After the initial shock
and subsequent despair for this country, I gave some thought to why this
happened. Poor Hillary, she did not deserve this. It does show that if
lies are repeated enough times, people start to believe them. She has had this
all her political life. And then came the Trump madman. His calling her
"crooked Hillary" again and again without any evidence then led
to his saying in a debate not only that she should be in jail but that, as
President, he himself would have his Attorney General find her guilty (of
what?). It is ironic that he himself was 100 times more guilty of everything
and more that he accused her of.
OK, but then she was
still on the road to winning easily, but the anti-Hillary conspiracy began to
really gel. First there was the hacking of her emails by the Russians and the
slow feeding of Julian's Wikileaks monster to leak the hacked emails slowly to
the press, with madman Trump actually asking the Russians to find her "missing" emails. And it is highly likely that the Russian masters of these
hackers made subtle modifications of selected emails. But amazingly Hillary was
still leading in all polls. Then came the coup de Gras in the form of the FBI
Director, James Comey. What he did can best be explained by copying a Newsweek
essay by Kurt Eichenwald:
James Comey should not simply be fired as
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He must be barred forever from
any form of public service. In the last 10 days, Comey has whipsawed the
election for president of the United States. Now we know he did it for no
reason. When his agents found information that suggested there
were emails on a laptop that might have
relevance to the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her email servers, Comey
did not wait until he knew even a scintilla of information before announcing it
to the world. Reasonably, lots of voters assumed there must be a there
there—who could imagine a person with the power of the FBI director would turn
the election on its head for no particular reason, on the basis of nothing?
Then, Sunday, Comey handed down another
missive from on high: Never mind. His agents had looked through the emails and
decided they were piffle. His majesty, the FBI director, has not yet deigned to
officially inform his subjects—the American people—whether the emails related
to the Clinton case or what they were. (However, people involved in the case
tell Newsweek that almost all of
them were duplicates of what the bureau already had or were personal.) He just
said “nothing to see here” and waived us on our way.
Well, forget it, Jim. We’re not moving on.
America has just witnessed one of the most—if not the most—egregious abuses of
power in the service of one man’s ego in its history. Joseph McCarthy and A.
Mitchell Palmer at least believed they were fighting a Communist threat.
Richard Nixon, in Watergate, at least had the motive of retaining power and
covering up wrongdoing. But Comey—who I do not believe did this for partisan
reasons—has no such motive. This was about him, about preserving his now
forever-destroyed reputation, about preening with his self-satisfied standing
as a maverick who acts based on what he thinks is right, regardless of others’
opinion. But there is a very thin line between being independent and being
reckless. And Comey has demonstrated he does not know the difference.
Before launching into a full Comey tear-down,
a few facts must be understood. The FBI is an investigative arm of the Department
of Justice. Nothing more, nothing less. An extremely small minority are
lawyers, or even have basic legal training. They do not—thank God—decide who
gets indicted and who doesn’t. Prosecutors run criminal cases and direct the
agents. As many prosecutors have told me over the years, there is almost never
an instance where agents who have been investigating a case for months do not
recommend for prosecution. Tunnel vision is one reason; the fact that agents
rise in the ranks by delivering cases that lead to prosecution is another. That
is why prosecutors—and through them, grand juries—make the decision to charge
or not. They both serve as a backstop to agents who don’t know the law and have
no ability to objectively review their own evidence.
This is why all this nonsense pushed by the
Fox Newses of the world has been so deceptive: Screaming “the agents wanted to
indict” is on par with “the fish wants to swim.” More important—if any agents
really did say these things—they are unfit for the bureau; they must be found
and fired immediately for this separate abuse of power.
What that means is, if the FBI does not even
conclude it has enough evidence to write a memo recommending prosecution to the
Justice Department, there is simply nothing there. Assuming someone committed a
crime when the FBI concludes the evidence obtained in the investigation is not
worth turning over to prosecutors is like assuming it must be raining when the
skies are clear.
The FBI is never supposed to comment on
ongoing investigations and, except in exceptional circumstances, never disclose
whether it has or has not recommended prosecution. Instead, on indictment,
prosecutors stand up at a press conference, announce the charges, then thank
the agents and offices of the FBI who conducted the investigation. If the
bureau does not develop enough evidence to merit even a recommendation for
prosecution, in those exceptional circumstances where it says anything, those
are the words officials use: We have not developed evidence that merits a recommendation
for prosecution.
In the last few months, unfortunately, Comey
has demonstrated he understands none of this. He has broken these rules time
and again, leaving himself in the position where he decided he had to break
them a couple of more times. He has acted with a lack of accountability that
has not been seen since J. Edgar Hoover held the post. It is unforgivable.
Comey came into the job as FBI director having
been a federal prosecutor and the deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush
administration. As anyone who has met him knows, he prizes his reputation for
integrity and as one who rises above politics. In fact, he prizes it a little
too much. And that is what even his allies in government are saying led to his
disastrous decisions in recent months. Like Icarus, driven by hubris, he chose
to fly too close to the sun and now has fallen into a sea of near-universal
public contempt.
The signs of Comey’s coming downfall showed up
quickly. In fact, the event that led to his golden reputation as a man of
integrity, when viewed through in the context of everything Comey has done in
his time as FBI director, looks quite different. He was cheered when the public
learned that, while in the role of acting attorney general at a time when his
boss, John Ashcroft, was in the hospital, he refused to sign a document
authorizing the continuation of a warrantless wiretapping program used as part
of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism efforts. Lots of drama surrounded
the event, with Comey—in his later retelling of the story to Congress—as the
hero. But in truth, by behaving as if only he knew the truth of the law, Comey
burnished his reputation but changed nothing. A couple of fixes were made to
the program, and he signed the authorization later.
Plenty of people in Washington knew of Comey’s
self-infatuation and predicted it would lead to the exact kind of problem born
of his arrogance that has convulsed the country for more than a week. In fact,
shortly after he was nominated for FBI director, the Daily Beast quoted an
unidentified Justice Department official saying these frighteningly prescient
words: “If past is prologue, something will happen in the context of a
legal, policy, or operational disagreement where Jim may get on the high horse and
threaten to resign or take some other action unless things go the way he
believes they should.” When he wanted to issue the now-famous first letter, the
attorney general and everyone else consulted in the Justice Department said it
was against policy and advised him not to do it. But Comey ignored everyone.
That’s the way it has been throughout Comey’s
tenure at FBI. When the Obama administration adopted a policy of cutting down
on mandatory minimum sentences, Comey stepped up to the microphones to declare
the president wrong. Such sentences, he proclaimed, are helpful in developing
cooperating witnesses. (In fact, there is no evidence to support Comey’s
statement—mandatory minimums do nothing to persuade potential witnesses to
cooperate. He just said it because he thought it was true.)
That was the same standard he used later in
talking what was called the “Ferguson effect,” a term used to describe the idea
that subjecting police to greater oversight and scrutiny increases the
chance that they will be murdered. Not only is there no evidence supporting the
idea, it has been thoroughly disproven. Yet Comey advances the idea as gospel
based again on nothing but his personal beliefs. He was even urged to stop at a
White House meeting, but as always, Comey felt certain he knew best, and
continued spewing this falsehood.
Then came the time when the FBI needed to gain
access to an iPhone that belonged to the extremists who committed an attack in
San Bernardino, California, in 2015. Comey was told that an
administration-wide encryption program was under development that would be
harmed if he pushed Apple. He ignored the White House and the Pentagon and, in
an action that thwarted the government encryption effort, demanded that Apple
be forced to unlock the phone.
Time and again, Comey did what Comey wanted to
do—regardless of the advice, regardless of what others thought, regardless of
whether his arguments had no evidence supporting them. This all came to a head,
though, with the investigation of Clinton’s use of a personal email server.
When the FBI concluded its investigation with
the decision not to recommend charges, that was all any professional in the
position of FBI director would say. There are many reasons for that—primarily,
that is the extent of the bureau’s job. It is not an arbiter of morality or
competence. More important, if the bureau goes further, both the powerful and
powerless are in no position to argue the facts. A sentence that starts with
the words “The FBI says…” is almost sacrosanct because of its history in the
last number of decades of self-control.
Comey did none of these things. Instead, in an
action that horrified many officials who have worked in Republican and
Democratic administrations, Comey held a press conference where he blathered on
and on about his personal opinions and presented details—sometimes
incorrectly—about the investigation. He consulted with none of his colleagues,
not even the attorney general. And while he proclaimed he would not be
recommending prosecution, he excoriated Clinton for her use of the private
email server—a statement that was totally beyond his role. He later told
Congress that no prosecutor could ever make a case against her based on the
evidence—words that should have cheered Clinton partisans, but which again were
horrific. Comey does not speak for prosecutors. The arrogance reflected in that
one statement was astonishing.
Then, Comey went further. He opened up the
Clinton investigative files and had them posted online. This act was again
unprecedented, unnecessary and unexplained. Put simply, Comey was out of
control. He was acting under all his own rules—calling press conferences,
absolving Clinton, condemning her, speaking for prosecutors, dumping FBI files
online—and seemed to be making them up as he went along.
His recklessness opened him up to even more
criticism from Republicans. Had he simply made the usual statement about no
referral, there would have been nothing else to review. But with his endless
proclamations and document dumps, he opened himself and the FBI for more
criticism as people with no training in investigations or law—but plenty of
interest in politicizing the FBI—picked through everything he said and every
scrap of paper to scream that the only reason Clinton wasn’t indicted was
because of politics. So much information had been placed in the public record
by Comey that no one in the public could tell what was a manipulation of the
facts and what was real.
Of course, despite all the outcry, Comey did
not consider the possibility he had made a mistake. In a message to his
employees in September, first reported by CNN, Comey tersely proclaimed that
Jim Comey had been right about everything, if he did say so himself. “I’m OK if
folks have a different view of the investigation (although I struggle to see
how they actually could, especially when they didn’t do the investigation), or
about the wisdom of announcing it as we did (although even with hindsight I
think that was the best course),” Comey wrote.
Then came late October. Agents had been investigating
allegation that former Congressman Anthony Weiner sent illicit, sexual text
messages to an underage girl in North Carolina. As part of the inquiry, those
agents seized a laptop and eventually discovered emails on it potentially
related to the Clinton case. (Huma Abedin, a senior Clinton aide, is the
estranged wife of Weiner, and it is her emails that were found on his laptop.)
About a week after they had obtained the device, the agents told Comey about
their find late on Thursday, October 27.
The emails had not been reviewed. No one
reached out to either Weiner or Abedin to obtain permission to review them. No
one tried to get a warrant. Literally, the bureau knew next to nothing. But
still, the day after he was briefed, with no further information, Comey sent
his letter announcing the non-development to Congress. The letter was vague and
almost incomprehensible, leaving it to the politicians and reporters to fill in
the blanks.
With Democrats reeling and Republicans
declaring the announcement as proof that Clinton was about to be indicted,
calls came from every side of the political spectrum that he provide more
information. But once again, Comey stood firm, telling his employees at the FBI
that—shock of shocks—he was right and everyone else was wrong. “There is a
significant risk of being misunderstood,” Comey told the bureau employees in
the communication, explaining why he was so vague in his letter to Congress.
“It would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the
record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the
significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to
create a misleading impression.”
Please. As any fifth grader not suffering
under the weight of Comey’s ego could know immediately, saying next to nothing
created a tremendously misleading impression. The numbers tell the ugly story.
According to the prime political statistics site, FiveThirtyEight, Clinton’s
probability of victory collapsed in the aftermath of Comey’s letter, falling
from 85 percent to 65 percent in just a few days. Polls in Senate
races changed. And throughout Comey’s week of silence, millions of people cast
their votes. I personally know several people who changed their votes because
of Comey’s letter—some to Trump but some to Clinton because they thought Comey
was engaged in Hoover-like corruption of the FBI.
A huge swath of the public now thinks the FBI
is a completely political organization: A large number of Democrats, because of
the original letter followed by a week’s worth of leaks from other agents about
other investigations, are convinced that the bureau is manipulating the
election for the Republicans and cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, plenty of
Republicans are arguing that Comey’s newest findings can’t possibly be true and
that he caved to pressure from the Democrats. In other words, no matter what side
of the political spectrum anyone is on, they agree that the FBI is political.
It’s not. Unfortunately, though, it is led by
a man who finally outsmarted himself with his own arrogance. He has done more
damage to the reputation of the FBI than any director since the Nixon
administration. Comey will, without doubt, be listed as second only to Hoover
as the worst director to ever hold the office because of his willingness to
abuse his power.
Fixing the damage Comey inflicted on the FBI
will take a long time. So long as a man is in charge who thinks he’s always
right and cares more his personal reputation than his duty, the repairs cannot
begin. Comey must be fired. But let’s wait until November 9.
Well, today is
November 9, the worst has happened and now Comey will most likely never be even
reprimanded by the Tea Party Republicans
still in power in the House and Senate. In fact he will probably be promoted by
the presumptive new Attorney General, Rudi Guliani. Sad and horrifying at the same
time.
