Comey Ran True to Form
The
FBI director let Hillary Clinton off, making the safe call—no big surprise
there.
By
Kimberley A. Strassel
When President Obama
in 2013 named James Comey to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
president must have sensed that he had picked someone who could be trusted to
have his back, even if Mr. Comey had served in the George W. Bush
administration. This week, Mr. Obama’s bet paid off when the G-man let Hillary Clinton
skate.
Not that Mr. Comey
had an explicit understanding with the White House. It’s just that Mr. Obama
and his savvy political team must have known from the start that Mr. Comey was
no John Adams.
Not the Adams of
Founding Father fame, but John Adams when he was a younger man, who in 1770
agreed to defend British soldiers accused of massacring Boston colonists. The
legal task was so unpopular, so dangerous, that nobody else would do it. Yet
Adams believed that the law trumped politics, and that the men deserved a fair
trial. In taking the case, he risked both his economic and political future. He
took it anyway.
Mr. Obama announced
Mr. Comey’s appointment by praising his “fierce independence and deep
integrity.” And the press drooled over several episodes in his history that had
given the former Justice Department official a reputation as tough and
impartial. What this missed was that Mr. Comey had risen through the ranks
precisely by being the opposite of tough. Washington rewards officials who are
best at currying public favor, best at surviving, best at creating unfounded
legends. And Mr. Comey had been steadily rising in Washington a long time.
Consider the episode
for which he is perhaps most famous: opposing the George W. Bush
administration’s “warrantless wiretapping” program in 2004. The left cast
the then-deputy U.S. attorney general as a hero, breathlessly relating how he
had rushed to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to
oppose reauthorization of the program. Mr. Obama, in choosing Mr. Comey,
furthered this lore, feting him as a man who “was prepared to give up a job he
loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong.”
Yet there was nothing
tough or bold about opposing a program that was always going to be explosively
controversial.
Intervening wasn’t brave; it’s what any watch-your-own-backside official would
do. There was nothing courageous in later spinning his role, or tarnishing
well-meaning government lawyers whose interpretations of the policy differed
from his own. Tough would have been standing behind a program that was vital
in the war on terror; tough would have been defending the policy when it became
a lightning rod for liberal and media criticism.
There was nothing
tough, when Mr. Comey was a federal prosecutor in 2003, about expending vast
time and resources to harass banker Frank Quattrone over the wording of a
single ambiguous email. Tough would have been withstanding the
post-Enron, antibusiness populist climate and refusing to burnish one’s
prosecutorial credentials by turning Mr. Quattrone into a whipping boy.
There was nothing tough about continuing to defend the FBI’s hapless
investigation of non-anthrax-mailer Steven Jay Hatfill. Tough would have been
admitting the FBI had bungled it.
And there was
certainly nothing tough in 2003 about appointing a special prosecutor—an old
buddy named Patrick
Fitzgerald—to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA
employee. How tough was it to allow the hounding of Bush officials after
Washington had turned against the war in Iraq? Tough would have been
exercising the authority Mr. Comey had to shut the case after Mr. Fitzgerald
quickly discovered the leaker’s identity. Mr. Comey
instead let it run for three years, let
it temporarily put a journalist in jail for refusing to disclose a source, and let it end with the scandalous perjury conviction of
Scooter Libby. This isn’t tough. It’s
going with the popular flow.
All of which is why
it was no surprise that Mr. Comey this week let Mrs. Clinton off, despite
the damning evidence amassed by the FBI of gross negligence in her handling of
classified material. A prosecutor—for this was the position Mr. Comey
essentially assumed on Tuesday—who put the law above all else would have
brought charges, holding Mrs. Clinton to the same standard as other officials
convicted of similarly “extremely careless” handling of classified material.
A prosecutor who had
spent a lifetime with one eye on politics and one eye on his résumé would
have behaved exactly as Mr. Comey did. He must have noticed that Mrs.
Clinton, leading in the polls, had recently dangled a job offer in front of
his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He saw
President Obama pressing not just his thumb, but his whole body, on the scales
of justice. Reporters were on Mrs. Clinton’s side. Democrats were
ready to be furious if he decided the wrong way.
Mr. Comey wasn’t
ready to go it alone and impose accountability on Mrs. Clinton. That would have
been tough. That would have been brave. He instead listed her transgressions
in detail and left it to the public to pass judgment at the ballot box in
November. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work. But Mr. Comey
is no John Adams.
Write to kim@wsj.com.
