Speak up, Jim Comey
The President of the United States has hurled grave, unproven charges at his predecessor and, by extension, at America’s national security professionals. The director of the FBI reportedly knows the dangerous allegations are bunk — and has pushed up the chain of command, to the Justice Department, to urge officials to say so. So far, nothing doing.
FBI boss James Comey must risk his continued employment and publicly state what he knows, now, understanding there may be legal limits on the extent of what he can say.
President Trump knowingly lit the match on a pile of tinder in a windstorm Saturday, saying without a shred of evidence that President Obama had personally ordered wiretaps of him in Trump Tower last year. This is an outlandish and poisonous claim. Over the weekend, rather than offering evidence of Trump’s smear, White House staffers reporting to the President scrambled to insist he was merely asking for Congress to investigate the accusation as it probes ties of Trump campaign and transition contacts with Russia.
All this is a willful misrepresentation of Trump’s incendiary words. He did not merely raise the possibility that Obama personally ordered surveillance of “my phones,” a supposition that itself would have been outrageous if unaccompanied by evidence. He outright stated that it had happened.
Following an Obama denial of the allegation, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Sunday went public to say no one under his charge had done any such thing.
“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time as a candidate or against his campaign,” said Clapper.
(This, of course, allows for the possibility that Trump associates were being monitored, or that associates or even Trump himself were caught in a surveillance net directed at foreign powers.)
Comey, still serving, has reportedly gone further, challenging the Justice Department to formally set the record straight, lest the FBI be broadly discredited by the loudest megaphone in the land as a partisan political surveillance unit akin to Russia’s Federal Security Service.
Comey ought not wait for the DOJ to grow a backbone.
He must come out and say, clearly, what he believes to be true, and let the chips fall where they may. While there are limits under the law to what he is allowed to disclose, any information is better than a void filled with reckless claims lobbed from the Oval Office.
James Comey leads 35,000 people in the nation’s preeminent federal law enforcement agency. Their honor and professionalism are under attack. In their defense, and to set the record straight in a country where misinformation spread by the President settles in like contaminants leach into groundwater, Comey must raise his voice again.