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FOCUS: The Comey Firing May Be the Beginning of the End of the Trump Administration |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 11 May 2017 10:55 |
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Rich writes: "Let's not forget the good news that came out of the Comey firing: It turns out that Trump, who has no idea of what is required to be a competent president sitting on top of the vast federal government, also turns out to have no idea of how to be a competent gangster sitting on top of what increasingly seems to be a somewhat-less-vast Trump-Kushner family criminal enterprise."
FBI Director James Comey attends a new Implicit Bias Training program at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, June 28, 2016. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
The Comey Firing May Be the Beginning of the End of the Trump Administration
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
11 May 17
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.
 onald Trump’s firing of James Comey last night has met criticism from both sides of the aisle, but the lawmakers calling for the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia to be moved to an independent prosecutor are overwhelmingly Democrats. Is this, as some experts fear, the end of the Russia investigation?
The axing of James Comey will not be the end of the Russia investigation. But it may be the beginning of the end of the Trump administration.
Let’s assume the worst immediate scenario for the moment. That the Vichy Republicans in D.C. — whether Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, or the big-bark-no-bite John McCain and Lindsey Graham — either block or pocket veto the Democrats’ calls for an independent prosecutor. And that somehow Trump and Jeff Sessions (who claims to have recused himself from all matters Russian, but clearly has not) ram one of their personal toadies through the Senate as the next FBI director: Rudy Giuliani perhaps, or Michael Mukasey, or, heaven knows, Jeanine Pirro. Nonetheless, the new director’s attempts to further derail the ongoing investigation will be met with revolt by the career professionals within the organization — an unwinding that may already be happening. There will be chaos. There will be leaks. There will be resignations. There will be synergy, clandestine or otherwise, with the Senate and House investigations into Trump and Russia. There will be blood. After the news of the firing broke last night, McCain called the scandal “a centipede” and made an unassailable prediction: “I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop, I can just guarantee it. There’s just too much information that we don’t have that will be coming out.”
Anyone in criminal jeopardy will be out to save his or her own butt, not to protect Donald J. Trump. This includes Michael Flynn — whom Trump is trying to hush up by continuing to sing his praises in public, presumably because Flynn knows enough to blackmail Trump (just as Russia knew enough to blackmail Flynn). My guess is that Flynn, who took such delight in calling for Hillary Clinton to be locked up, does not want to go to prison. Nor, I imagine, do the other White House hands who may be implicated in the 18-day gap that separated Sally Yates’s informing the White House counsel Don McGahn that Flynn was lying about his dealings with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Flynn’s exit.
The White House will be outwitted and outmaneuvered at nearly every turn by the events to come. Let’s not forget the good news that came out of the Comey firing: It turns out that Trump, who has no idea of what is required to be a competent president sitting on top of the vast federal government, also turns out to have no idea of how to be a competent gangster sitting on top of what increasingly seems to be a somewhat-less-vast Trump-Kushner family criminal enterprise. Trump actually thought that Americans could be duped into believing that the abrupt Comey firing was triggered by Comey’s handling of the Clinton investigation. He actually thought that Democrats, some of whom blame Comey above all others for Clinton’s defeat, would go along with the firing at a time when the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s collusion with a foreign foe to sabotage the election in the Republicans’ favor. And, as we saw from all the frantic White House scurrying last night, Trump and those around him were shocked — shocked! — to discover that the firing precipitated an uproar in Washington and beyond.
A White House gang this insular, this politically naïve, and this transparent in its maladroit efforts at deflection and deception is a gang that can’t shoot straight. No one in the West Wing apparently even considered that it might look bad to time this debacle on the eve of a day when Trump’s only scheduled official event was an Oval Office meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. No doubt these same brilliant masterminds now think that Washington will go back to business as usual. You know: The all-male, 13-member Senate task force will produce a new version of Trumpcare that the House will buy and the president can sign; that new tax legislation benefiting Trump, his billionaire cabinet, and his donors will speed on a glide path through both chambers; that right-wing federal judicial nominees will be rubber-stamped; and that new White House–devised press stunts, executive orders, and tweets will quickly change the subject after each indignity, inducing the press and the public to move on to the next outrage. None of this was in the cards even before the Comey firing.
Now that Trump, by his own actions, has shown that the Russia investigation is anything but the “total hoax” that his tweets have claimed — now that everyone knows he sees himself in criminal jeopardy — he’ll be engulfed in 24/7 whack-a-mole as the “fake news” rolls out one revelation after another. And those revelations won’t just be about Russia, but about the entire family enterprise. It should not be forgotten that the week’s other news has included the revelation that Jared Kushner’s sister, Nicole Meyer, took advantage of a freshly minted Trump law to market U.S. immigration visas to Chinese customers in exchange for $500,000 investments in a Jersey City real-estate development. What’s the story with Nicole Meyer? What else has she been up to? We are soon to find out.
There will be no resumption of order in the capital until after the 2018 midterms, or there is a credible resolution of the Russia story — whichever comes first. And there’s at least the possibility we won’t make it to the midterms. Richard Nixon, a far more devious criminal mastermind than Trump could ever be — just ask Roger Stone — fired the special Watergate prosecutor closing in on him on Saturday night, October 20, 1973. He was in that helicopter fleeing the White House the following August 9.
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Free Lunch for Everyone |
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Wednesday, 10 May 2017 14:17 |
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Taibbi writes: "What's so interesting about modern America is our hostility to the mere idea of trying to create an easier and happier life."
'Utopia for Realists' author Rutger Bregman argues that if you give people a basic income with no strings attached, they will make better decisions, work more, cost the state less in the areas of things like health care and incarceration, and be happier. (photo: Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty)
Free Lunch for Everyone
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
10 May 17
Can Americans handle the new book 'Utopia for Realists'?
 he first thing you notice about Utopia for Realists, the new book that argues that money should be free and a 15-hour work week sounds about right, is its tone. Writer Rutger Bregman is cheerful, optimistic, imaginative, welcoming, funny and economical – the opposite of most of our political books, which tend to be fulminating, accusatory, combative and narrow-minded, and all of these things across far too many pages.
Bregman is Dutch, which will be a strike against him on these shores, and then there is the matter of his politics, which seem designed to infuriate the entire spectrum of current American thought. He is for open borders, which will make him an Antichrist to the Trump right, and he speaks warmly of neoliberalism, which will make Sanders liberals cringe.
At the same time, the entire thesis of his book seems aimed at the tepid incrementalism of mainstream Democrats, who reflexively dismiss all big ideas as "politically unrealistic" and the work of "purity testers." He will have few natural allies on this side of the Atlantic, which may be one of the reasons his international bestseller hasn't been reviewed in very many of our major newspapers yet.
But Bregman's book is both a fun read and a breath of fresh air to anyone who lived through the ghastly experience of last year's presidential election season, which turned into an angry referendum on the relentless narrowness of American politics.
Utopia for Realists is a book that argues, with humor and sympathy, that we've all suffered from forgetting how to dream of a better world. "We inhabit a world of managers and technocrats," he writes. "Political decisions are presented as a matter of exigency – as neutral and objective events, as though there were no other choice."
American writers continually made the mistake of trying to understand the upheavals of last year in terms of the usual left-right explanations of the world, instead of looking at more basic criteria. People everywhere were depressed and bored out of their minds. They craved something new. Polls consistently showed that people in both parties were unhappy with their choices and wanted a new direction, almost irrespective of what that direction was.
People wanted big ideas and big dreams, but Democrats and Republicans both have been trained to imagine the future not as a better place, but one filled with horror and destruction. On the right, the fantasy future is overrun by benefit-devouring immigrants with scabies, while for the left the next decades are a hellscape filled with toxic greenhouse gases and overfished oceans.
What I saw on the campaign trail last year was an electorate so desperate for big dreams that they turned to lost paradises of the past.
Donald Trump promised to build walls to reverse the onslaught of multiculturalism and send us back to a Fifties nirvana that never existed – he literally promised Happy Days and even had Scott Baio as an opening-day convention speaker.
For Democrats, meanwhile, the most exciting future was presented by a septuagenarian socialist reintroducing the New Deal to young voters. Even a mildly radical idea like free college aroused not just derision but anger among "responsible" thinkers in both of the major parties and in the punditocracy, ostensibly the place where we play with ideas in this country.
Bregman argues that we are where we are because a century of bummerific experiences with utopian ideas – fascism, communism, Nazism, to name a few – have left us imagining that "dreams have a way of turning into nightmares" and that "utopia is a dystopia." This has left us with a world where "politics has been watered down to problem management" and "radical ideas about a different world have become literally unthinkable."
Even liberalism, Bregman argues, has become pessimistic, an ideology that is "all but hollowed out," with young people trained to "just be yourself" and "do your thing." That's probably an overstatement and a cliché. But there's probably also some truth to the idea that a lot of the controversies about safe spaces are the end result of a new emphasis on trying to make the individual feel maximally safe and accepted within the larger context of a world we've unconsciously come to accept as essentially unchangeable.
Government, too, Bregman argues, has mostly given up trying to make a better world, and has instead focused on policing it better. "If you're not following the blueprint of a docile, content citizen," he writes, "the powers that be are happy to whip you into shape" – with control, surveillance, repression.
The welfare state is where Bregman sees the ultimate perversion of the utopian instinct. It's become "a grotesque pact between left and right," in which conservatives have spent a generation making sure people getting aid are punished and villainized as lazy and work-averse, while progressives have used public assistance as a way to lever more control over the lives of poor people who aren't trusted to make the right life choices. Anyone who has covered the way the remains of the welfare bureaucracy works knows this is true, that we have made receiving any kind of aid to keep yourself or your children alive a humiliating, intrusive experience, one that invites an army of inspectors into your home, who examine everything from how many toothbrushes you have in your bathroom to whether your Facebook page shows you're spending your time wisely.
Bregman thinks we should just give people money, no questions asked, and let them sort it out. His prescriptions are humorously simple. He quotes economist Charles Kenny, who notes "the reason poor people are poor is because they don't have enough money." And he tells the fascinating true story of that time that Richard Nixon – Richard Nixon! – tried to implement a law guaranteeing a basic family income for all Americans.
The story is one of those classic absurdist tales of history. Nixon's brain led him to this idea by means of some bizarre accident – he apparently thought "Tory men and liberal policies" are what "changed the world," and saw the plan as the ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics, something that would make his name ring out forever: Richard Nixon, guarantor of universal dignity.
But of course aides who hated the idea (including one who was an Ayn Rand fan) pushed him away from the plan, and it morphed into yet another plan to castigate the lazy poor by forcing them to work. Later in the Seventies, the idea vanished altogether thanks to another classic political reason – a typo, which mistakenly showed that experiments in this area revealed a 50 percent higher divorce rate, which naturally led men to worry that guaranteeing women a basic income would leave them with no reason to stay home. Years later it turned out that basic income experiments had shown no impact on the divorce rate.
One of the reasons the welfare state is so unpopular in America is because every aid program ends up being income-dependent. You can't qualify for aid here until you're poor enough, but we treat the poor as work-averse parasites with bad judgment who have to be monitored round-the-clock. But studies abroad show that the countries with the most universal programs are the most successful and engender the least hostility. "Basically," Bregman writes, "people are more open to solidarity if it benefits them personally."
Bregman's basic ideas are pretty simple. He thinks (and many scientists agree with him) that if you give people a basic income with no strings attached, they will make better decisions, work more, cost the state less in the areas of things like health care and incarceration, and be happier and feel less humiliated, scared, and insecure. He quotes Woody Allen, who pointed out that "money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."
He also argues pretty forcefully that working longer hours makes us less productive and also more unhappy. At some point in the arc of industrialized countries, we end up working more and more hours just so we can acquire more and more stuff we don't need. More relaxing, less working and consuming – that's where we should be looking. So he proposes a 15-hour work week. I'm sure people here will hate the idea.
And who knows, maybe none of it works in practice. But what's so interesting about modern America is our hostility to the mere idea of trying to create an easier and happier life. We're a country that was once rich with social experimentation, from the Shaker colonies to Brook Farm to Oneida to New Harmony to the Fourierist experiments to the Octagon community of vegetarians to a long list of others, many of them amusingly crazy, who tried to use the accident of plenty as an excuse to build a better way to live.
Now we don't really even try, and mostly just scream at each other on the Internet. That doesn't seem like it will get us there. Maybe free money and a three-hour work day won't, either, but it sure seems like it would be more fun to try.
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FOCUS: The Great American Ass-Covering |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 10 May 2017 10:35 |
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Pierce writes: "The one thing that may save us from a Trumpian dictatorship is that they're so transcendentally bad at it."
Former director of the FBI, James Comey. (photo: Getty)
The Great American Ass-Covering
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
10 May 17
With James Comey's firing, the entire Justice Department is now hopelessly compromised.
 oly hell, what a blunder.
The one thing that may save us from a Trumpian dictatorship is that they're so transcendentally bad at it. If you're keeping score at home, there is an ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation into alleged collusion between the president*'s campaign and the Russian government. Late Tuesday, the president* fired the director of the FBI at the recommendation of the attorney general of the United States, who already has recused himself from the investigation because of his involvement in said campaign. Mother of god, these people are morons.
Leave aside whether you thought it was time for James Comey to go. It was time for him to go last July, when he called that unprecedented press conference. There is no reason to believe anything the administration says on this matter.
This, from the letter the president* personally signed, firing Comey, for example:
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
Good lord, who emphasizes that when you're firing the guy in charge of investigating your associates? Christamighty, what a dolt.
But the longer bill of particulars lodged against Comey by the current leadership of the Department of Justice (Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, head overseer) is where the true hilarity lies. From The New York Times:
Memos released by the White House show that Rod J. Rosenstein, the newly sworn-in deputy attorney general, recommended that Mr. Comey be fired over how he disclosed the investigation into Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Comey broke with longstanding tradition and policies by discussing the case and chastising the Democratic presidential nominee's "careless" handling of classified information. Then, in the campaign's final days, Mr. Comey announced that the F.B.I. was reopening the case, a move that earned him widespread criticism.
So we are to believe, especially if we are all morons, that Comey was fired because of the administration's dissatisfaction with the activities that, more than anything else, helped make the administration possible. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.
Can't anybody play this game? I will take any bet in any amount that we will have a special prosecutor looking into the Russia business by midsummer at the latest. Otherwise, I don't know who will take the job. The entire DOJ—including the FBI—is now hopelessly compromised. And yes, I dread the very thought of who these clowns might appoint—Rudy Giuliani? Chris Christie? Sheriff Clarke? Bo Dietl?—but that seems a secondary concern right now. At present, we're governed by people in a frenzy to cover their own asses. Nobody's hands are on the wheel.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 10 May 2017 10:30 |
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Boardman writes: "The White House was in such a hurry, it didn’t even notify Comey directly."
Former director of the FBI, James Comey. (photo: Getty)
FBI’s Comey Sacked by People With Much to Gain by Firing Him
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 May 17
Why does Comey, already under investigation, need to be lynched?
 BI Inspector General Michael Horowitz started investigating FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials no later than January 12, 2017, in response to “requests from numerous Chairmen and Ranking Members of Congressional oversight committees, various organizations, and members of the public.” In his May 3 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey said he welcomed the investigation, because if he’d done something wrong, he wanted to know about it. Comey also confirmed again that the FBI was investigating the nature of the relationship between representatives of the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
In a tweet on May 8, the president apparently attempted to interfere in the latter investigation, an arguably illegal and impeachable act. President Trump tweeted at 6:46 p.m.: “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” In the first place, it is false to call the story a “total hoax” when there are so many documented Russia-Trump contacts, including most notably the man Trump first chose to be his national security advisor. More importantly, the president’s tweet seems aimed directly at James Comey, the official who could limit or shut down this complex investigation into so many of the president’s men. In a functional government, the president has no authority to interfere, directly or indirectly, in an ongoing investigation.
Later on May 8, ProPublica ran a story based on leaks calling Comey’s Senate testimony “inaccurate” as it related to Hillary Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The story was technically accurate while creating a somewhat false impression of the false impression created by Comey’s testimony. On May 9, FBI Assistant Director Gregory Brower sent the Senate Judiciary Committee an official, clarifying letter “to supplement” Comey’s testimony and to provide “the full context of what was reviewed and found on the laptop,” ProPublica reported on this letter with a made up, false statement: “the FBI acknowledged that only a ‘small number’ of more than 49,000 ‘potentially relevant’ emails found on Weiner’s laptop had been forwarded….” ProPublica also falsely reported that the “FBI said just two of those messages contained classified information.”
The FBI letter identifies 12 email chains with classified material that had not been marked classified at the time it was sent. The letter is clearly and unambiguously written, and there is no reason to believe it was sent without Comey’s approval. ProPublica’s treatment of this story seems to illustrate the difficulty Washington has these days treating anything both factually and honestly.
Early in his 2 p.m. May 9 press briefing, press secretary Sean Spicer explained away the White House’s slow reaction to having a national security advisor who was vulnerable to blackmail and lying to colleagues this way:
Well, I think, first of all, let’s look at the timeline. Sally Yates came here on the 26th of January. Then she informed the Counsel’s Office that there were materials that were relevant to the situation. It wasn’t until about seven days later that they had access to those documents. After that time, they did what you should do; frankly, it’s an element of due process, reviewing the situation. They informed the president right away after they were informed of her giving us a head’s up. And ultimately, the president made the right decision. [emphasis added]
This explanation is based on a lie of omission, since others had warned the White House about Gen. Michael Flynn long before late January. Spicer’s “timeline” is a complex lie of distortion, since the president fired Yates on January 30 and the White House stalled before looking at the evidence, then allowing Flynn to resign on February 13. Spicer tried to lie about the president defending Flynn, but a reporter reminded him the president had called the matter a “witch hunt” and also said Flynn “should seek immunity” before agreeing to testify. Another reporter asked: “But don’t you think it’s worrisome that he was still doing that [acting as national security advisor] when he was a potential target of Russian blackmail?” Spicer stonewalled.
Near the end of the press conference that concluded at 2:48 p.m., a reporter asked: “Is the White House concerned that the FBI director apparently gave inaccurate testimony?... Does the president still have confidence — full confidence — in FBI Director James Comey?” Spicer tried to evade the question, eventually saying, “I have not asked the president since the last time we spoke about this.” That pretty much left Comey twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
But not for long. Within hours, President Trump not only interfered with the FBI inspector general’s investigation of Director Comey, but effectively killed it by firing Comey for no specific reason. Nothing we seem to know at the moment (late on May 9) seems to explain the need to interrupt due process of law (so important for Flynn) and instead rush to lynch the subject of an independent investigation. In the context that now seems to exist, the Comey lynching appears to have been planned for some time, but then hurried into execution. Why the rush?
The White House was in such a hurry, it didn’t even notify Comey directly. The president called Congressional leaders, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Schumer told Mr. Trump that he was making a ‘big mistake.’ Mr. Trump paused. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’” Later the president attacked Schumer on twitter. In its haste, the White House hand delivered the firing letter to the FBI in Washington, apparently unaware that Comey was then in Los Angeles. Comey learned of his “effective immediately” firing from news reports and, at first, thought it was fake news. His first reaction was to laugh. Comey’s reaction to the letter itself is not known, but it, too, is risible in its way:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington
May 9, 2017
Dear Director Comey,
I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.
I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors,
Donald J. Trump
After opening with a paragraph that seems to say “The buck stops with those guys,” the president gets to the heart of the matter, at least insofar as he seems to be concerned: “I am not under investigation….” But that sentence goes on to say, “that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau,” from which one cogent inference is that: if you could lead the Bureau effectively, you would be investigating me. Whatever the president is actually thinking remains opaque. He offers no justification for his decision beyond unsupported claims, attributed to others.
One of those others is Attorney General Jeff Sessions who, having supposedly recused himself from everything related to the Russia-Trump connections investigation, suddenly emerges to kill it. The Sessions letter does not even hint at the way Sessions is blowing up his commitment to not act in his own self-interest in a matter where his conflict could hardly be more stark. Like the president, Sessions offers no supported argument for why Comey must go. Also like the president, Sessions kicks responsibility for the decision down the chain of command to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who at least offers some argument against Comey, albeit flawed and fundamentally dishonest. It reads like a brief written by a lawyer ordered to make a case that had neither weight nor substance, but could be a good excuse for a lynching. Besides that, Rosenstein was reaching conclusions on matters that are properly the province of the FBI’s inspector general. Rosenstein makes clear that his memo to Sessions was discussed between them in advance and that Sessions was in prior agreement with its arguments.
The memo begins with an assertion for which no evidence is offered. Rosenstein takes it as accepted fact that, over the past year, “The FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage.” That damage is unspecified.
In Rosenstein’s view, Comey’s sin is the way he handled in July 2016 of the closing of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for State Department business. This has long been a rabid Republican talking point, frequently summed up in the Trump rally campaign shout, “Lock her up.” Rosenstein is, among other things, a Republican whose own judicial appointment had been derailed by Democrats in 2007 (the seat having been in play and vacant since 2000). Rosenstein was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General on April 26, 2017, replacing Sally Yates, whom Trump fired in January. Rosenstein was then the longest-serving US attorney (2005-2017), having been confirmed unanimously by the US Senate.
Rosenstein’s indictment of Comey is viciously one-sided. It makes no effort to be balanced, even-handed, or even logical. The attack begins, referring to earlier conversations with Sessions:
As you and I have discussed, however, I cannot defend the Director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.
Pre-empting the inspector general’s investigation, Rosenstein concludes that Comey must be wrong because “almost everyone” thinks so. Almost everyone thought there were WMDs, almost everyone thought torture was fine and dandy, almost everyone thinks presidential assassination by drone strike and waging endless undeclared wars are matters unworthy of serious concern. This manner of reasoning is a longstanding, fundamental failure of coherent and honest thinking. It has a formal name, even: “argumentum ad populum.” Rosenstein also uses it with another logical fallacy (“argumentum ad auctoritatem”), the argument from authority, that because someone in authority says something is true, therefore it is true (see pervious list re WMDs, etc.). In other words, Rosenstein’s reasoning, like that of Sessions and the president, is thoroughly specious.
Worse, it is dishonest to its bones. Rosenstein distorts the reality of the Clinton investigation in July 2016 in multiple ways:
- He omits any mention of Republican pressure, from Congress and elsewhere, for Comey to produce a political indictment.
- He minimizes the role of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who had compromised herself by meeting with Bill Clinton, and who reportedly cleared Comey’s action in advance.
- He makes absolute, after-the-fact judgments, condemning Comey’s behavior even though it was known to the Justice Department at the time and no one chose to head him off.
- He omits any serious consideration of the difficulty of Comey’s unprecedented situation – investigating the Democratic candidate for president – but rather suggests that what Comey should have done was essentially nothing, with all the highly-partisan political benefit that would have given Republicans.
Rosenstein deals with Comey’s October 28, 2016, announcement of the new email investigation in one sentence that refers to Comey’s explanation months later. Rosenstein has nothing to say about Comey’s promise to Congress, or about Republican pressure from within the FBI, or about the risk to the FBI if the new Clinton situation was leaked. Rosenstein again judges the situation from a “normal” perspective and not as the remarkably heated and complex political bomb it was.
The bulk of Rosenstein’s memo is devoted to quoting people who agree with him, as if that were evidence. He knows it’s not. Sessions knows it’s not. Who knows what the president knows, or if he ever knew it.
None of the parties involved in lynching Comey have had the integrity even to mention the FBI inspector general, much less to explain why their self-serving opinions should pre-empt whatever conclusions he might reach based on articulated evidence.
Based on their memos, and based on their dereliction of duty in not allowing the inspector general’s investigation to run its course, Rosenstein and Sessions, at a minimum, should be “terminated and removed from office, effectively immediately.”
Failure to do so would be, arguably, another impeachable offense.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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