We have no idea whether the current DOJ indictments will lead to a conviction of James Comey, namely that he authorized FBI subordinates to leak to the media and then lied about it, obstructing Congress in the process.
It may come down to the word of Comey, a known fabricator, against the testimony of his former subordinate, Andrew McCabe, an admitted liar. Take your pick.
We know, however, that Comey is not facing a Trumpian $500 million in potential fines, nor 93 indictments, nor the scrutiny of five different local, state, and federal prosecutors. Nor, like some of the J6 arrested, will he be sent to solitary confinement to await a trial in a year or two or be charged with “illegal parading.”
We also know of the crimes or unethical conduct for which James Comey is not currently being indicted or investigated.
He is not being charged with pleading amnesia or ignorance in 2018—e.g., “I didn’t know,” “I couldn’t recall,” “I didn’t remember”—a reported 245 times while under oath to House investigators and misleading them.
He is not being charged with leaking in 2017 a confidential FBI memo of a conversation with then President Trump—which he improperly stored in his personal safe, in violation of FBI protocols—to the New York Times via a third-party Columbia professor.
He is not being charged for falsely assuring the President of the United States in 2017 that he was not the object of the current Crossfire Hurricane “Russian collusion” investigation—when, in fact, Trump, as the Mueller investigation revealed, was the real target of almost that entire ruse.
He is not being charged for deliberately leaking an FBI memo of a conversation with President Trump for the purpose of injuring him by prompting the appointment of his friend and predecessor, Robert Mueller, as a special counsel to investigate the supposed crimes of Donald Trump. Comey’s gambit resulted in a 22-month and $30 million administration hiatus, only to find no actionable wrongdoing by Trump.
He is not being investigated for usurping the role of the DOJ in 2016 when, as an FBI investigator, he served simultaneously as investigator and prosecutor, creating a conflict of interest.
He was tasked with both finding evidence of Hillary Clinton’s alleged wrongdoing and also making the federal prosecutorial decision whether to indict her for transmitting classified material over an unsecured email server. And after finding evidence of her culpability, he chose not to indict her on the grounds that her candidacy at the time meant no reasonable prosecutor (of which he was then not supposed to be one) would bring such a case against her.
He is not being investigated for improperly disclosing his newly reopened investigative case against Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election. Nor is he being investigated for predetermining that Hillary Clinton was innocent of the charges of unlawfully transmitting confidential material before his own FBI investigation was complete—and before Comey’s FBI had even interviewed her.
He is not being investigated for tasking Peter Strzok to alter his own original condemnation of Clinton’s conduct by replacing the initial and correct term “gross negligence,” a phrase that denotes a federal crime, with “extreme carelessness,” which involves no criminal liability.
He is not being investigated for, nor charged with, birthing the entire governmental role in the Russian collusion hoax that warped the 2016 presidential election and transition by his use of the discredited Christopher Steele as an FBI confidant/source.
He is not being investigated for using the fraudulent Steele dossier as a “central and essential” document to obtain a FISA court writ to improperly surveil Carter Page—an act that even he later admitted was wrong.
He is not being investigated for stumbling upon a rock mosaic on a beach arranged to read “8647” (“get rid of/remove Trump”) and then on social media nonchalantly posting that clear threat to injure/remove/eject the current president.
He is not being investigated for stating to the country that it was unclear whether Trump did or did not cavort with Moscow prostitutes—as alleged solely by the discredited, spurious Steele dossier, which he, as FBI director, knowingly helped disseminate and knew was bogus.
Under Comey, the FBI used the fabulist Steele as a “confidential human source” to produce his fantasies before firing him—only to later offer him a reported “up to $1 million” to confirm anything in his dossier, in a vain bid to salvage the FBI’s rapidly eroding reputation.
He is not being charged with or investigated for not acting in 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s overt use of fabricated material to mask her own criminal exposure and siccing the FBI on her political opponent. Or, as the FBI itself put it of Clinton’s ruse: “US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
He is not being investigated for attempting in 2017 to entrap or ambush then-National Security Advisor designate retired Gen. Michael Flynn by sending two FBI agents (including the ubiquitous Peter Strzok) to interview him—in expectation—after Comey subordinate Andrew McCabe’s disingenuous call to mislead Flynn into thinking he need not have a lawyer present—that Flynn would likely be naive and vulnerable without counsel.
Or, as Comey later bragged publicly about his gambit:
“We did not tell the White House, ‘Hey, we’re going to come talk to your guy.’ In a more organized administration, or a more experienced administration, they would not have let that happen.”
So Comey’s problem is not really legal, at least not entirely.
It is moral and ethical. It is no exaggeration that no single person has been more responsible than Comey for tarnishing the reputation of the FBI between 2015 and 2017—and with it the Washington administrative establishment itself.
Comey is not the victim of an arbitrary grand jury indictment.
Instead, he is fortunate that he does not face both more legal jeopardy and social ostracism for all the harm he has done his country, mostly to please the powers that be in the Obama administration, the media, the liberal bipartisan Washington establishment—and his own exaggerated sense of self.
In the weeks to come, we may see more indictments of many Washington grandees. The media will allege Trump “revenge,” but the legal system will adjudicate—not the New York Times, NPR, or the DNC—whether any of these indictments are proper and lead to convictions.
We do not know whether John Bolton transmitted classified information improperly that was intercepted by foreign intelligence agencies.
But we do know that Bolton was chastised by a federal judge for including information in his campaign-cycle memoir that was either likely classified or confidential and whose publication was injurious to his nation’s security. In the judge’s own words, Bolton “gambled with the national security of the United States,” and he “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil and potentially criminal liability.”
We do not know whether former Interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe or FBI Director James Comey was lying when Comey denied he greenlighted subordinates like McCabe to leak confidential FBI information to the media.
But we do know that McCabe did confess that he lied on four occasions to federal investigators and was not prosecuted by then Attorney General Bill Barr—and not because McCabe did not lie under oath, but because Barr thought he could not convince a Washington jury to convict a high-ranking FBI official. And so he never even made the effort.
We do not know whether former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper improperly rejected intelligence reports finding no Trump-Russian collusion, but pressed ahead to spread that Russian collusion ruse at the prompt of then-President Barack Obama.
But we do know that James Clapper lied under oath, with impunity, to the US Congress—and did admit that he did (“least untruthful” answer) when he swore that the NSA did not spy on American citizens. And he likely lied again when he swore that he did not leak elements of the dossier to CNN.
We do not know whether former CIA Director John Brennan, like Clapper and Comey, ignored intelligence reports finding no basis for Russian-Trump collusion and yet went ahead to use the CIA to help promote that fabrication to injure 2016 candidate Trump.
But we do know that Brennan lied under oath to the U.S. Congress, and with impunity, when he swore that the CIA did not surveil Senate staffers’ computers. He lied again with impunity when he claimed that Obama’s predator drone targeted assassinations had not killed any collateral civilians.
All of these officials—well, aside from the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis lawfare circus—have so far faced no consequences for their lies and impropriety.
Indeed, some of them are more likely to have profited from lying by being hired as MSNBC or CNN analysts, where they ‘analyzed’ the very hoaxes they helped birth. By such exemptions, they have sent the message over the last decade that the elite Washington administrative class is a law unto itself and without any moral bearings whatsoever.
The final irony? All of them have posed as our moral censors, whether peddling the Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation caper, or the lawfare walls-are-closing-in-on-Trump farces.
Does it really constitute a “revenge tour” belatedly to seek some sort of legal accounting for these alleged crimes?
Or over the last decade, has it not been both immoral and injurious to the American sense of equality under the law not to treat these officials as any other American—without their money and connections—would be treated?