The strange reasoning of James Comey
LOCK HIM UP.
Hillary Clinton, in some of her sharpest remarks about her former rival since the election, suggested Friday — without ever naming him — that President Trump could face impeachment hearings for firing the FBI director.
Clinton, in a graduation speech at her alma mater, Wellesley College, took repeated veiled shots at Trump for having launched “a full-fledged assault on truth and reason” and proposing a budget that represented an “attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us,” before comparing the growing investigations surrounding him to those that ultimately took down former President Richard Nixon.
After a minutes-long coughing fit that stalled her speech, the former secretary of state and First Lady spoke at length about the anger she felt years after her 1969 graduation from Wellesley over the scandal Nixon had brought upon himself.
Trump has earned comparisons to Nixon for having fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been leading the probe into whether his campaign coordinated with Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential race.
Comey’s termination is reminiscent of Nixon’s 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” when the besieged President fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox. U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned the same night.
Months later, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend the articles of impeachment against Nixon. In August 1974, he resigned.
Clinton used the comparison as an example for possible resilience.
“But here’s what I want you to know. We got through that tumultuous time and once again we began to thrive as our society changed laws and opened the circle of opportunity and rights wider and wider for more Americans,” said Clinton. “We turned back the tide of intolerance and embraced inclusion.”
In a New York magazine profile published later Friday, Clinton admitted she was truly concerned over Comey’s firing.
“I am less surprised than I am worried,” she told the magazine.
“Not that he shouldn’t have been disciplined. And certainly the Trump campaign relished everything that was done to me in July and then particularly in October,” she added, referring to Comey’s decision to close his investigation into her email server but reopen it again in October.
“Having said that, I think what’s going on now is an effort to derail and bury the Russia inquiry, and I think that’s terrible for our country,” she said. FORMER FBI director James Comey acted on Russian intelligence he knew was fake but feared the public would believe, according to reports on Friday.
Comey decided to publicly explain his decision to end an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server partly because of the fake information, CNN reported.
The discovery of the Russian intelligence — claiming that thenAttorney General Loretta Lynch had reassured Clinton’s campaign that the email probe wouldn’t cut too deep — led Comey to act unilaterally and break longtime FBI norms to publicly discuss why he was closing the case despite finding Clinton’s actions “extremely careless,” the Washington Post reported earlier this week.
Comey knew the intelligence was bunk, but worried the fake documents would leak to the public.
Sources close to Comey tell CNN that he worried there would be no way to push back on the report if it went public.The network says that Moscow is still actively spreading false information in a bid to undercut the current FBI probe into Russia’s meddling in the election.