A Note to Washington: The Bush Administration Was Worse

By T.A. Frank, Vanity Fair

05 May 18

Fifteen years ago, Washington was cheerleading illegal surveillance, torture, and war. Today, we just have a clown show. The inflation of Trump into Satan and the rehabilitation of Dubya suggest that manners are more important than actions, and that even the darkest deeds get a pass if they’re packaged well.

f Donald Trump had just gritted his teeth and lived with James Comey as F.B.I. director, everyone would have been spared a lot of grief. Paul Manafort might still be cutting shady deals; Stormy Daniels wouldn’t be a household name; and none of us would have had to endure Comey’s book-selling-ethical-leadership tour. Now Comey is once more back in the headlines, because Rudy Giuliani—fast overtaking BP’s Tony Hayward as the world’s worst spokesman—put forth a new reason for Comey’s firing, namely that Comey wouldn’t publicly declare that Trump “wasn’t a target of the investigation.” (The White House should have stuck with allegations that Comey is a “showboat” and a “grandstander,” since, on that front, we’re seeing that Trump had a point.) So we can expect Comey to make the rounds once more.

If the conversation surrounding James Comey—much of it dominated by Comey himself—reveals anything, it’s mostly the strangeness of Washington’s moral framework. For all his foibles, Comey seems to be fundamentally a decent person who comes across convincingly as someone who means well. At the same time, much of Comey’s mindset is emblematic of respectable opinion in the age of Trump. That is to say, it’s evidence of Trump’s tendency to make formerly stable people lose their minds. Comey isn’t that far over the edge, but there’s still a loss of perspective that some of us find mystifying.

This isn’t to slam Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, which could be a lot worse. Despite a seeming attraction to the spotlight, Comey writes of weaknesses and humility, highlighting his own limitations, in a manner that comes across as sincere. The second sentence of his author’s note even observes that “a book about ethical leadership can come across as presumptuous, even sanctimonious.” When he speaks of how lies can overtake an institutional culture—with “those unwilling to surrender their moral compasses pushed out and those willing to tolerate deceit brought closer to the center of power”—anyone who has studied totalitarian regimes, or merely corrupt business, will recognize the cogency of his words.

For those who groan over the man’s self-promotion, let’s remember that these things can be hard to get right when everyone’s calling you. Also, appalling treatment at the hands of a powerful person can destabilize nearly anyone. Comey wasn’t merely forced out of his role years in advance of his expected retirement; he was also informed of it in the most hurtful and humiliating way, ambushed by television chyrons announcing the news. Subjected to such indecency, people can be prompted to go on a crusade. When the White House of George W. Bush outed Valerie Plame as a spy, Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, became kind of a joke in Washington, D.C., for rushing in front of every camera to rail about it. But can you blame him?

Here, though, we come to Comey’s blind spot, or to mine, for it seems to this reader that Comey’s revulsion toward Trump as a human being—and no one would hold up Trump as a model of behavior on any front—causes him to lose all perspective on the threats and sins he has witnessed in public life.

The genuinely chilling chapters in Comey’s book concern the behavior of the Bush White House, in which Comey served as the U.S. deputy attorney general. We read about how Bush administration lawyers who reviewed the basis for Bush’s wide-ranging surveillance program, called “Stellar Wind,” found it to be so far beyond the realm of legality that they had to insist on pulling the plug on it. Not only did the White House initially disregard these arguments, but Bush’s enforcers rushed to the bedside of a hospitalized John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, in an effort to strong-arm Ashcroft into signing off on a renewal of the program. Comey felt obliged to rush to the hospital to prevent this.

Comey is even more devastating on the subject of torture. He describes going to Alberto Gonzales, then the attorney general, and pleading for the White House to ban the abuse of inmates in U.S. custody. “I painted a picture for him of a human being standing naked for days in a cold room with hands chained overhead to the ceiling, defecating and urinating in his diaper, engulfed in deafening heavy-metal music, and spending hours under a constant bright light,” Comey writes. “He is then unchained to be slapped in the face and abdomen, slammed against a wall, sprayed with cold water, and then . . . made to stand and squat in positions that put extreme stress on his muscles and tendons.” And that’s before waterboarding, of course. But Bush White House big shots, including Condoleezza Rice, were uninterested. The White House made no changes.

Then we get to Donald J. Trump and . . . what? Comey sees Trump and is reminded of New York mobsters who he used to prosecute. Fine. To no one’s surprise, plunking Trump into the White House has been like plunking Vinnie Antonelli into Fryburg, California, the premise of the movie My Blue Heaven. But the behavior Comey describes is mainly oafish and crude—requests for loyalty and a plea to go easy on fired national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey rejects both. It’s true that such actions would be considered breathtaking were the president Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney. But we also assume such people know better. We all—let’s be realistic—know that Trump doesn’t. He’s Vinnie Antonelli in Fryburg. It’s a bizarre ascent and unlikely ever to be repeated. We’re dealing with it.

More important, though, is the relative weight Comey gives to the offenses he describes. Yes, Trump’s unfitness for office and disregard for the truth are bad. But we have just been reading in earlier chapters about illegal surveillance and shoddy legal reasoning and politicization of the Justice Department and the torture of prisoners. And that’s just in one Bush department, thus leaving out the false casus belli in Iraq or the yawning deficits or the financial collapse of 2008. What, I want to ask Comey and so many other arbiters of respectability, has Trump done that even comes close to such damage? Fifteen years ago, we were advancing down the path towards police-state behavior to an extent unseen in generations. Today, we just have a clown show. The inflation of Trump into Satan and the rehabilitation of Dubya (not to mention his enablers, provided they flash their Resistance badge) suggest that manners are more important than actions, that even the darkest deeds get a pass if they’re packaged well.

True believers like Comey are crucial to honest institutions, and sanctimony is a small price to pay for this. (One amusing exchange in Comey’s book concerns Ashcroft, a pious Christian hardline social conservative, rebuking Comey for using the word “turd” during a meeting, since his office was “held in trust for the American people.”) Donald Trump, by contrast, is a cynic. He’s dishonest, unethical, funny, and, like all cynics, terrible for our institutions. But we’ve had worse in the past, and we’ll have worse again. To have people like James Comey speak out in defense of liberty and law will become critical when resistance entails genuine social cost, not when it’s a thriving business model. Will he—will we—recognize the difference?