The media apologists for disgraced former FBI Director Jim Comey — and that includes Jim Comey himself, which I wrote about yesterday here — are out in full force trying to spin Comey’s leak of sensitive and classified information to the press into a lie Donald Trump told the American people.

Jen Rubin, the Washington Post’s resident “conservative” (who’d like to see “her” party burned to the ground by the way), even dropped the E word to clear her hero and prove Trump is slinging bull dung.

EXONERATED! https://t.co/A8H8PYuBOJ

— Mo Mo (@molratty) August 30, 2019

WaPo’s Senior Political reporter Aaron Blake backs up his colleague but goes one further by charging other Trump friendlies with perpetuating the “lie” that Comey leaked information to the press.

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1167429459131150337

I’m not saying language parsing in pursuit of defending Comey and smearing Trump is what these guys are actually paid to do, but kudos to them for going above and beyond to fulfill that employment mandate if that’s what’s going on.

But for the life of me I can’t imagine why else they would concoct such an absurd narrative that Comey didn’t intend for the press to get the information in his memos and publish it except that it helps them stay in favor in their newsrooms. Because Comey most certainly did leak to the press. He admitted it to Congress, and the IG report simply says he didn’t give the information to the press directly.

Comey was clever. He used a friend.

My hunch is this is why Attorney General Barr chose not to prosecute for the leaks because imagine what the histrionics would be right now if there were actual charges against Comey for violating FBI policies and creating a separate file of his conversations with the president when those documents were only declared classified after the fact.

Apoplectic, that’s what.

And perhaps another backlash the likes of what we witnessed during the Kavanaugh hearing wasn’t what the administration thought was warranted for this particular infraction. Particularly because, as John Solomon of The Hill notes, the worst may be yet to come for their hero.

Comey may try to deflect with celebratory comments that he wasn’t charged with mishandling classified information, but he remains in a precarious position — and the trend lines aren’t good.

Next up will be the IG’s findings regarding Comey’s truthfulness before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and whether he attested to false or misleading statements in order to electronically monitor a presidential campaign.

That determination may not be as cut-and-dried as many think it is, but it hopefully, at a minimum, will explain why Comey believed he could sign off multiple times on a FISA application based largely on information that he, himself, described as “salacious and unverified.” His exposure here is potentially much more devastating than breaking FBI record retention and handling rules.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Solomon writes, invoking U.S. Attorney John Durham‘s investigation into whether policies were violated in pursuit of initiating a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign.

But where it could get really hairy for Mr. Comey, Solomon writes, is here.

But beyond that, Mr. Durham and his team likely will follow up on emerging indicators that Comey may have colluded with other intelligence community leaders to actually “manufacture” the justification needed for an investigation by targeting covert informants against campaign representatives in violation of established policies and procedures.

Collusion. The thing that the apologists have been screaming about for three years, and declared unequivocally the worst of the worst when they believed Trump may have done it, could very easily end up being the very thing Durham decides Comey was engaged in from the start.

So demand apologies for Mr. Comey if you so desire and it helps you curry favor, apologists, but be forewarned: we may find out very soon how much he doesn’t deserve them.