impropriety or partiality. But that is not a license to do actually improper things, in the hopes of appearing neutral and fair. This was Comey’s mistake. He consistently behaved as though he was compelled to do the wrong thing, in order to create the appearance of doing the right thing. In July, to avoid mounting criticism of the FBI after Bill Clinton’s meeting with Loretta Lynch, he wrongly held a press conference in which he tried to lay out a case against Hillary Clinton while at the same time supporting the decision (made weeks earlier) not to prosecute. In October, he wrongly notified Congress of a further investigation of e-mails before anything significant was found, because he worried that he would be criticized later for “concealing” the fact that they were conducting a new search. In both cases, he decided to do the wrong thing to improve his reputation for neutrality, rather than do the right thing and take unfair criticism.”
Comey absolutely deserved to be fired for his disastrous Emailgate investigation-and to paraphrase Grady in the Shinking, maybe a little bit more.
FN: For what that “little bit more” might look like stay tuned and see below…
That isn’t why Trump fired him. Trump fired him to end the Russia investigation-again process matters.
FN: Scheonberg’s analysis of Comey’s boners is so incisive, yet he completely marginalizes the fact of Russian interference and collusion. He doesn’t understand the point we developed in Chapter Mensch-that Comeygate and Russian Collusion were one operation…
“I never thought that Trump would actually get rid of Comey. After all, that would imply that Comey did something wrong in the lead-up to the election which he won. Since it is increasingly clear beyond any reasonable doubt that Comey’s actions swayed the election to Trump, why would Trump risk feeding the narrative that his election was illegitimate by terminating Comey?”
Obviously to obstruct the Russia investigation-the one Schoneberg wrongly thought was a sideshow.
“I didn’t think he would do it. But he did, and so I was happy, happy, happy. The culprit who cost Clinton the election, and said he would do it again, was gone. What could be bad about that?“
Well first of all, at that point firing Comey didn’t in any way lessen the damage already done-that he had done. It was sort of like closing the barn door after the cows are in the mountains. Comey elected Trump and Trump’s fit of ungratefulness in firing the man who elected him didn’t retroactively unelect Trump so what at that point was there to celebrate? Beyond that the fear was no one knew who Trump would replace Comey with.
He could have chosen someone like Rudy Giuliani-talk about fox guarding the henhouse! Giuliani colluded with the rogue anti Clinton agents in 2016 but it would have been even easier next time if he were the actual Director. Trump ultimately chose Chris Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer Christopher Wray.
Many folks both in mainstream legal circles as well as Democrats themselves felt some relief in this choice. It’s certainly true it could have been worse-the far more emboldened unchastened Trump of 2020 might well have appointed Rudes. In 2017 he was still nervous enough to listen to Rod Rosenstein and Friends-apparently Christie himself takes credit for getting Trump to choose Wray.
To be clear to say it could have been much worse than Wray doesn’t mean he was good-maybe he was the best we could have hoped for during the “President Trump” regime. But reinstating him was President Joe’s first mistake-basically his first act upon reaching Office.
FN: See chapter Biden.
As emboldened as Trump got post Mueller and first impeachment, clearly you couldn’t sit there in May, 2017 and laud his firing Comey-as Schoenberg more or less does.
“I didn’t think he would do it. But he did, and so I was happy, happy, happy. The culprit who cost Clinton the election, and said he would do it again, was gone. What could be bad about that?“
Again process matters. And at that point the big concern was what Trump would do next-as he’d only grow more emboldened. It was hard to take much pleasure in Comey being thrown out as he’d already done his damage-Trump wasn’t being thrown out.
The irony with Schoenberg is that like many people he’s half right and half wrong. What’s interesting is that he was wrong in a different way-thinking Russia was a sideshow-than most people in 2017-2018 and right in a different way-the conventional wisdom had completely memoryholed Comey’s disastrous Emailgate investigation-as most of them in the mainstream press were so complicit-while folks debated Russian collusion there’s no question the Dean Baquette news colluded with Comey and the anti Clinton rogue agents.
FN: To be more precise I’d say Schoenberg is more like 75% right as he spoke very little about his-mistaken-idea that “Russia was a sideshow” While the MSMers during this time were more like maybe 30% right…
Schoenberg really has some wonderful analysis of a subject almost completely ignored by the MSM.
End FN:
And he’s half wrong-but also half right here.
“Apparently, that isn’t how most Democrats saw it. No sooner was the firing made public, when Democratic politicians began lambasting Trump for his decision, and backing off their prior antagonism towards Comey.”
They were entirely right to lambast Trump as it was a enormous abuse of power-and per the Mueller Report it may have been a crime.
FN: Again if Hillary had survived Comey’s October Surprise I would have fully supported her decision if she fired Comey-of course then all the chicken hawk Dem electeds would probably desperately attempt to dissaude her because of “optics” which is what led to Comey’s disastrous decisions in the first place.
But Schoenberg is right on his second clause-the Dems made a big mistake backing off their prior antagonism towards Comey-who fully deserved and as this book makes clear still deserves all the antagonism in the world.
In coming to see Comey as a hero rather than the zero who caused this entire mess Dems were guilty of the Kanan fallacy.
Comey is like Canaan in Season 5-3 28 minutes in: Tosha tells him “You don’t get points for cleaning up the mess you made.”
Although Tasha wouldn’t want to go here-the same applies to her son, Tariq. Tariq gets to feel like he’s a hero for killing his sister, Rainer’s, killer. But the reality is he got her killed in the first place. What’s heroic isn’t killing your sister’s murderer but not getting her killed in the first place.
The same applies to Comey. He desperately wants-needs-us to think he’s the hero. But he’s no hero. He’s the opposite of a hero. He is the “500 year flood”, his extreme carelessness, his not very bad but catastrophic decisions are that 500 year flood.
Yet he’s sorry not sorry and that his decisions were “merely very bad” but following the rules and not putting his thumb on the scale and not electing Trump who he know was being looked at in a counterintellgience investigation for ties to Russia.. that would have been the cataclysmic option.
Schoenberg has also done an excellent job of documenting Comey’s utter refusal to express any regret regarding his own actions-as noted above he seems to want it both ways, he wants redemption without admitting he did anything wrong.
“The other reason that I focus on Comey’s mistake is that he has yet to admit he made a mistake. In fact, he continues to claim that if he had it to do all over again, he would make the same decision. “I am convinced that if I could do it all again, I would do the same thing, given my role and what I knew at the time.” (Page 207.) Many people have focused on the ridiculous “Speak or Conceal” dichotomy that Comey has set up in his mind to explain away his error. He seems simply incapable of applying the actual facts as they developed to help him see that a different, and very justifiable, decision would have been preferable.”
“Obviously, Comey is simply incapable of imagining the world as it would have been had he made a different choice. What could he possibly mean by “might have been even worse”? Worse than what actually transpired? Worse than his firing by President Trump? What exactly is he imagining that would be worse? Really, what is it?”
In chapter Why the Comey Letter we delved deeper into Schoenberg’s argument that Comey didn’t do the letter as he assumed HRC would win but because:
“I think Comey is imagining something that he knows now isn’t true, but that he really thought would be true when he made the decision on October 27. Comey thought the FBI was going to find something incriminating. He really did. It is the only way to understand his decision-making then, and his attempt to justify it now. What he was deathly afraid of was that Clinton would win and then afterwards it would be revealed that she had actually committed a crime. In that scenario, the wrath of the world that he lived in — almost exclusively Republican — would have come squarely down on his head. That was the scenario he most feared, and that he most wanted to avoid. That was why the “Conceal” door, as he describes it, looked so threatening. He didn’t see that inside that door was another, much more likely scenario — that the FBI would find nothing incriminating on the laptop, making his failure to disclose the new search both harmless and easy to explain. The Conceal door only becomes scary if you think the chance of finding incriminating evidence was higher than the chance of not finding any. Comey thought Clinton was guilty, and that the FBI would find, as he called it in his Senate testimony, the “golden e-mails” proving her guilt, that had eluded them so far.”
In that chapter I argued this is very important as it reminds us that in fact Comey is a partisan Republican-or had been through his entire career.
FN: I fully agree as well with Schoenberg that we still need an investigation of Comey and the FBI’s conduct in 2016. As we saw in Chapter Horowitz, Horowitz was supposed to be part of the investigation but then he tabled it allegedly based on reasoning that doesn’t even pass the proverbial laugh test.
Again, he’s no hero. He’s the opposite of a hero. He is that 500-year flood that has been so much more than merely very bad, but utterly cataclysmic. Back to Schoenberg:
“Comey was a cancer that needed to be removed for the Department of Justice to function properly.”
I’ve already explained that I disagree with his take on Comey’s firing-who removed him and how. However, it’s hard to argue with the larger, more metaphysical point: Comey was-is-a cancer. His cataclysmic Emailgate investigation continues to infect this country.
We still need that Emailgate investigation:
“When I began writing about Comey in November, I called for an investigation of the FBI and I think that is still necessary. Comey testified on May 3 that he had a meeting in his office on October 27 when he and his colleagues decided “unanimously” to send that inane October 28 letter that ruined the election. That’s a conspiracy to interfere with an election and I think the American people deserve to know who else was involved.”
Again, if he wants redemption it starts with repentance and regret. He wants to be heroic maybe he can testify publicly on his role again except this time accurately-as can the rest of the Emailgate investigators-we looked at in Chapter Why the Comey Letter. As I stated in that chapter, I don’t much believe the public explanations of anyone in Emailgate-including from Lisa Page or Andy McCabe though it’s a level of degrees and no one is less trustable than Comey himself. Comparatively McCabe-Page may have been heroic.
It’s also my strongly held opinion that Comey should be penalized sharply-because of his brazen breach of protocol, due to the cataclysmic effect of his breaches and violations and extenuated by the fact of his utter lack of contrition or remorse. We can debate what this punishment should be-for starters it seems me he ought to lose his generous government pension benefits-including clawback. Maybe a clawback of his book sale profits. Again, his abuse of his powerful position as FBI Director has had a cataclysmic -his own word, a good word-effect on our country.
So, in my view his penalties should be steep. Maybe his FBI record should have an asterisk put next to it-together with a loss of any the many honors he amassed during his long FBI career. If what I’m suggesting seems unprecedented or harsh so were his own actions and so was their cataclysmic effect.
To be sure it’s not only Comey who should face such penalties. What Horowitz should do is release the names of all the leaking rogue agents he’s hiding and each one of them should get the (my proposed) Comey treatment-like how Jeff Sessions and Christopher Wray treated McCabe.
FN: Regarding the leakers Jim Jordan seems to be using some of these in the latest GOP parallel narrative attacking the J6 investigation-see Chapter Horowitz if you’re listening. Horowitz has hidden the identities of 100 rogue 2016 FBI agents-give or take. But Jordan seems have been talking to a number of them in the parallel anti J6 investigation. It’s certainly a plausible conjecture that there is a good deal of overlap between the 2016 rogue anti-Clinton leakers and the ‘whistleblowers’-who were actually rogue FBI agents who tried to undermine the J6 investigation.
Indeed, this is the least that should happen to any law enforcement, military, or intelligence personnel involved in the January 6 Insurrection-full loss of any pay, pension or benefit, as well as terminated to boot-members of the Capitol police, the Pentagon, DHS, the Secret Service.
Speaking of the Secret Service-like the FBI a very Republican place-we have all those “lost” texts on January 6. Anyone who had anything to do with this alleged “routine” deletions or “mass migration” should face similar penalties-loss of job, honors, pensions, benefits, etc.
Start with every single deleted text. Who deleted it? Who sent the text? To whom? Everyone should be cross examined. Unprecedented measures? Maybe. Unprecedented actions.
Since the Comey firing, the elected Dems dropped the issue of a broad, fulsome Comeygate cum Emailgate investigation, but it still remains to be done. He’s not a hero, he’s the opposite of a hero. He was a cancer at the DOJ, and it continues to infect this country. He is our 500-year flood. He wants to be a hero but he’s the opposite he is the Bill E. Buckner of American politics.
Are these links needed-or is everything already accounted for?
Pan his self-serving Showtime movie The Comey Rule
https://www.salon.com/2016/11/08/the-year-democracy-broke-and-how-we-got-here/
https://variety.com/2020/tv/reviews/the-comey-rule-showtime-1234754580/