Summary: Embattled Republican FBI director James Comey tried to reclaim some of his street cred with his fellow Republicans last Friday by trying to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign and the national media were having none of it. Comey’s announcement, strategically timed to “put out the garbage” on a Friday afternoon, had been mercilessly dissected within hours.
In fact, Comey’s error in judgment, and indeed, the embattled FBI director himself, had himself largely become the scandal by the close of business Friday. Though it is not in Hillary Clinton’s nature to invoke victim status, her surrogates have done remarkably effective job of political jujitsu by turning the tables on James Comey and raising some issues concerning him that ought to be deeply troubling to the American public.
Those issues include, among others, the extent to which Comey and the Bureau had treated Donald Trump and his Russian associates with kid gloves while holding Hillary Clinton to unreasonable and impossibly high standards. There is also a real question of whether Comey himself has succumbed to noble cause/righteous actor corruption in believing himself and himself alone to be, in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. For Comey’s sake, it were best if he had succumbed to such corruption, rather than that he had succumbed to the corruption of having been turned or compromised by the Russians.
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Embattled Republican FBI Director James Comey tried to reclaim some of the Republican street cred he had lost in July when the much-vaunted FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server wound up going nowhere. Having disappointed his party by having found nothing to justify prosecuting the Democratic candidate for President, and having been raked over the coals for it by banana Republicans, Comey knew that his personal political viability in any future Republican administration was in serious jeopardy.
So, last Friday, in an apparent effort to save his own political skin, James Comey tried to ratfuck Hillary Clinton and her campaign by releasing a bureaucratically worded letter to Congress in which he implied that there might be additional documentation that was “pertinent” to the investigation he had led the American people in July to believe was closed.
Within hours, the new alleged Clinton “scandal” had melted away to nothing, withering under the bright light of unremitting scrutiny. The emails in question were emails on a laptop belonging to Clinton staffer Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony “dick pic” Weiner. The emails in question were neither sent to, nor received by, Hillary Clinton. In short, the whole thing appeared to be another phony Clinton scandal ginned up by James Comey and by deplorable Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz.
Yet, not only was the “scandal” debunked within a matter of hours, but Comey and Chaffetz themselves had also become the center of a broadening scandal which neither of them had foreseen. Worse for Comey, the scandal involving him appears to have done nothing but metastasize since Friday afternoon. Information now available as of Tuesday, November 1, indicates a pattern of conduct which causes us to entertain doubts not only about Comey’s judgment, but also about his basic loyalty to the United States.
We know, in limine, that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Department of Justice. In short, Comey decided to go on what the Common Law charmingly calls “a frolic of his own.” Despite the existence of stated DOJ policy discountenancing making announcements concerning investigations closely prior to an election, Comey essentially told his boss to fuck herself, that he was going to make the announcement anyway.
By doing so, by engaging in a fairly obvious ratfuck for transparently political reasons, James Comey has managed, in one foolish and incontinent maneuver, to tarnish not only his own reputation, but also that of the entire Bureau. It is more than forty years now since J. Edgar Hoover, whose misconduct as Bureau director sullied the agency he headed, died a death unmourned outside the circle of a few FBI apparatchiks.
Since Hoover’s death, the Bureau had heretofore done a fairly decent job reclaiming its reputation. Until Friday afternoon, the Bureau had managed to cultivate for itself a reputation for integrity. It was no longer viewed, as it had been viewed in the Hoover time, as being of vehicle of political retribution, or as a platform from which a politically motivated Bureau director could ratfuck his real or imagined political enemies. The integrity of the Bureau had indeed become something of a byword since Hoover’s death.
Until Friday afternoon.
Because, again, with one ill-considered, incontinent, letter, sent to Congress in a way that was sure to place it in Donald Trump’s hands immediately, James Comey managed to revive the FBI’s prior reputation as being an essentially corrupt tool of the Republican Party, using its investigative resources to give whatever support it could to a Republican candidate.
Indeed, that was the narrative that had very much clamped itself upon the American public’s consciousness by Monday morning. Moreover, during Monday, the situation metastasized further. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sent a blistering, pugnacious letter to the FBI director taking him, and the Bureau, to task for their astonishing failure to pursue an investigation of Donald Trump’s clear ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
While the Republicans were quick to denounce Harry Reid’s letter as a mere stunt, the information that has become available in the twenty-four hour since then suggest that the minority leader’s letter was anything but a political stunt: “in my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.... The public has a right to know this information.”
Yet, Comey, hypocritically invoking the sixty day rule (!) to protect his chosen candidate, has been curiously unwilling to level with the American public about whether the FBI is even investigating the mounting evidence that Donald Trump is indeed a Manchurian candidate. Even though we are becoming aware of the existence of “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” the FBI Director has seemed curiously reluctant to investigate.
Yet the director seems willing to commit a great deal of Bureau resources pursuing Huma Abedin on the off chance that some small number of emails on the Abedin/Weiner joint laptop might possibly contain some vaguely incriminating data that might in some vague way, point in the general direction of the quondam Secretary of State. In other words, Comey appears willing to ignore the Russian wolf at the door while sending all his agents to look for an imaginary bogeyman under the bed.
Given the fraught political nature of this election season, when Donald Trump has openly invited the Russian intelligence apparat to hack the Democratic Party, and when just about everybody and his brother seems to have set their moral scruples aside to eagerly traffic in the stolen property WikiLeaks has been peddling, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether we are not being betrayed at the highest political level. If Donald Trump is willing to open the door and let the Russians ransack America’s living room, why shouldn’t James Comey do the same thing?
If, on Friday morning, you had suggested to me that James Comey might either have been compromised by the Russians or have actually been turned by them, I would have fed you your tongue for telling impossible lies. But now, with Halloween behind us and The Day of the Dead before us, I can no longer be sure. Given James Comey’s kid glove treatment of Donald Trump and Trump’s evident willingness to traffic with enemies national, I think patriotic Americans must dare to envisage the hypothesis of the basic disloyalty of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of his willingness to promote a candidate favorable to, and controlled by, the Moskovskiy Kremlin.
As happened with Brexit, we must now begin to entertain again an hypothesis that the West is under serious and concerted attack at the hands of James Comey and Donald Trump, and that a Russian Kriegßpiel is very much underway against the United States in particular and the West in general. We are indeed betrayed at the highest political levels. The Republic is in grave danger, and a comprehensive prophylaxis of Donald Trump, James Comey, and the numerous Russian embeds in the Trump campaign, together with a like prophylaxis of Trump supporters is in order. We have spies, saboteurs, and wreckers among us, all of whose activities must be inhibited by any means necessary.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. The views set forth herein are his own and should not be construed as constituting any form of legal advice.
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