Jump to content

James Comey is my Homie


Hugo Stiglitz

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, Mojo Hand said:

My God. you're all over the place trying to grasp for an argument that you don't even understand.   That position has nothing to do with the op-ed you just linked.  Did you even read it beyond the title? 

As for your argument, you're conflating the Executive with the president.   The president can suffer legal consequences after his term is over.   That is why Bill Clinton had to deal with potential criminal charges, which he essentially settled by admitting wrongdoing, paying the other side's fees, and giving up his law license for 5 years.   He was subject to potential criminal liability and the rule of law, entirely separate from the impeachment process.

And the impeachment process, from articles of impeachment to trial in the Senate, is absolutely a political process.   That there are governing legal standards doesn't make it otherwise.   There are legal standards governing the passage of legislation, too, but passing legislation is quintessentially political.

Clinton was acquitted in that process and public opinion strongly supported that acquittal.  There was no public price to the representatives who voted to acquit.   That means his offense was not worthy of removal.  Literally by definition.   It is the voters who have the last word on what is right and what is wrong here.

Even if the Senate is likely to acquit trump, if the offenses prove serious enough, the House should tee it up and make the Senate take a stand.   And the voters will decide if they got it right or wrong.

The Executive is a commonplace synonym for The President.  Nothing is conflated.

Whatever CAN happen after office isn't the point.  

Of course impeachment is in practical terms political, that is precisely because of the Presidents immunity to prosecution, legal,  DURING presidency.

 

Unless there is audio or video of Trump and "High Ranking Russian Officials" having a pow-wow colluding there is no way he is criminally prosecuted.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pretty interesting bit of information on the rationale for not pursuing charges on Clinton that I hadn't seen before:

Quote

 

The Most Newsworthy Part of ABC’s Comey Interview Was an Unaired Detail About His Infamous Hillary Email Letter https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/abc-comey-interview-gives-new-detail-on-hillary-email-letter.html

...But the network also released an enormous unedited transcript of Stephanopolous’ conversation with Comey, and there’s a section therein that reveals what (I think is) new information about Comey’s pre-election 2016 letter to Congress announcing that the FBI had reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

The context here is that Comey and other FBI officials had decided (and announced) in July 2016 that Clinton shouldn’t be prosecuted for using a private email server to discuss classified information as secretary of state, because her case involved a relatively small amount of classified material and did not involve intentional mishandling of information, evidence of disloyalty to the U.S., or efforts to obstruct justice. As Comey explained to Stephanopoulos, prosecutors “are very unlikely to prosecute a case unless you can show the person … clearly knew they were doing something they shouldn’t do.” Later, he said that the FBI’s investigators “knew that, unless they found something that was a smoking gun, where someone told Secretary Clinton, ‘you know, you shouldn’t be doing this,’ or where she acknowledged it or where somehow there’s an indication of her obstructing justice, the case was unlikely to be prosecuted.”

What the FBI would discover in October 2016 was that it had inadvertently located a cache of Clinton emails on her aide Huma Abedin’s computer during the unrelated investigation of Abedin’s husband Anthony Weiner for sending obscene material to a minor. The detail that Comey explained to Stephanopoulos—which he had alluded to previously but never, to my knowledge, explained at this length—is that the Abedin cache specifically included emails from the period of Clinton’s State tenure just before she set up the private server. That period would have been the exact time, Comey explained, when Clinton was most likely to have been warned not to set up a private server, because it would constitute mishandling classified material:

Quote

 

What [FBI investigators] told me was, “We have found, for reasons we can’t explain, hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. And something much more important than that. Thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s Blackberry domain.”

She used a Blackberry for the first three months or so of her tenure as secretary of State before setting up the personal server in the basement. And the reason that matters so much is, if there was gonna be a smoking gun, where Hillary Clinton was told, “Don’t do this,” or, “This is improper,” it’s highly likely to be at the beginning.

 

1

In other words, the Abedin cache wasn’t just a random sampling of Clinton emails that weren’t expected to differ in any relevant way from the thousands that had already been reviewed, but were rather from the exact period most likely to contain explicit, actionable content that could have convinced the FBI to reverse its recommendation that she should not be prosecuted.

Of course, after review, the FBI did not find grounds to reverse its decision in the new cache, and there’s a case to be made that Clinton lost the election because of Comey’s much-ado-about-what-turned-out-to-be-nothing announcement that the investigation had been reopened... 

 

 
Edited by bolverk
Link to comment
Share on other sites

James Comey is LeBron's big homey..?

Quote

JAMES COMEY
LEBRON WAS HIS FBI ROLE MODEL
... Seriously

272
 31  4/17/2018 6:07 AM PDT

HAIL TO THE KING
James Comey says he modeled his management of the FBI after LeBron James -- and says he used the NBA superstar's never-ending desire to win to motivate the organization. 

Yeah, he's being 100% serious. 

Comey appeared on "Good Morning America" and said, "I admire LeBron James. I used to talk about him all over the FBI."

"He illustrates what the endless pursuit of excellence looks like."

Comey says he was incredibly impressed by how LeBron pushes himself every offseason -- finding parts of his game to make better. 

During his run as FBI director, Comey says he would tell his staff to be more like LeBron ... "We have to find parts of our game to make better."

He also said (close your ears, Bulls fans) that LeBron is undoubtedly the best basketball player alive. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, SmokeyBear1861 said:

LOL, I like how the dumbass link says 'lebron james leaving cleveland because donald trump'...then the link goes to another dumbass asking questions:  "Is LeBron James Leaving Cleveland because....?"

More dumbasses asking dumbass questions.  Shocking. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, ChiTownDoc said:

LOL, I like how the dumbass link says 'lebron james leaving cleveland because donald trump'...then the link goes to another dumbass asking questions:  "Is LeBron James Leaving Cleveland because....?"

More dumbasses asking dumbass questions.  Shocking. 

well thats on you for clicking on a link posted by the shitty hack smokeybear

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I’m 75 pages into the Comey book and not one word about Trump or Russians yet. 
I just finished the Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart chapters though.
Really good book so far, especially the stuff about him meeting with all these mafia killers around the world.


Can he say anything in the book with an ongoing investigation?
Link to comment
Share on other sites

41 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

 


Can he say anything in the book with an ongoing investigation?

 

I imagine he can talk about things that are public record.

I just finish another 40 pages and Comey throws Cheney and his crew directly under a Mack truck.  

He’s brutal on how they handled surveillance and enhanced interrogation. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

I imagine he can talk about things that are public record.

I just finish another 40 pages and Comey throws Cheney and his crew directly under a Mack truck.  

He’s brutal on how they handled surveillance and enhanced interrogation. 

Let us know when he gets to your girl. 

Edited by Anastasis
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just heard Comey is leaving Republican Party.

If true, there's going to be a lot of dems pissed. His wife probably told him to. Kinda disproves hrc's theory of all the women voting for Trump because their wives, friends, boy friends told them to. Is it ok to call Comey a cuck?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

After seeing a few of his recent interviews, I find Comey a very interesting character.  I can definitely see why people think he's an attention whore.  He doesn't mind the spotlight.

He has an oddly earnest, folksy way of speaking and is the opposite of circumspect.  I think he tries very very hard to appear fair, and presumably, to BE fair.  He's obviously quite intelligent and I don't really think he could be legitimately accused of not taking his job seriously.  He loves his country and has a high regard for the FBI and DOJ.

I don't think he'd make a good CIA or NSA guy, but cops can be more idiosyncratic.  His career success doesn't surprise me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

He also has a very high opinion of his own earnestness and was completely willing to act as final arbiter of the Clinton situation.  Which is completely inappropriate for an investigator.

As if you would have trusted Loretta Lynch to come out and say exactly what Comey said.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Its veracity or Lorreta's integrity aren't the point.

Comey circumventing the process is a really, really bad situation.  Just like BO with his Pen and Phone, and now subsequently Trump.  That is not how it is supposed to work and when Public Servants overstep there bounds they need to be called out on it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

As if you would have trusted Loretta Lynch to come out and say exactly what Comey said.

She shouldn't have said what he said either.   The only thing coming out of the investigation, given the actual findings, should have been that there was sufficient evidence for charges on all elements except mens rea, which isn't explicitly in the statute but is an implied requirement under whatever legal authority.    The moral disapproval wasn't for the FBI Director or AG to give, especially during a presidential election. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Its veracity or Lorreta's integrity aren't the point.

Comey circumventing the process is a really, really bad situation.  Just like BO with his Pen and Phone, and now subsequently Trump.  That is not how it is supposed to work and when Public Servants overstep there bounds they need to be called out on it.

Comey clearly thinks he didn't overstep his bounds.  So, we have one man who built his career in the FBI and rose to the top of the bureau VS some dude on a message board.  I'm not saying some dude isn't right, but maybe you just really don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.

By the way, Lynch didn't think he overstepped his bounds, either.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Comey clearly thinks he didn't overstep his bounds.  So, we have one man who built his career in the FBI and rose to the top of the bureau VS some dude on a message board.  I'm not saying some dude isn't right, but maybe you just really don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.

By the way, Lynch didn't think he overstepped his bounds, either.

It is factual that it is against SOP/policy for a FBI investigator, and even the Head of the FBI, to provide color/summary/intent on an active investigation.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Incredulity said:

It is factual that it is against SOP/policy for a FBI investigator, and even the Head of the FBI, to provide color/summary/intent on an active investigation.  

It is factual that Comey disputes this, so maybe not.  You're FBI?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Comey clearly thinks he didn't overstep his bounds.  So, we have one man who built his career in the FBI and rose to the top of the bureau VS some dude on a message board.  I'm not saying some dude isn't right, but maybe you just really don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.

By the way, Lynch didn't think he overstepped his bounds, either.

There has been extensive criticism of Comey from inside the FBI and DOJ community.  For example, 

Quote

 

Just days before her defeat, an open letter circulated among former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials accusing Comey of unprecedented actions that had left them “astonished and perplexed”—as well as angry. “In our network, we are sad,” says the former Southern District attorney. “He was an American hero. Now who knows how he will go down in history?”

“He left himself completely exposed to charges that he acted in a way that affected the outcome of a political election,” says someone who was close to the e-mail investigation. “It has affected the reputation of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. in ways that are profound and will take years to comprehend.”

 

 

 

enty of Comey’s longtime admirers were appalled that he had spoken at all, because by doing so he blew through several of the Justice Department’s long-standing policies. “It was an unprecedented public announcement by a non-prosecutor that there would be no prosecution,” says someone who once worked for Comey. The F.B.I. does not talk publicly about its investigations, and “it does not make prosecutorial decisions. Full stop.”

“[Comey] has said he did not consult with anyone at the D.O.J. beforehand so he could say it was the F.B.I.’s recommendation,” observes another former prosecutor. “But right there that is a massive act of insubordination.”

Comey then, according to his critics, compounded his mistake by declaring Clinton’s conduct and that of her aides “extremely careless.” This was another breach of protocol. Neither prosecutors nor agents criticize people they don’t charge. “We don’t dirty you up,” says Richard Frankel, who retired from the F.B.I. in early 2016 and now consults for ABC News. And Comey’s choice of language opened another can of worms. Unlike other criminal statutes, which, as a rule, require intent, the Espionage Act does allow for prosecutions of those who display “gross negligence.”

 

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/james-comey-fbi-director-letter

 

 

Edited by Mojo Hand
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Comey colossally fucked up and violated protocol.

That has nothing to do with why Trump fired him. 

Comey was also in between a rock and a hard place with the NY field office agents leaking information. If he hadn't disclosed that Hillary was under investigation, the NY field office would have leaked it and it would have looked even worse. 

There were no good options at that point. It was very well executed by the Trump side. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Comey disputes it.  So that settles it.  What did Nixon say about Watergate?

Yes, I fully support the idea that he cannot be wrong.  Yeesh.  

My point is that he probably knows a helluva lot more about his duties than you do, unless you haven't disclosed something.  I'm unable to judge either way, but that kind of honesty just isn't allowed on a message board when "Incredulity" is here to drop knowledge on us.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Yes, I fully support the idea that he cannot be wrong.  Yeesh.  

My point is that he probably knows a helluva lot more about his duties than you do, unless you haven't disclosed something.  I'm unable to judge either way, but that kind of honesty just isn't allowed on a message board when "Incredulity" is here to drop knowledge on us.

You're unable to judge either way, except for to assert that I don't know what the fuck I am talking about.   

 

Makes sense.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

When he refers to "classified material related to loretta lynch" is those pics above, is he referring to the Russian intelligence that was inserted into the FBI and which he allowed to influence his decision making?  Or something else?

Would we know this? Has someone written about this yet? 

Edited by burntorangebongos
We the public
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Comey seemed pretty adamant that he revealed as much as he could without compromising any future actions as a witness, and that the FBI had reviewed for classified or undisclosed material.  I don't think he is likely to provide any further color than what's in the book.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

51 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

Ego is the right reason? 

No, he wanted to protect the integrity of the FBI.

He felt the political climate with Lynch/Tarmac/DOJ was too politically toxic to operate through those channels and he wanted maintain or not deteriorate the perception that the investigation was done in a professional and unbiased way.

It was always about protecting the institution which he sacrificed himself for more than once because he’s an idiot like that. Everyone hated him afterwards and he knew that’s what would happen.

Edited by Hugo Stiglitz
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Brian Beutler covers my feelings pretty well:

 

Quote

If Former FBI Director James Comey had played no role in the 2016 election—if he had withheld comment on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and all other unindicted investigative subjects, as Justice Department rules dictate he should have—Clinton probably would be president today.

But imagine for a moment that Comey said nothing two years ago, and Trump had won anyhow, wth his campaign still under an undisclosed investigation. Everything we know about Trump and Comey suggests the events of 2017 would have played out much as they did in real life. Trump would have tried to compromise the FBI director in the same Nixonian way, Comey would have declined to help Trump obstruct justice, Trump would have fired him, and Comey would have written a book about it.

The difference is that book wouldn’t have been received with the serious misgivings many liberals have about A Higher Loyalty, which just hit the shelves here in our nightmarish reality. Comey’s actual book recounts not just Trump’s efforts to corrupt him and the broader government, but seeks to justify the decisions he made in 2016, which arguably brought about Trump’s presidency, his own firing, and the right’s ongoing efforts to undermine public faith in the FBI’s institutional neutrality.

Comey’s brutal critique of Trump’s conduct in office—his routine abuses of power—is a vital service. Under slightly different circumstances it would be a unifying one, too. Instead, Comey has been received among Trump’s critics with both appreciation and bewilderment. How can he present himself as an arbiter of faithful leadership and not cop to his errors more fully? As a family member of mine messaged me incredulously this week, “it’s so weird and discordant for Comey to seem so smart and be so articulate but to have such terrible judgment. And I really believe he believes what he is saying.”

This is not a universal sentiment within the broad Trump opposition. Or rather, many of those who share misgivings about the way Comey concluded, then unconcluded, then reconcluded the Clinton email investigation also think it’s a mistake for liberals to dissolve back into election-related recriminations. Comey’s chilling assessment of the dangers Trump poses in office should serve as a singular rallying point.

“Let me get this straight: Instead of using an opportunity to absolutely hammer Trump for his highly unethical and potentially criminal conduct as described by the former FBI Director, Dems want to relitigate 2016 election decisions?” writes Lawfare’s executive editor, Susan Hennessey. “There is nothing—absolutely nothing—anyone can do to change the decisions that preceded the election. Agree, disagree, whatever. It doesn’t matter. We can fight about it until the damn cows come home or we can focus on the President’s ongoing assault on the rule of law.”

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias says, “This is not the time for complaining about Comey and the emails.”

“[T]o react to Comey’s charges against Trump with a comprehensive assessment of his entire career is to miss the point,” he adds. “James Comey is a critical figure of our time not because of any particular decision, right or wrong, that he made during his tenure in government. He’s important because he exemplifies values—most of all, the pursuit of institutional independence and autonomy—whose presence among career officials safeguards the United States against the threat of systemic corruption.”

If revisiting Comey’s conduct in 2016 served the sole purpose of airing grievances, this critique would be persuasive. But Comey’s inadequate grappling with his own failures is a real problem. To retrospectively absolve Comey risks not just overlooking his errors of judgment, but inviting complacency about the poisoned political milieu that drove Comey to the decisions he made. Comey has an opportunity in theory to focus public attention on a systemic threat to neutral authority and rule of law that Trump merely exploited. Instead, by assuming a defensive posture, he is normalizing that threat.


In a somewhat crude sense, there’s probably no harm in subjecting Comey’s conduct in 2016 to scrutiny now. The experience of 2017 through today suggests there’s plenty of room in the anti-Trump universe for both infighting and fighting Trump. Moreover, the idea that Trump’s opponents can either unite behind Comey, or waste that opportunity by second guessing him, is a false choice. Comey himself seemingly understands this, or he wouldn’t have written at length about his decisions, and invited critics to engage him on them.

But there is real, deep value in understanding why Comey made the mistakes he made so that future leaders don’t fall into the same trap he did.

Buried in the transcript of Comey’s interview with NPR is an exchange that exposes the analytical error underlying Comey’s decision to make multiple, extraordinary intrusions into the 2016 election.

Comey acknowledges in his book that he was motivated to speak publicly about the Clinton investigation in large part because conservatives (including Trump and other leading Republicans) had primed much of the public to believe President Obama’s Justice Department would corruptly protect Clinton from legal accountability.

“[Y]ou talk about this meeting between the Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Clinton,” says NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “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?”

Comey responds: “[E]ven 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.”

NPR’s Carrie Johnson pressed Comey on this point, asking “[W]as that your job? Was it your job to worry about those things?”

“I think so,” Comey responded. “As the director of the FBI I think my job is to worry about how—despite what your mother told you about not caring what other people think—as the director of the FBI, the public trust is all you have in that institution. And so yes, worrying about that had to be part of the job description of the Department of Justice—I mean, of the leader of the FBI.”

This would be a powerful argument in a political climate where both major ideological factions felt equally committed to a kind of factual politics. That Comey describes the conspiracy theories Republicans propounded about the email investigation as “politics [as] there always have been,” suggests he suffers from a continued blindness to asymmetries in American political life that allowed him to be bamboozled.

Comey reveals here, as the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent noted, that he left the institutions of justice vulnerable to bad faith actors angling to manipulate him. Like many journalists, Comey succumbed to a false assumption of balance—that all politics is just politics. He couldn’t and can’t grapple with the idea that one party is less beholden to empiricism and truth than the other, and uses that leeway to undermine neutral institutions unless those institutions do the bidding of the GOP.

Like Trump now, Republicans weren’t interested in the fair administration of justice when they suggested the Clinton email investigation might be rigged. At an extreme, their goal is to destroy the notion of law enforcement as a neutral mediating institution and turn it into an instrument of partisan power. In 2016, this manifested in a party-wide campaign to intimidate Comey and others into prosecuting the leader of the opposition whether she was guilty of a crime or not. Bring charges against Clinton, they implicitly threatened, or we will convince our supporters that the FBI, like the media and the scientific community, is just another biased and compromised liberal institution.

They made good on that threat. And they continue to deploy bad faith and propaganda to intimidate federal law enforcement officials into corrupting rule of law. Republicans have successfully manipulated the Justice Department into taking another look at multiple, fabricated Clinton scandals. At Trump’s behest, Attorney General Jeff Sessions intervened in the DOJ’s disciplinary process to fire the deputy director of the FBI, a day before his pension fully vested, to satisfy Trump’s grudge against a witness to his obstruction of justice. The GOP has used Congress’ oversight to conduct show trials, aimed at convincing Republican voters that the DOJ is a hub of anti-Trump politics, and have been rewarded for it with access to the government’s evidence in the Russia investigation.

If Comey accommodated this kind of bad faith ref-working, it’s no surprise that less steel-spined officials are doing the same thing, and will continue face the same thuggish tactics, because Republicans have learned that the tactics work. Trump would like to destroy the rule of law in America by fiat, but with that option foreclosed for now, he has made significant progress toward that goal in increments, largely through the power of propaganda.

Comey can’t do anything to change these incentives directly, but if he were to acknowledge his errors in judgment—and, more importantly, grapple with why he made them—he could do something really valuable: warn public servants and the rest of us not to make the same mistakes. Don’t allow bad faith critics seeking to destroy neutral authority to lead you by the nose. Learn how to recognize it, identify it for what it is, and resist it, or risk compromising yourself. The other way lies ruin. A world in which we accept that Comey made the best decisions he could in a difficult but extraordinary environment is a world in which Trump and the GOP keep gnawing and gnawing at the underpinnings of the rule of law until they snap.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites



×
×
  • Create New...