FBI Director James Comey, Flickr, labeled for re-use
It never ceases to amaze the lengths to which reporters, pundits, even voters will go to defend or excuse what former FBI Director Jim Comey did to help Trump realize the *presidency*. His self-serving explanations, designed to resurrect his reputation just in time for his book tour, offered in his 60 Minutes and ABC’s 20/20 interviews ring hollow. Comey found it acceptable to break protocol twice to both publicly spank and later irrevocably harm Hillary Clinton’s electoral chances yet kept silent about the very real FBI investigation of the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2016 election.
Yes, Mr. Comey, you did negatively influence the election. Your wrongheaded actions did have an impact. You allowed your ego, your predisposition not to trust women and your willingness to be a pawn of the rogue NY FBI office to influence your judgment.
Comey’s most telling comment in the 20/20 interview is this:
“One of the things I’ve struggled with my whole life is my ego and … I have to be careful not to fall in love with my own view of things.”
Ya think?
I do not buy that Comey was “so sure Clinton would win” the election that he sat on the rogue NY FBI agents info for weeks and waited to announce that he was re-opening the email investigation 11 days before the election — and thought that would have no effect. His interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, always ready to undercut Hillary, went to far as giving Comey a ready made excuse for his actions so Comey didn’t even have to come up with one:
“STEPHANOPOULOS: At some level, wasn’t the decision to reveal influenced by your assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to win? And your concern that she wins, this comes out several weeks later, and then that’s taken by her opponent as a sign that she’s an illegitimate president?”
How helpful, George. No, she would not have been “illegitimate”. This entire 2-year email “investigation” was a farce and a media feeding frenzy from the start. The best proof is that now Hillary is out of politics, there are no charges whatsoever. There never will be. Comey and the NY FBI office, along with Stephanopoulos and his media brethren, all suffer from the same disease. It’s called “let’s discredit a powerful woman-itis.”
In his interviews, Comey is calling Trump the equivalent of a “mob boss” and said he is “morally unfit to be president” yet he found every excuse to stay silent about Trump in the months running up to the election while having no qualms about breaking protocol to denounce Hillary Clinton, who the Pulitzer prize winning Politifact called “The most honorable politician in all of 2016.”
Stephanopoulos and Company were more than happy to egg Comey on in his bias.
While Comey’s commentary about Trump is valid, why did he wait so long to tell us? What has that cost us? And we still must answer the most painful question that got us into this electoral mess in the first place…
Why are we so willing to entertain the worst tripe about a hard working public servant if she is a woman but give every possible benefit of the doubt to a man who has repeatedly proven he doesn’t deserve it?
Until we stop buying into negatively biased views of women or persons of color, we will get more like Trump at all levels of government.
8 Comments
Comey is a very complex man. He has a tendency every now and then to see through a glass darkly. Yes, he is responsible for clearing Trump’s way to the oval office…and he is responsible for hammering in a few of the final nails on Hillary’s political coffin. For all of this, I do not forgive. He allowed his left hand to not know what his right hand was doing. Were he prosecuting such a person, he would be hammering down hard on that person. Time for him to ante-up. His wife and daughters marched. Did he march as well? Would he have smacked either of them as he did to Hillary? I think not. He, and so many others biased against strong, smart women have a chip in their heads about Hillary. Most of the country wanted her to win and she would have had this egomaniac not stepped in just days before the election with the email nonsense, bringing front and center for all the undecideds, and…of course the Putinesque bots and cavalry. Mr Comey has a deep sick spot that he must see and own. That is the way to the high road, sir…the higher loyalty you speak of in your book, which of course I will read, is crooked in the middle. Go get some psychoanalysis and root out the ego blindness, then apologize profusely to Ms. Clinton and the rest of us popular voters who knew right from wrong. After that you can write a sequel…call it, “I walked a high road but with feet of clay”.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment, Naomi. Egomaniac is, unfortunately, an apt description for Comey.
Anita – I like you a lot, ever since I was introduced to you when you were a semi-regular guest on the Jerry Doyle Show. There’s a man who tragically passed well before his time. Anyway, back then and still now I really think you have a “blind spot” when it comes to Hillary Clinton. Of course there were going to be no charges. Those “missing” 30K e-mails? Who do you think many of those correspondences were with? If you guessed, “Big O”, ding, ding, ding! Hillary was smart – she knew she had insulation by e-mailing the POTUS from her non-Gov’t e-mail account because if she went down, guess who goes down with her? OH, but Big O tells us he found out about her private server just like the rest of us did – on the news. RIGHHHT. And that “tango on the Tarmac” between Bubba and Loretta Lynch…to discuss golf (in 110 degree AZ June heat) and grandkids? Please… The fix was in on this from the get-go. I applaud you championing women in positions of power, I just wish you would pick someone other than HRC.. 🙂 Thanks!
Mike, thank you for visiting and for your kind support. I still miss Jerry terribly. As for Hillary, as you may know, I’ve written a very well sourced book on the subject and have literally written hundreds of well sourced articles about her and the bias she faced and still faces from many corners, doing more research on this topic than many could fathom. As such, I find it odd when anyone assumes I’m the one with the blind spot. We can agree to disagree of course, but Hillary Clinton has earned my support through many years of right action. That will not change.
Mike,
You sound like every man who makes excuses for his intrinsic bias against powerful women who refuse to sit at the back of the bus and take a more submissive role in life and leave the important work up to unqualified men, like trump. Like Comey, you are the one with a “blind spot”. What about Colin Powell using a private e-mail when he was SOS and who encouraged Hillary to do the same, that is, until he was called out by Hillary and then he backtracked on his advice to her, which the media accepted without question. Another privilege men are given and have come to expect.
No evidence of wrongdoing was ever found by bubba and Loretta Lynch other than the perception, which is all that is needed to convict a woman. a man with the exact same circumstances would be excused and no one would care.
What fix? Hillary won the popular vote in the primary by 4 million votes and then by 3 million votes in the presidential election. Any man who had won by such a wide margin would have contested the outcome of a mere 70,000 votes spread amongst 3 states, MI, WI and PA, especially with the emerging fact that Russian did indeed tamper with the election. trump even announced towards the end of the election that Hillary won, he would contest the results and would claim that the “fix was in”. He knew Russia was helping him. The only fix that was in was trump’s campaign (and I have no doubt with his involvement) colluded with the Russians to assure that he would win the electoral votes, if not the popular.
If you think that the Russians could not have “hacked” the votes in these 3 states, then I invite you to watch this HBO Emmy award winning documentary “Hacking Democracy” which without any doubt proves that voting systems can be hacked without detection. It’s all on film from a Supervisor of Elections in Tallahassee, FL overseeing how it was done and said himself, had he not seen how it was done, he would have declared a mock election fair and honest.
Finally, your refrain “any woman but HRC” will apply to ANY woman who runs for president. That phrase has been beat to death and continues to prove that misogyny and sexism are alive and well in this country. Yes, you are the one with the “blind side” to your own sexist post.
Well stated, as always, Kathleen. The email frenzy in particular was ginned up by click-bait driven media eager to work as GOP stenographers.
Kathleen, I need to push back on you a little. I am NOT afraid of powerful women – I would have warmly accepted a Condoleezza Rice, Nikki Haley, Susana Martinez, Joni Ernst, etc., as President of these here United States. This has all to do with ideology and how overall corrupt I think the Clintons have proven themselves to be. And when I said “fix”..I didn’t mean the election, I mean the prosecution of Hillary for having classified information on an unsecured SERVER (not just a private e-mail account) – that was NEVER going to happen in the first place, hence my reference to the Lynch/Bubba meeting in Phoenix. And Comey had drafted his exoneration letter long before they “interviewed” her over the 4th of July weekend in ’16. Cheers. Mike
white men are the final arbiters, for now, at least. women and ethnic minorities still have ALL their options deferred to the white men. comey functions under this zeitgeist as much as I do or, anyone does. it shapes our world for the time being. we all know deep in our hearts that the final resolutions to all threads come at the words of a white man at least in America.
I don’t want you to get me wrong; I’m not hating on them, I’m just saying…
whether it’s the auto mechanic that takes my comments about my own car that I bought and paid for and that I care for on my own as fluff, or the school principal that waits for the “father” to come on for the real parent/teacher conference; we all await the judgements of white men, suspended in the past and denied any final meaning.
comey is enjoying his learning curve on all of this; I just hope he arrives at some sort of true epiphany along the way: that he enabled trump’s win, that he demeaned the real candidate because he just “didn’t take her seriously”, that he OWES us recompense, that he earns his salvation by now fighting the devil he shepherded into the white house. at least history has forced him to look at himself.
he’s no hero to me, but he can be a righteous hammer of justice; if he can just be ashamed enough of himself…can he?
these days, I’ll take what I can get to get rid of trump.