James Comey continues his defensive flailing apace, writing op-eds attacking Bill Barr and tweeting like a nine year old girl, with cryptic shots of him staring at trees.
Why? Because he knows he’s in trouble.
Victor Davis Hanson wrote a great piece on James Comey this week that I’d recommend everyone go read. It’s a well laid out, no holds bar synopsis of just how far down the rabbit hole the former FBI director has gone.
Here are a few of the highlights.
Comey seems to have become utterly unhinged by Donald Trump, especially when the president, in his thick Queens accent, scoffs in the vernacular—quite accurately, given the transgressions of the FBI hierarchy—about “crooked cops.” What an affront to Comey’s complexity, his subtlety, his sophistication, his feigned Hamlet-like self-doubt—at least as now expressed in his latest incarnation as Twitter’s Kahlil Gibran.
Comey’s sense of self-aggrandizement is part of why he’s so off putting. If you are going to be underhanded, at least don’t lie about who you are. But Comey continually asserts himself as the only honest man left in America. He truly felt that it was his job to overstep norms, cast aside laws, and do whatever was needed to bring about his skewed vision for the country.
It’s all rather scary when you really think about it, given the unelected nature of his former position.
Second, Attorney General William Barr is soon to receive a number of criminal referrals from Congress, inspectors general, and perhaps other prosecutors. He won’t allow collusion hysteria to cause him to recuse himself in the manner in which Jeff Sessions sidelined himself and elevated Rod Rosenstein.
In anticipation of that bleak reality, Comey seems to be prepping his own defense by a transparent preemptive attack on the very official who may soon calibrate Comey’s own legal exposure. Comey should at least offer a disclaimer that the federal prosecutor he is now attacking may soon be adjudicating his own future—if for no other reason than to prevent a naïf from assuming that Comey’s gambit of attacking Barr is deliberately designed to suggest later on that prosecutor Barr harbored a prejudicial dislike of likely defendant Comey.
This stuck out to me like a sore thumb.
By Comey’s own standard he set for Donald Trump, he is currently obstructing justice by attacking AG Bill Barr. We’ve been told over and over by Democrats that publicly attacking the investigative authority investigating you is obstruction (and Comey is absolutely under investigation right now for leaking and his handling of the Trump-Russia probe). So what’s different here?
Of course, Comey would have no issue coming up with caveats to assert he’s still above board. That’s the kind of leader he was. Obfuscation and double standards where his typical fare as FBI director.
Hanson’s article goes on to chronicle in great detail exactly all the bad, possibly illegal behavior Comey has trafficked in. He’s leaked like a sieve to the media. He ran informants against a Presidential campaign with no probable cause. He lied to a FISA judge multiple times. He lied to Congress about that FISA application when he said the Steele dossier was not the majority of the evidence presented. We know now that it was almost the entirety of the evidence.
The list of sins keeps going and going.
The only remaining mystery of this entire sordid mess is how the rotten onion will be peeled away. When indictments come down, will the likes of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson or James Baker or Bruce and Nellie Ohr be leveraged to inform on the likes of the Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe high stratum—that in turn will provide clarity about still higher officials to learn what Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Sally Yates knew and when they knew it?
In the meantime, expect James Comey to continue his frenetic pace on TV, radio, and in op-eds attacking William Barr and Donald Trump in deathly fear that his illegal behavior may finally have a legal accounting.
James Comey has completely collapsed, not because he was once an upstanding public servant, but because what he’s always been is now being revealed.
You can smell the fear in the air. Comey is running scared. He’s lashing out, attacking those who’ve formally called him a friend (like Bill Barr). For two years we heard that the walls were closing in on Donald Trump. In reality, there was no there, there.
But the reckoning is coming for a lot of Obama era officials who didn’t play by the rules and acted in a partisan manner. AG Barr should only be emboldened by the attacks on him and I expect he’ll see these new investigations through. The IG report is also expected next month and word is that it’s going to be brutal.
While no one can go back in time and really make this right, the people who perpetrated it should still pay a price. That’s justice that must be served for the betterment of our governmental system. We can not have unelected bureaucrats deciding their goals override the electoral process.
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