You don’t have to be a cockeyed
optimist to believe that, although times are tough, they could be worse. Just
imagine the mess if James Comey were still running the FBI.
Near the end of his forceful
Thursday interview, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Comey if he would have
kept working for President Trump had the president not fired him.
“Yes,” Comey said. “In fact, that
was my intention. To serve another six years.”
Yikes. Thank heavens — and Trump —
Comey didn’t get the chance to corrupt the FBI for a minute longer, let alone
six more years.
Comey’s book tour is a phenomenon
possible only in the Age of Trump. He is treated like a star because he
delivers catnip to the hate-Trump media, as when he condemns the president as
“like a crime boss who’s morally unfit.” The book, “Higher Loyalty” has sold more than 600,000 copies
and the president feeds the circus by calling Comey a “leaker and a liar.”
Most authors would die for such
attention and sales, but Comey is paying a reputational price for his windfall.
The more he talks, the more he inadvertently proves Trump’s case that
something was very rotten in Washington and that Comey himself was unfit to
lead the FBI.
Consider his comments to a New York
bookstore audience.
“There is a deep state in this
sense,” Comey said. “There is a collection of people, CIA, NSA, FBI [and] in
the United States military services who care passionately about getting it
right, who care passionately about the values we try to talk about.”
He called them the “ballast of the
country” and said “No president in a single term could screw it up…It would
take generations, and that should comfort us.”
That depends on who “us” is and
whose “values” are being pushed.
In a vacuum, the notion of seasoned
professionals making the government run is unremarkable. But against the
backdrop of continuing revelations of serious misconduct in those agencies
during the Obama administration, there is no comfort for the millions of
Americans who believe insiders abused their powers for partisan purposes.
They see the “deep state” as a
sinister force aiming to hijack an election and, when that didn’t work,
undermine a fairly elected president. They also see a system with one set of laws
for those favored by the government and a different set for everyone else.
Comey, as an ambitious insider, was
both a beneficiary and a perpetrator of this double standard of justice.
He continues to insist that his
investigation of Hillary Clinton was clean, even as he says he didn’t trust the
actions of his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He insists the Trump probe
was not affected by the anti-Trump sentiments of top officials Peter Strzok and
Lisa Page, who texted about an “insurance plan” in case Trump won, or the lies
to investigators of his top deputy, Andrew McCabe.
His claim that he saw no bias is
laughable — they were all biased in the same way, agreeing that Trump should
not be president!
In a truly bizarre claim, Comey said
on Fox he isn’t certain the Russian dossier was paid for by Clinton and the Democratic
Party.
That doesn’t pass the smell test,
and, even if true, would mean the probe was incompetent. The political
motivation behind the dossier is a key fact when judging its credibility, as
are the openly-partisan leanings of investigators.
Yet to hear Comey talk, none of this
matters. All that matters is that we should trust him to do the right thing,
which happens to be whatever he says it is.
That includes giving a “friend” memos he wrote to leak them to the media.
Oops — it’s not a leak when he does it.
Nor does he see anything wrong in
writing a scathing book based on his private meetings with the president, even
though he leaves an unprecedented stain on the FBI.
Comey’s self-aggrandizement is
apparent with his claim that he tried to “protect the independence” of the
agency, as if it were a separate branch of government, accountable to no one.
It also doesn’t seem to bother him
that public trust is destroyed when law enforcement is politicized to help the
candidate of the incumbent party and hurt the candidate of the opposition
party.
What happened at the FBI under Comey
in 2016 was not “ballast.” It was a clear and present danger to America.
This is the “deep state” in reality,
not the idealized one he depicts.
A final example involves how the
most salacious aspects of the Russian dossier were published. Comey writes that
he briefed President-elect Trump on the alleged prostitute saga, telling him
that “media like CNN had the dossier and were looking for a news hook” to
publish it.
Presto — two days after that
briefing, CNN broke the news that Comey had discussed the dossier with
Trump, making the meeting the news hook CNN sought. The source of that story appears to be James Clapper,
Obama’s Director of National Intelligence — and now a CNN contributor.
According to a House Intelligence
Committee report released Friday, Clapper initially “flatly denied” discussing
the dossier with CNN.
But when confronted with evidence to
the contrary, he changed his story.
The report says “Clapper
subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake
Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists,” according to The Federalist.
One more fact: Comey said he briefed
Trump on the dossier at Clapper’s suggestion.
That’s the deep state in action.
_____________________
House panel’s Russia report finds 'no
evidence' of collusion, Trump says probe ‘MUST END NOW’
The House Intelligence Committee on Friday declared that
it found “no evidence” of collusion between the Russian government and Trump
campaign during the 2016 presidential election, releasing a heavily redacted
final report on its yearlong Russia investigation.
The Republican-authored report -- released over
Democratic objections -- stated the committee “found no evidence that the Trump
campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government.” The
committee did, however, “find poor judgment and ill-considered actions by the
Trump and Clinton campaign.”
President Trump, reacting to the report moments after its
release, hailed its findings and said the Russia "Witch Hunt" must
end, in an apparent swipe at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing
investigation.
“Just Out: House Intelligence Committee Report released.
‘No evidence’ that the Trump Campaign “colluded, coordinated or conspired with
Russia.’ Clinton Campaign paid for Opposition Research obtained from
Russia-Wow! A total Witch Hunt! MUST END NOW!” Trump tweeted.
-----------
Just Out: House
Intelligence Committee Report released. “No evidence” that the Trump Campaign
“colluded, coordinated or conspired with Russia.” Clinton Campaign paid for
Opposition Research obtained from Russia- Wow! A total Witch Hunt! MUST END
NOW!
----------
The more than 250-page report was heavily blacked out,
however, and the leader of the investigation slammed the intelligence community
for their “overzealous redactions.”
“I am extremely disappointed with the overzealous
redactions made by the IC. Many of the redactions include information that is
publicly available, such as witness names and information previously
declassified,” investigation leader Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, complained in a
statement Friday.
“I will continue to challenge the IC’s many unnecessary
redactions with the hopes of releasing more of the report in the coming
months.”
The committee’s investigation was based on four topics:
Russian active measures against the 2016 U.S. election, the U.S. government’s
response to the attack. Links between Russians and the Trump and Clinton
campaigns, and purported leaks of classified information.
The committee also found that there was “no evidence that
Trump campaign associates were involved in the theft or publication of Clinton
campaign-related emails, although Trump associates had numerous ill-advised
contacts with WikiLeaks.”
The committee outlined “poor judgement” practiced by both
campaigns, though, citing the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between members
of the Trump campaign and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya “who falsely
purported to have damaging information on the Clinton campaign demonstrated
poor judgement.”
“The Committee also found that the Clinton campaign and
the DNC, using a series of cutouts and intermediaries to obscure their roles,
paid for opposition research on Trump obtained from Russian sources, including
a litany of claims by high-ranking current and former Russian government
officials,” the report read. “Some of this opposition research was used to
produce sixteen memos, which comprise what has become known as the Steele
dossier.”
The release of the full report comes after committee
leaders announced key findings last month, prompting a war of words between
Republican and Democratic members.
The GOP majority at the time reported
finding no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump campaign associates.
They also said that based on the investigation, the controversial anti-Trump
dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele “formed an essential part
of an application” to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain
electronic surveillance on Trump adviser Carter Page.
Conaway took over the probe when House Intelligence
Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., stepped
down in
April 2017 after he was accused of making “unauthorized disclosures of
classified information, in violation of House Rules, law regulations, or other
standards of conduct.”
But the top committee Democrat blasted Republicans last
month for “prematurely” shutting down the panel’s Russia probe and renewed
their criticism on Friday.
“Notwithstanding the decision by the Majority to end its
work and turn its attention to counter-investigations designed to serve the
President’s interests, the Minority’s work on the Russia investigation
continues,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a statement Friday. “We will
continue our investigation using every means at our disposal; to do otherwise
would ignore our responsibility to conduct meaningful oversight and insure that
the Russians do not possess leverage over the President of the United States.”
Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this
report.
