Comey’s Chutzpah
So former FBI chief Jim Comey finally admits the glaringly obvious: “I was overconfident as director in our procedures” in getting a warrant to wiretap a Trump campaign aide and the bureau’s behavior “was not acceptable.”
Comey came to this belated mea culpa during a tough Sunday interview by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, after a damning report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which slammed “the entire chain of command” under Comey for major “performance failures.”
Yet, while Comey has accepted the basic facts Horowitz uncovered — even saying, “He’s right, I was wrong” — he is still in deep denial on key IG findings.
Notably, he’s still insisting the FBI didn’t rely all that much on the notorious Steele Dossier, even as he claims that Steele was somehow credible. In fact, Horowitz showed that the dossier was “essential” to the bureau’s getting the warrant — and that the FBI’s own checking showed that Steele was highly unreliable, and even that his sources didn’t back up his claims about what they’d said.
When Wallace pushed on whether he had been falsely minimizing the investigation’s reliance on Steele, Comey eventually gave the non-apology, “If I was, then I’m sorry that I did that.”
The ex-lawman says his claim that the IG “vindicated” the investigation refers only to the way he says it undercut President Trump’s charges that the probe was improper. Comey repeatedly insisted the investigation had been opened by the book and claimed Horowitz had only exposed “mistakes and negligence,” not actual misconduct.
Yet all the “negligence” ran in the same direction. Horowitz didn’t find smoking-gun evidence of bias, but the overall record speaks for itself.
Deceiving the court that OKs counterintelligence eavesdropping so that you can spy on a presidential campaign, continuing that investigation even as none of the evidence checks out and allowing repeated leaking to the press of falsehoods about the new president all add up to more than “mistakes.”
It’s clear that Comey considers himself the most honorable man in the world, yet now it’s proven he’s made a mess of both the Hillary Clinton and Trump investigations. At best, Comey was played by other Obamaites and by his own agenda-driven subordinates into boosting an all-out drive to completely derail and delegitimize the new administration. At worse, he was complicit. Either way, he made a mockery of the FBI.