TALKING TRASH
IF you want a visible symbol of all that’s wrong with Washington these days, look no further than the 6foot-8-inch frame of James B. Comey Jr., whose DC circus act finally closed on Thursday with an unctuous performance before the Senate intelligence committee. Seeking to take down the president of the United States for unceremoniously firing him, the former FBI director succeeded primarily in embarrassing himself and the bureau. Call him the Biggest Loser. But Comey’s not alone. During his much-hyped testimony — treated by the media as the second coming of Joe Valachi ratting out the Mafia — Comey did manage to smear president Trump’s character (a “liar”). He also succeeded in wounding his former boss, Loretta Lynch, embarrassing The New York Times and hurting the feelings of the anonymous-quoting media by likening them to “feeding seagulls at the beach.”
For a White House press corps praying for Watergate redux, Comey even outed himself as this year’s model of Deep Throat, freely admitting he leaked his own memo regard- ing his unease with Trump via a buddy at Columbia Law School. He admitted he did it to provoke the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the alleged Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.
Comey’s self-detonation took down others as well. He described in detail how former Attorney General Lynch insisted that he characterize his probe into Hillary Clinton’s egregious mishandling of classified materials as simply a “matter” rather than an “investigation.”
Troubled by Lynch’s prejudicial meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Phoenix while his wife was under Justice Department scrutiny, he therefore took the matter into his own hands by injecting the FBI directly into the campaign, not once but twice — something he had no right to do.
Another casualty of his testimony was his description of a “blockbuster” Times story in February that alleged “repeated contacts” between Team Trump and Russian intelligence officials as “almost completely wrong.” That story, like most of the anti-Trump reporting lately in the Times and The Washington Post, was based on anonymous “current and former American officials.” The president has been madly tweeting about “fake news” for months, and here was a classic example of it.
Even Comey’s friends haven’t escaped unscathed. The man who supposedly read Comey’s still-unseen private memo to a reporter, identified as professor Dan Richman, has gone to ground after Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, issued a statement suggesting legal action for “unauthorized disclosure of privileged information.” So what’s the state of play now? We know for sure that Trump was never under investigation during the FBI’s probe into former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and the phantasmagorical “Russian hacking” of the election. We know because James Comey finally confirmed one of the few details of this case that had somehow not leaked out.
We know that the Obama administration had its thumb on the scale throughout the entire Clinton investigation; we also know that Comey accommodated every break his boss Lynch gave Clinton without a smidgen of dudgeon.
Still up for debate is the insinuation that Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice for telling Comey he “hoped” the FBI could let “good guy” Flynn off the hook for his contacts with the Russians. There’s still no concrete evidence of any malfeasance, and the Times’ discredited story ought to concern other reporters that Obama loyalists could be manipulating them as part of the “resistance.”
At least we finally we know something important about Washington today: that getting and keeping the job in DC is more important than actually doing the job. If the sensitive Comey felt pressured by Trump to drop the Russia probe, his proper recourse was informing his boss, Jeff Sessions, not leaking a “Dear Diary” entry to the media when it served the purposes of bureaucratic infighting.
Despite all the collateral damage, the political situation remains unchanged. Those who refuse to accept the results of the election will continue to harry the White House, while Trump’s defenders will redouble efforts to stop them.
Meanwhile, there’s a new FBI director on the way, health care and tax reform, and Donald Trump remains president.
Jim Comey lost his job. Now let The Donald do his.