To protect the institutions
I think I’m approaching an understanding of what happened with Comey and the emails and the press conference and the letter. Basically it’s that the alternative wasn’t as much better as we (with the luxury of not living through it) may imagine. He says over and over that it was a choice between bad options. There was no good one. What would have been so bad about not saying anything when the FBI closed the investigation? The fact that Fox and Trump-fan Twitter would have been all over it like an oozing infectious skin disease.
He explains it (again) in that NPR interview.
Inskeep: Let me circle back to the Hillary Clinton case and the decisions that you made there. You mentioned it was a no-win situation. What would you say was your greatest concern when it became clear to you that that email case was going to at some point come down to a decision by you?
My greatest concern towards the end of that email investigation — it lasted about a year — towards the end was how does the Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, credibly close this investigation without charges and maximize public confidence that it was done in a just way. If it ends without charges. Because by the spring, if it continued on the same course and speed it was on, it looked to me like it was going to end without charges. And the credibility of the institution is important even in ordinary times. But all the more so when you’re investigating one of the two candidates for president of the United States. How are you able to maintain public confidence that you’re not a partisan, it’s not the Obama Justice Department trying to give a break to Hillary Clinton.
That sounds kind of abstract and conjectural if you don’t think about it much…but if you pause to think about it, and about what this whole discourse is like, you realize what he’s getting at. We would have been inundated in a crow-storm of lies…just as we were anyway. The storm of lies was going to happen no matter what…and it might have been even worse if he’d gone the other way.
Inskeep: That’s your concern. And so that I guess was behind your decision to make a public statement about the case. Just so the people understand, how would you have closed that case in the ordinary way? Suppose it was an ordinary investigation, you weren’t concerned about perceptions of the FBI or the Justice Department, what would the FBI normally have done at the end of this case?
In the ordinary case, we would most likely in writing prepare some sort of summary of what our investigation had determined and then send it over to the Justice Department, and they would in the ordinary case either say nothing, which is the most common case, or at most issue a letter to the target saying, or the subject saying it’s over, or some minimal statement about it.
Inskeep: So you decided to take another path, and decided independently of the attorney general to take another path, to speak in public about it.
That’s right. By the end of — by the beginning of July I made a decision that to protect the institutions — both the justice institutions, both the Justice Department and the FBI — the least bad alternative was to announce — the attorney general having said she would accept my recommendation rather than recuse herself — announce that recommendation and show transparency to the American people, to try to show them this was done in an independent, honest and competent way, rather than just do it in the normal fashion and just send it over to Justice.
In other words, if I understand this correctly, if they’d done it the normal way, the loonies would have screamed that the fix was in, it was a cover-up, it was corrupt, the FBI was a Democratic stooge (except they would have said Democrat stooge).
Inskeep: Here’s the thing that’s on my mind, director. You were hoping to demonstrate that the FBI was above political influence. Did you, in your course of action actually allow yourself to be politically influenced? Because you write first that you were concerned about criticism — essentially conspiracy theorizing — about the FBI, from Republicans that President Obama’s candidate for president would be cut a break. Later on you talk about this meeting between the Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Clinton. And you say you had no thought that there was any conspiracy there, but after it became a big thing on cable TV, it changed your mind. Were you actually being influenced by cable TV pundits in what you decided to do?
But is that being politically influenced, as opposed to factually or environmentally or socially or social media-ly? Is it political to take the media / social media environment into account?
I suppose it is in a way…but that way is probably part of a director’s job.
Comey’s answer:
Yeah, that’s a reasonable question, Steve. I don’t think so, and here’s why I say that: Even if cable TV punditry had never been born and there were no such thing, there would be intense public interest in a criminal investigation of one of the two candidates for president of the United States. So even if there weren’t wings in our politics, which there always have been, but even if there wasn’t that punditry, I think it would be an intense interest in knowing that this had been done in an honest, competent, independent way. And a number of things that occurred in the lead-up to that first week in July that led me to conclude, and reasonable people can disagree about this, but led me conclude that the best way to foster that confidence of an intensely interested public was to show transparency and do it separate from the attorney general.
I think I see what he’s getting at.
On the other hand there are the law types (I forget who they are – maybe Tribe is one?) point out that what he did is exactly what prosecutors are trained never to do.
It’s thorny. I guess that’s why it won’t lie down.
So it basically comes down to, he did the wrong thing, but if he’d done the other thing, that would have been wrong, too. Got it…I think.
The problem is that our current rumor mill operates on a diet of caffeine and steroids 24/7 and needs constant nourishment. And the people that are Trump supporters (along with most Republicans, even those who noisily dislike Trump but quietly do all the things he wants) will not tolerate anything other than getting their own way. They believe that everyone is out to get them, and that liberals are not only wrong, but stupid and evil, and must be resisted to the point of murder if necessary.
Comey’s only hope was to be kidnapped by aliens right before he took any action. Since that wasn’t going to happen, he tried to decide which way would be the best for the country, and it had an unwanted (but totally predictable) outcome. The fact that he did not predict that outcome doesn’t mean he is ignorant or corrupt, but just that he is human. And lots of people didn’t see it.
Look, James Comey did what he had to do to protect the FBI from criticism from the conservative news media.
Thanks to his willingness to throw Hillary Clinton under the bus, nobody on the right is accusing the FBI and the entire DOJ of being part of a Deep State conspiracy against Republicans.
Yep, conservatives really took note of Comey’s candor and aren’t calling him, oh, I don’t know, Lyin’ James Comey, or dedicating entire websites to discrediting him.
And thanks to Comey’s caution, the leader of the Republican Party would never have his lawyer tell a federal court that the Dept. of Justice can’t be trusted to review search materials.
(sarcasm disengaged)
You can never win with the Conservative Hack Media Complex. No matter how far you bend over to accommodate their “concerns,” they will want more, and as soon as you stop giving in, they will not hesitate to smear you as a biased deep state hack whose cousin’s friend’s college roommate once ate in the same restaurant as George Soros. To attempt to play their game is a losing effort — all you do is help them shift the Overton Window.
That’s always been my take on Comey’s behavior. His concern was the protection of himself and by extension, the bureau and there had been considerable political pressure on him around this investigation.
Heads of agencies are always political positions, even if they’re not filled by politicians per se, you still have to be able to play the game. Comey saw himself as above the game, which in my opinion is stupid because it can’t be avoided whether you like it or not. It’s all very well to piously state that the only way to win is not to play, but reality bites soon enough.
Was he in an impossible situation? Yes. Does that mean he chose the least bad of all the possible options? Not in my opinion. Because whether he likes it or not, the treatment of Secretary Clinton and Mr Trump were hugely asymmetric, despite the fact that the underlying asymmetry of seriousness tilted the opposite way. I understand why he did what he did, I’m even sympathetic to his view at the time that Clinton was likely to win and therefore where was the harm. But people have died as a result. A bit more mea culpa might be in order.
Had Clinton won, whatever Comey did, however he did it, would have been used against her. Congress would have been as obstructionist as they were with Obama and would have eagerly sought out some pretext for impeachment. As it is they’re desperately trying to avoid impeachment.
The counterfactual of HRC’s victory would have been uglier than impeachment and further gridlock; it would include millions of people being stoked every day by the grievous, bottomless ego of the losing candidate refusing to concede and holding rally after rally extolling the evils of the forces which had kept him from grabbing the ring.
Looks like he’s sort of doing that anyway. He’s more about rallies than actual governance.
I do think you’re (somewhat) right. I think it would have been a difficult four years, made nearly impossible by the sore losers. I do not think it would have been uglier, though. Clinton would know how to talk to our allies without making idiots of us all. She would not taunt North Korea on Twitter. She would not try to run us into World War III by her big mouth. She would not give classified information to the Russians.
She would be far from perfect, and the animosity would probably prevent her from doing much, but not being able to do much is far, far better than what we see Trump doing. The ugliness of the misogyny would, of course, be a daily dose of vile, and the ugliness of the Neo-Nazis who had just managed to lose their candidate would allow them to be even more hateful. (I mean, face it, how ugly have these guys been even when winning? With losing an election to someone they have loathed for 25 years?).
So, yeah, I think it would probably be uglier than anything else we had ever known. I cannot believe it would be uglier than what we have right now.
This is what I mean about the way we (with the luxury of not living through it) are probably not doing a good job of realizing how bad the other scenario would have been. We can see in real time how bad this one is, but the other one is something we have to imagine. It’s so easy to fall short.
But also the current scenario is so horrific it’s mind-breaking to try to see how it could be worse.
To clarify, I don’t imagine the political fallout amongst the politicians or the international community would’ve been any worse, and probably would be better. But the pundits have been seeding the ground for an insurrection for years, and there are thousands of people who are well-armed and unhinged enough to take those calls seriously. Add in Trump to the mixture, stoking those calls with his own grievance, and I imagine the tinderbox might have already gone up. That’s the kind of ugliness I meant; I suspect it’s inevitable anyway, for what it’s worth.
And it will be ugly.
What is the US gun market doing at the moment?
And another wheel falls off the White House trolley.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/17/nikki-haley-russia-sanctions-confused-white-house-trump