Bill Press: Not so fast: James Comey's no hero
Washington Irving's story of Rip Van Winkle is still one of the greatest short stories in American literature ...
Washington Irving’s story of Rip Van Winkle is still one of the greatest short stories in American literature: the tale of a colonist who fell asleep and woke up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution.
Imagine his surprise at that turn of events. Or imagine the surprise of somebody who fell asleep just a couple of years ago and woke up today to discover that former FBI Director James Comey had morphed from a despised villain of Democrats to their beloved hero.
What happened while he was asleep? And is it for real? Clearly, how totally surprised and shocked he’d be to see the same James Comey, whom Democrats once blamed for Hillary Clinton’s election loss, now embraced by Democrats but accused by Republicans of leading an FBI plot to force Donald Trump out of the White House. Neither the sudden love of Democrats nor sudden scorn by Republicans is deserved.
Remember? It was Comey, under pressure from Republicans, who organized and led a needless, year-long FBI investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. He concluded that investigation, on July 5, 2016, by acknowledging that she had done nothing illegal, while nonetheless excoriating her for being “extremely careless” in handling sensitive information.
Even worse — Remember? — it was Director Comey who announced on October 28, less than two weeks before the election, that he was reopening the FBI investigation of Clinton based on emails found on the laptop of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Comey’s action was itself an “extremely careless” move, which violated longstanding Department of Justice rules of not taking sides in the middle of a presidential election, but which nonetheless won praise from Clinton’s opponent. “It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made in light of the kind of opposition he had where they’re trying to protect her from criminal prosecution,” Donald Trump told supporters at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “You know that took a lot of guts.”
Nine days later, on November 6, only two days before the election, Comey again cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing, but by then the damage had already been done. Clinton had fallen eight points in the intervening nine days and never recovered. In his book, “The Unmaking of the President 2016,” attorney Lanny Davis makes a persuasive case that, more than any other factor, Comey’s 11th-hour action alone cost Clinton the election.
Yet today, Donald Trump is trying to rewrite history by turning the entire James Comey story upside down. To Trump and Joe DiGenova, the latest addition to his legal team, Comey’s no longer their savior. He’s Public Enemy No. 1. In one of the most far-out conspiracy theories ever hatched, they claim that, from the beginning, the FBI was leading a Department of Justice plot to help Hillary Clinton become president.
As DiGenova explained to Fox News, “They didn’t like Donald Trump, they didn’t think he was fit to be president, and they were going to do everything within their power to exonerate Hillary Clinton. And, if she lost, to frame Donald Trump with a false crime, because they didn’t think he should be president.”
The whole idea is so absurd it shouldn’t even be taken seriously. After dragging Hillary Clinton through the mud for over a year, Comey’s FBI is now accused of helping orchestrate her election? Really? Yet Republican House Whip Steve Scalise and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy have joined several Republican senators in asking the Department of Justice to appoint a second special counsel to investigate the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who succeeded Comey as head of the FBI’s criminal investigation of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, some Democrats, forgetting his treatment of Clinton, are urging Comey to run for office. As of November 2017, he had more than 200,000 followers on Twitter. His new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” out next week, is already number two on Amazon.
How soon we forget. How quickly we fall in love. In all the euphoria over his newfound celebrity status, let’s not forget who James Comey really is: no friend of Donald Trump’s, for sure. But no friend of Democrats, either.
No, Donald Trump should not have fired James Comey for what he did to Michael Flynn. Barack Obama should have fired him for what he did to Hillary Clinton and our democracy.