Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I would like to talk about the legal aspects of the recent indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director.
He’s been indicted on two counts. One, lying to Congress about authorizing his subordinates to leak to the press. He says he didn’t. The indictment says he did authorize that. And second, obstructing a congressional investigation by so lying. He says because he didn’t lie, he obviously couldn’t obstruct an investigation.
But what I’m interested in, legally, is, we’re getting the same type of atmosphere that we saw with a Mueller investigation. Before anything had really transpired, we were told that this was a hunter-killer team of professional prosecutors. They were all-stars. They were pros. And they were gonna make short work of President Donald Trump’s legal team and find Donald Trump guilty of colluding with the Russians. Twenty-two months later and $40 million, they found no actionable offense.
But what am I getting at? Right now, the press is going wild that Comey has been unjustly indicted because they say, or they argue, that the prosecutor in the Justice Department, Mr. Erik Siebert, decided that he didn’t want to prosecute the case because he felt there was insufficient evidence, so he was let go by Pam Bondi, the attorney general—wink, nod—maybe with the encouragement of Donald Trump, maybe not. And Lindsey Halligan, the replacement, has very little experience. She’s gonna be chewed up in court, and Comey is going to walk.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. But remember what the indictment says, that he did not authorize anybody to leak. That doesn’t mean that he’s going to find somebody who says that. Because Andrew McCabe, whom was his deputy director, had already testified to the inspector general that he was authorized—or at least he thought he was authorized by James Comey. Michael Horowitz felt that maybe Comey had the better of the argument when he denied it.
But these were two close people, both at the center of the Russian collusion hoax, that were blaming each other or contradicting each other, who leaked and who didn’t leak. And at the end, Andrew McCabe was found actionable for lying on four occasions, which he admitted to, under oath, three of the four, that he had denied, falsely, leaking to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI investigation.
I don’t know why Bill Barr, the attorney general at the time, did not prosecute Andrew McCabe. Maybe he felt he couldn’t convince a Washington or a New York jury. But Andrew McCabe basically got off scot-free after admitting that he lied, in the same fashion that John Brennan had lied two times under oath to Congress. One about a Predator drone program, where he said there was no collateral damage. One about spying on Senate staffers’ computers, which he, as director of the CIA, knew about and probably ordered.
And remember, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, lied and said that the National Security Agency did not spy on Americans. He admitted that that was a lie too.
So, we’re in a climate where all of these people have been on record of lying. And now the question is, will there be a subordinate who comes forward and says, “Yes, I did leak to the press. And I did it on the authorization of James Comey”? And will there be written evidence?
Now, the legal community, given their expertise of the lawyers involved, said that this is very hard to prove, and that the prosecuting federal attorney has no experience, and this is political. And I don’t know whether that is true or not.
But I can tell you that in the great question, is this delayed justice or is this retribution, people are very angry at the Washington legal community and the bureaucracy because when they look at the career of Andrew McCabe and they see that he admittedly lied four times under oath; when they look at this former CIA director, John Brennan, when he lied twice; when James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, admitted that he lied once under oath; when we see James Comey admit that he misled the president on whether he was the object of an FBI investigation, and when he was sharply criticized by the inspector general for not filing that report in FBI files, but putting it in his private safe and leaking it, then we get a larger picture that our bureaucrats, in this effort, had weaponized the CIA, weaponized the FBI, weaponized the directory of national intelligence, lied on numerous occasions and got off.
So, I have no idea whether these two indictments will result in a conviction of James Comey. But as I said earlier, I have no doubt, also, that, morally and ethically, he abused his office and did great harm to the United States.
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