Tag: Comey

  • The compromises necessary to survive Trump

    Comey has thoughts on William Barr.

    People have been asking me hard questions. What happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the attorney general, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt?

    How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like “no collusion” and F.B.I. “spying”? And downplaying acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president’s being “frustrated and angry,” something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger?

    How could he write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading that they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?

    How could Mr. Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump’s attempt to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?

    I wonder all those things too. I wonder why these people don’t feel too encrusted with filth to keep going.

    And how could Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after the release of Mr. Mueller’s report that detailed Mr. Trump’s determined efforts to obstruct justice, give a speech quoting the president on the importance of the rule of law? Or on resigning, thank a president who relentlessly attacked both him and the Department of Justice he led for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations”?

    Comey says he doesn’t know for sure, but his months of watching Trump, especially Trump manipulating others, gave him some clues.

    Amoral leaders bring out the good stuff in people who have it and the other thing in people who don’t.

    Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

    It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking.

    [shudder]

    I know the type; I’m allergic to the type; and Trump is the type x a thousand. He rarely stops talking and he never has anything of value to say, so it’s a ceaseless flow of garbage. I don’t claim to have Inner Strength, but I have a pretty good working substitute in the shape of a violent aversion to ceaseless flows of garbage. I’d be out of there in seconds not because I have a steely core of virtue but because I know what I don’t like and I run away from it. No status or riches or fame would be worth having to be around That Man.

    (Trump did the “everyone knows” thing just the other day when he was lying about Robert E. Lee. I hate that thing he does.)

    Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.

    That “no spot for others to jump into the conversation” part – you can see him doing that, in interviews or when reporters ask questions. He does things like inserting an “aaaaaaand” or “soooooooo” to give himself time to form the next sentence while closing the spot for others to jump into the conversation. It’s like a body block but done with the flapping mouth.

    Comey says the ones who yield do it thinking they can be the bulwark that saves the country.

    Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

    And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

    I don’t think that’s why Barr is doing it though. He came in way too late to think he could be any kind of bulwark.

  • Clinton’s emails for heaven’s sake

    Comey has emerged from the absurd closed-door questioning the Republicans insisted on in the last few days before the Democrats bump them. He tells us they talked about Hillary Clinton’s emails for heaven’s sake – his words. He says it was stupid and didn’t need to happen. He says he can’t talk about current investigations.

    Don the Con is pitching a fit.

  • A tendency toward a corrupting belief

    Jennifer Palmieri has an interesting take on Comey and what he did in 2016.

    She’s never met him but they have mutual friends and a lot of DC overlap, since she was director of communications in the Obama administration and then in Clinton’s campaign.

    I don’t harbor ill will toward him. Our mutual friends attest to his high character, and his book, A Higher Loyalty, shows him to be a thoughtful person, generous boss and a colleague who—despite being prone to bouts of self-absorption—seems able to laugh at himself. Even though he is a Republican, I have never thought that he allowed his personal political views to drive his decisions as FBI director. I also value Jim Comey’s adherence to a “higher loyalty” beyond the president to upholding the rule of law, and how he stood up to President Trump’s inappropriate pressure even when it was clear it would cost him his job.

    But what Comey’s actions and book reveal is a tendency toward a corrupting belief that his “higher loyalty”—which lifted him above partisan politics—somehow bestowed upon him the right to take actions that were well beyond his role as FBI director. It’s a very dangerous attitude, and one that resulted in him taking unprecedented actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, with devastating consequences.

    That’s interesting if true, because so much of his disagreement with Trump revolved around the role of the FBI and its director, around what is appropriate and what is not, around the distance between the political world and the law enforcement world. If he too got it wrong, for however different reasons…isn’t that ironic.

    She was impressed by his standing up to Gonzales but alarmed by his advertising of it.

    I respected his willingness to stand up to the White House in defense of the law and his boss. But it made me uneasy that he made sure the press knew all about his heroic stand. In my experience, officials like that have a hard time staying in his or her lane and out of the spotlight.

    My unease grew in October 2015, when I watched from the campaign trail as Comey gave a speech in which he speculated that a recent rise in murder rates could be due to a “chill wind” police felt in reaction to protests and threats against them after the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. It was a surprising speech. The FBI Director had veered from the Bureau’s purview of investigating crime into the Department of Justice’s purview of making policy, something I found to be a troubling encroachment and one he would repeat with devastating consequences during the Clinton email investigation.

    You know…I wonder if some of this is born of the tv glorification of and fascination with law enforcement. I wonder if that makes it seem just natural and right for prosecutors and district attorneys to be in the limelight giving speeches and contributing to the discourse. The Sam Waterston Effect, one might call it. Sort of an odd parallel to The Apprentice Effect.

    His July 5th press conference, in which he appointed himself Hillary Clinton’s investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury, was his original sin. No FBI director had ever made such a public pronouncement at the conclusion of an investigation. Comey justifies the press conference by writing that he sought to wrap up the investigation in a way that would “persuade a majority of fair and open-minded Americans” that the investigation had been done in an honest and non-political manner.

    It’s a laudatory goal. But it’s also not his job. If it is anyone’s duty to worry about the public’s reaction to an FBI investigation, it is the job of the Attorney General and his or her deputies. Ironically, Comey’s drive to appear non-political drove him head first into a political maelstrom. And once he had established the practice of publicly commenting on the Clinton case, it made his next devastating step to send the October 28 letter all the easier to justify in his own mind.

    The thing about that job division though is that people don’t defend other people’s turf as passionately as they do their own. Yooman nacha. But her point I think is that that’s just too bad: you don’t get to break the rules just because you want to protect your own particular organization.

    A friend of mine who is a Trump supporter told me I should call this piece “Dear Madam Director,” because a female FBI director would never have made the same decisions he did. I think there’s some truth to that. His ego clearly got in the way. Despite Comey’s claims he took the actions he did to protect the FBI’s reputation and make sure a President Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected under a cloud of suspicion, I suspect his concern was more about his own ego and protecting his own reputation from attacks from Republican members of Congress.

    But even if his only motivation in taking these actions had been to explain his decisions for the good of the FBI and the new president, it was still beyond the scope of his role. I am sure it would have been frustrating for him to sit mute while partisans attacked the FBI for its decision not to pursue a case against Clinton, but it would have been the right thing to do.

    What if the thought is that the attacks on the FBI would fatally weaken it just when it needed to investigate what Putin and his pals were doing?

    I don’t know. I’m not an insider. I can’t be sure who has it right.

    Told you it was interesting.

  • Yes but what did you FEEL?

    The Times suggests the Republicans may have made a booboo in demanding that Rosenstein hand over the Comey memos. All the memos have done is show that Comey has been consistent.

    Democrats said the memos helped establish that Mr. Comey was not a disgruntled employee who made up stories about the president.

    “Thanks @HouseGOP for urging release of the Comey memos!” Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, gleefully wrote on Twitter.

    That made me laugh quite a lot.

    But. Some Republicans say no it all shows that Comey somethingsomethingsomething.

    Some Republicans continued to assail Mr. Comey, casting doubt on his judgment and suggesting that he had been motivated by resentment over his firing.

    In a statement about the memos, the three Republican committee chairmen who had pressed for their release wrote that Mr. Comey never explicitly said in his memos that the president was trying to interfere in the Russia investigation.

    “While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation,” they wrote.

    You have got to be kidding. They’re saying the most relevant “fact” of all is what Comey felt? Come on. If somebody robs you and you don’t “feel” robbed that doesn’t mean that somebody did not rob you. The issue is not what Comey felt, ffs, it’s what Trump did. The law deals in actions, not feefees. In no other context would Republicans ever ask what someone “felt” – they consider feelings sissy stuff, except when it comes to religious maniacs not being allowed to interfere with other people’s rights.

  • External standards

    Comey was on the Colbert show the other day. The Times took some notes.

    In recent days Trump has been furiously tweeting about Comey, even suggesting he should be put in jail.

    Colbert asked him how he felt about Trump’s twitter insults.

    Comey told Colbert that the episode seemed to reflect the reasons he decided to write “A Higher Loyalty”: to remind the country that it should not take the president’s public acts too lightly.

    “My first reaction to those kinds of tweets is a shrug — like, ‘Oh, there he goes again.’ But actually then I caught myself and I said, ‘Wait a minute. If I’m shrugging, are the rest of the country shrugging? And does that mean we’ve become numb to this?’ It’s not O.K. for the president of the United States to say a private citizen should be in jail. It’s not normal, it’s not acceptable, it’s not O.K. But it’s happened so much, there’s a danger we’re now numb to it, and the norm has been destroyed. And I feel that norm destroying in my own shrug. So we can’t allow that to happen. We have to talk about it and call it out. It’s not O.K.

    That’s one good thing about social media, and blogs, even though that also cuts the other way. We now have the ability to refrain from shrugging things off; we can make a fuss now, a public fuss. That cuts both ways because so can everyone else and some of everyone else=Trump and people who like Trump and people who use this new tool to insult women and other underlings. We can make a fuss and they can make a fuss.

    Comey was also on Fresh Air.

    GROSS: And he asked for your loyalty again, and how did it end?

    COMEY: He came back to loyalty again and said, I need loyalty. And I paused, and I said, I will always be honest with you. And he said, after a pause, that’s what I want – honest loyalty. And I paused, desperately looking for a way to get out of this incredibly awkward conversation. I said, you’ll get that from me, knowing what I meant and believing that given the conversation that had happened since we started the meal, he understood what I meant by that. And then we were out of that particular part of the conversation.

    GROSS: That’s one example of the times that you compare the president’s behavior to the Mafia. And you’re familiar with the Mafia because you prosecuted them when you were in the New York office. So usually with the Mafia, there’s transactional relationships. You know, I’m going to give you this. I expect something in return. I expect your loyalty. But beneath all of that is a threat. Like, if you don’t give me your loyalty or if, you know, in spite of all my compliments to you, you betray me in some way, something’s going to happen. Did you sense that beneath this conversation there was any kind of threat?

    COMEY: Well, certainly not the kind of threat that La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, would make explicit or implicit. And I don’t mean by comparing Donald Trump’s leadership culture to that of a Mafia boss to suggest he’s out there breaking legs or, you know, bombing shops when people don’t make their payments. And I didn’t get a sense of any kind of dark threat like that. But what I mean by the comparison is they’re strikingly similar in the centrality of the boss and in there being no external reference points other than the boss.

    Most ethical leaders make judgments, hard judgments, by calling on some external reference points – a religious tradition, philosophy, logic, history, practice, something external to the leader but in the Mafia, and in my experience in Donald Trump’s world, there are no external reference points. It’s what is best for the boss? What will serve the boss best? How do we get the boss what he wants? It’s all about me as the leader.

    Yes. It’s all about one giant all-encompassing ego. That’s no good. No one person is that important, and certainly not a Mafia boss or Donald Trump. But really no one is. Everyone has rights, and no one has extra rights.

    It’s interesting that Comey doesn’t cite human rights as one of his examples of an external standard. It’s a pretty good one.

  • The President pointed his fingers at his head

    Chris Cilizza comments on some highlights from the memos:

    3. “The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion…..It really was conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle in a way, with pieces picked up, then discarded, then returned to.”

    No observation anywhere in these memos rings truer of Trump than this one, which comes from the one-on-one dinner the two men at the White House eight days after Trump had been sworn in.

    Watch any Trump press conference or speech and you are immediately struck by the massively haphazard nature of it. Trump can jump — as he did earlier this week — from his Electoral College win to the situation in North Korea without blinking an eye. To his supporters, it shows an able mind unbound by needing to stay “on message.” To his critics it shows someone incapable of focusing on much of anything for any extended period of time.

    Comey’s recounting of the logical hops in the conversation — from Trump’s inaugural crowd size to the nastiness of the 2016 campaign to how tall his son, Barron, was is perhaps the most powerful moment in the memos. It captures Trump’s approach and mindset perfectly.

    It’s not just the inability to focus on one thing – it’s the absence of a coherent through-line, in other words it’s the absence of thought. Non-stop babblers like Trump are story tellers as opposed to diccussers; they’re all narrative and no analysis. That’s a really very drastic disability for a president.

    4. “I said I don’t do sneaky things. I don’t leak. I don’t do weasel moves.”

    Comey critics will fixate on these lines because we know that he leaked parts of these memos after he was fired in an attempt to have a special prosecutor appointed to examine whether — among other things — Trump was secretly taping conversations in the White House. By Comey’s own standard — as laid out above — his purposeful leak was ‘weasel move.”

    Wait. Comey said that as the FBI director. He said it on the job, in his official capacity. He was saying what his interactions with the president would be as head of the FBI. When he was no longer in that job and thus not reporting to the president, he was free to make his own rules.

    Plus, on a human level, Trump deliberately fired him in the most abrupt embarrassing caught in LA without a ride home way possible. I have a hard time seeing it as a “weasel move” for Comey to share his own memos after that.

    7. “He then went on to explain that he has serious reservations about Mike Flynn’s judgment….the President pointed his fingers at his head and said ‘the guy has serious judgment issues.’”

    Reminder: This comment by Trump comes just eight days after he has become President! Which means that he harbored doubts about Flynn long before January 20, 2017. And yet he still chose Flynn as a his national security adviser. Which is curious except when you remember that dogged loyalty is by far the most important thing to Trump. And there was no one more loyal to Trump in the campaign than Flynn.

    Yes. That one is just stunning.

  • Height clearance in submarines

    Reading the Comey memos this morning. Notice that they were no sooner handed over to Congress than they were leaked. So much for that whole pesky law and order idea that evidence from an ongoing investigation should not be handed over to Congress.

    On page 3 the memo of the dinner for two begins. Comey reports that he had a chance to chat with the two servers before Trump got there, and that they were both retired Navy submariners and the three of them “had a fun discussion about height clearance in submarines.”

    The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion.

    I bet. That’s the Trump we’ve come to know and to loathe more than we did before in the happy days when we knew little of him and cared less. He’s a very prolific talker, but a very bad one: he just takes off, as if he were in a competition for “how long can you keep talking?” He babbles. He makes you wish language had never been invented to be abused by a goon like him.

    The president spoke an overwhelming majority of the time.

    Sums.it.up.

    Trump asked, “So what do you want to do?” They talked about Comey’s job in detail.

    There was no acknowledgement by him (or me) that we had already talked about this twice.

    With a babbler like Trump it can be hard to tell if that’s just more babbling or early Alzheimer’s. Or both.

    Trump says Obama and Holder were close, and Comey agrees and then says that’s a thing presidents keep getting wrong – they think because problems come from the Justice Department that it’s a good idea to “try to bring Justice close” when in fact it’s a very bad idea. He cited Mitchell, Meese, Gonzales, and Trump added Bobby Kennedy.

    Then there’s a startling bit, with names redacted, where Trump tells Comey he (Trump) doubts Flynn’s judgement. Oh, really, sir?

  • To protect the institutions

    I think I’m approaching an understanding of what happened with Comey and the emails and the press conference and the letter. Basically it’s that the alternative wasn’t as much better as we (with the luxury of not living through it) may imagine. He says over and over that it was a choice between bad options. There was no good one. What would have been so bad about not saying anything when the FBI closed the investigation? The fact that Fox and Trump-fan Twitter would have been all over it like an oozing infectious skin disease.

    He explains it (again) in that NPR interview.

    Inskeep: Let me circle back to the Hillary Clinton case and the decisions that you made there. You mentioned it was a no-win situation. What would you say was your greatest concern when it became clear to you that that email case was going to at some point come down to a decision by you?

    My greatest concern towards the end of that email investigation — it lasted about a year — towards the end was how does the Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, credibly close this investigation without charges and maximize public confidence that it was done in a just way. If it ends without charges. Because by the spring, if it continued on the same course and speed it was on, it looked to me like it was going to end without charges. And the credibility of the institution is important even in ordinary times. But all the more so when you’re investigating one of the two candidates for president of the United States. How are you able to maintain public confidence that you’re not a partisan, it’s not the Obama Justice Department trying to give a break to Hillary Clinton.

    That sounds kind of abstract and conjectural if you don’t think about it much…but if you pause to think about it, and about what this whole discourse is like, you realize what he’s getting at. We would have been inundated in a crow-storm of lies…just as we were anyway. The storm of lies was going to happen no matter what…and it might have been even worse if he’d gone the other way.

    Inskeep: That’s your concern. And so that I guess was behind your decision to make a public statement about the case. Just so the people understand, how would you have closed that case in the ordinary way? Suppose it was an ordinary investigation, you weren’t concerned about perceptions of the FBI or the Justice Department, what would the FBI normally have done at the end of this case?

    In the ordinary case, we would most likely in writing prepare some sort of summary of what our investigation had determined and then send it over to the Justice Department, and they would in the ordinary case either say nothing, which is the most common case, or at most issue a letter to the target saying, or the subject saying it’s over, or some minimal statement about it.

    Inskeep: So you decided to take another path, and decided independently of the attorney general to take another path, to speak in public about it.

    That’s right. By the end of — by the beginning of July I made a decision that to protect the institutions — both the justice institutions, both the Justice Department and the FBI — the least bad alternative was to announce — the attorney general having said she would accept my recommendation rather than recuse herself — announce that recommendation and show transparency to the American people, to try to show them this was done in an independent, honest and competent way, rather than just do it in the normal fashion and just send it over to Justice.

    In other words, if I understand this correctly, if they’d done it the normal way, the loonies would have screamed that the fix was in, it was a cover-up, it was corrupt, the FBI was a Democratic stooge (except they would have said Democrat stooge).

    Inskeep: Here’s the thing that’s on my mind, director. You were hoping to demonstrate that the FBI was above political influence. Did you, in your course of action actually allow yourself to be politically influenced? Because you write first that you were concerned about criticism — essentially conspiracy theorizing — about the FBI, from Republicans that President Obama’s candidate for president would be cut a break. Later on you talk about this meeting between the Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Clinton. And you say you had no thought that there was any conspiracy there, but after it became a big thing on cable TV, it changed your mind. Were you actually being influenced by cable TV pundits in what you decided to do?

    But is that being politically influenced, as opposed to factually or environmentally or socially or social media-ly? Is it political to take the media / social media environment into account?

    I suppose it is in a way…but that way is probably part of a director’s job.

    Comey’s answer:

    Yeah, that’s a reasonable question, Steve. I don’t think so, and here’s why I say that: Even if cable TV punditry had never been born and there were no such thing, there would be intense public interest in a criminal investigation of one of the two candidates for president of the United States. So even if there weren’t wings in our politics, which there always have been, but even if there wasn’t that punditry, I think it would be an intense interest in knowing that this had been done in an honest, competent, independent way. And a number of things that occurred in the lead-up to that first week in July that led me to conclude, and reasonable people can disagree about this, but led me conclude that the best way to foster that confidence of an intensely interested public was to show transparency and do it separate from the attorney general.

    I think I see what he’s getting at.

    On the other hand there are the law types (I forget who they are – maybe Tribe is one?) point out that what he did is exactly what prosecutors are trained never to do.

    It’s thorny. I guess that’s why it won’t lie down.

  • A rogue element

    Nate Silver points out an aspect I would love to know more about. (I don’t suppose we ever will.)

    Stephanopoulos doesn’t quite pose the “why not wait?” question directly to Comey, but Comey’s thinking seems to have been influenced by concerns that pro-Trump elements within the FBI would leak word of the Weiner emails to the media.

    From the transcript where they’re talking about why he sent the letter about re-opening the emails investigation:

    GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the reasons it was– you feared it was going to leak out is– ’cause you were dealing with a rogue element of FBI agents and former FBI agents up in New York who were really pushing to get this out there. Were you aware of that?

    JAMES COMEY: I knew that there were leaks coming– or appeared to be leaks about criminal investigation of the Clintons coming out of New York. And I don’t know exactly where that was coming from. I commissioned an investigation to find out. I don’t know what the investigation found.

    But, yeah, I was worried about– the– the team that had done the investigation was in the counterintelligence division at headquarters, of the emails. And there were no leaks at all, very tight. But the criminal folks in New York were now involved in a major way, and I don’t want to single anybody out ’cause I don’t know where it was coming from.

    But there’d been enough up there that I thought there was a pretty reasonable likelihood that it would leak, and that’s what Loretta was reflecting.

    GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You had your– your former boss, Rudy Giuliani, out there on television saying something big was coming.

    JAMES COMEY: Yes, I saw that. And I don’t know whether that was– it’s part of what I ordered investigated. I don’t know whether that was part of a leak outta the– FBI office in New York that knew about the search warrant. But that was my concern, that once you start seeking a search warrant, especially in a criminal case– counterintelligence is different.

    They’re so used to operating in a classified environment. They’re much tighter. But once you start involving people whose tradition is criminal, and in New York which has a different culture, there is a reasonable likelihood it was going to get out anyway.

    Rogue elements in the criminal division in the New York branch of the FBI, who were Trump fans, who were thought to be about to leak.

  • A tremendous education

    Funny thing: I did a search of the Comey interview and the word “truth” appears 48 times. “Truth matters” appears 3 times.

    GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Right at the beginning of your career, you’re involved in prosecution of major mafia figures. How does that form you?

    JAMES COMEY: Well, it’s a tremendous education to get– a view inside La Cosa Nostra, the mafia, both in the United States and in Sicily. And to realize that the mafia is an organization like any other organization. Has a leader, has underlings, has values, has principles. They’re entirely corrupt. And it is the antithesis of ethical leadership.

    But I didn’t know it at the time. But it was forming my view that the truth has to be central to our lives and that leadership has to be focused on important and ethical values. And not what’s good for the boss, how do I accomplish what’s good for the boss and get the boss what he wants.

    And, I would imagine, his awareness of the tension between the two, and the importance of that tension. The mafia attitude to The Boss is a particular kind of attitude; it must have been deeply disconcerting to him to find it again in the new president of the US.

    He talks about the Martha Stewart case, and his determination not to let it slide because she’s rich and famous.

    “Why would I treat Martha Stewart differently than that guy?” And the reason would only be because she’s rich and famous and because I’ll be criticized for it. The truth matters in the criminal justice system. And if it’s going to matter, we must prosecute people who lie in the middle of an investigation.

    Imagine what it’s like for people who work in the criminal justice system watching Trump in action.

  • When the stakes rise, self-examination diminishes

    Carlos Lozada at the Post reviews Comey’s book. He’s not besotted with him.

    Running through the book, a sort of geek chorus, is Comey’s doctrine of “ethical leadership,” an often preachy and sometimes profound collection of principles that he believes should govern those who govern. “A Higher Loyalty” is the brand extension of James Comey: the upright citizen turned philosopher, the lawman as thought leader.

    I’ve learned to be suspicious of people – or maybe I mean men – who need brand extensions or hope to be thought leaders.

    Comey understands that side-by-side comparisons are not a true measure of leadership, that leaders should be assessed against their own best performances and highest aspirations. “Ethical leaders do not run from criticism, especially self-criticism,” he writes, “and they don’t hide from uncomfortable questions.”

    So let’s pose one: Does Comey live up to the standards of ethics and leadership he outlines in this book?

    Spoiler: Lozada says no.

    Not entirely, at least.

    When Comey cops to petty misdeeds, however, the self-criticism — and self-regard — is almost comical. At 6-feet-8, he used to lie about having played basketball for William & Mary, and he still feels bad about it. (After finishing law school, he reached out to friends and fessed up.) He once regifted a necktie to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Because we considered ourselves people of integrity,” Comey explains solemnly, “I disclosed it was a regift as I handed him the tie.” And he congratulates himself for not exercising director’s prerogative and cutting in line at the FBI cafeteria. “Even when I was in a hurry. . . . I thought it was very important to show people that I’m not better than anyone else.”

    But when the stakes rise, self-examination diminishes. On his decision to publicly denounce Clinton’s handling of classified information in her private emails in July 2016, Comey’s misgivings are cosmetic. He wishes he had organized the statement differently and explained early that no charges were warranted, and he wishes he had not characterized Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless” — even if “thoughtful lawyers” could understand what he meant. (Too bad thoughtful lawyers weren’t his only audience.)

    Pause to contemplate what a tiny fraction of his audience was made up of thoughtful lawyers.

    Comey’s own ethical leadership suffers most in the book’s treatment of his one-time boss, former attorney general Loretta Lynch. He criticizes Lynch for asking him to describe the FBI’s Clinton investigation as a “matter” rather than investigation — an “overtly political” request, he explains. Fine. But then he says that his decision to excoriate Clinton’s actions resulted in part from some unverified classified materials that emerged in early 2016 and that, if publicly known, “would undoubtedly have been used by political opponents to cast serious doubt on the attorney general’s independence in connection with the Clinton investigation.” He insists that he personally never saw Lynch interfere, but he remains “bothered” by the existence of this classified information that someday could be used to “question the independence of the FBI.”

    Of course, it is also bothersome that the former FBI director would cite vague information to imply wrongdoing by the nation’s top law-enforcement official, with the very nature of the information making it hard for her to respond. The Washington Post has reported that in 2016 the FBI received a Russian intelligence document citing an email in which Lynch supposedly assured the Clinton campaign that the investigation would not go too deep, but that the document was unreliable. For Comey to suggest that the attorney general “appeared politically compromised” without offering supportive evidence does not seem particularly ethical. And it does not seem like leadership.

    And that makes one pause to notice that in this account the people Comey has done the most unjustified harm to are…women. Is it just random that Clinton and Lynch are women, women doing or aiming to do pinnacle-type male jobs? Maybe. I wonder though. Lozada’s point throughout is that Comey didn’t interrogate himself enough.

    Comey isn’t just the kind of writer who quotes Shakespeare, but the kind who quotes himself quoting Shakespeare. He rejects the notion that “I am in love with my own righteousness” yet notes that “I have long worried about my ego.” (Consider the egotism of being preoccupied by your egotism.) …

    For all his contempt for Trump — he decries “the forest fire that is the Trump presidency” — Comey concludes that the president’s behavior, while disturbing and dangerous, “may fall short of being illegal.” But he’s not here as a lawyer or investigator, this is Comey the philosopher. He laments Trump’s lack of self-reflection or self-awareness. “Listening to others who disagree with me and are willing to criticize me is essential to piercing the seduction of certainty,” Comey writes. “Doubt, I’ve learned, is wisdom. . . . Those leaders who never think they are wrong, who never question their judgments or perspectives, are a danger to the organizations and people they lead.”

    Trump is the most severe example of that tendency in this book. But he is not the only one.

    Oh well, all he did was hand the election to Trump.

  • The toxic consequences of lying

    A Times review of (or essay on) Comey’s book. The headlines in the margin indicate there are several, so I don’t say the Times review. It’s interesting.

    Decades before he led the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he doesn’t hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the current occupant of the Oval Office.

    A February 2017 meeting in the White House with Trump and then chief of staff Reince Priebus left Comey recalling his days as a federal prosecutor facing off against the Mob: “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.” An earlier visit to Trump Tower in January made Comey think about the New York Mafia social clubs he knew as a Manhattan prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s — “The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino.”

    Creepy, and enlightening, and creepy.

    It’s interesting how in recent history Democrats in the White House have been lawyers, while Republicans have been nothing in particular. Trump is a huckster, Bush 2 was a…?, Reagan was a former movie star; Obama and Clinton were lawyers. There are a lot of implications to that. The people who are making life difficult for Trump are lawyers – mostly Republicans, but lawyers. Everything about Trump is antipathetic to lawyers, and vice versa. (Dershowitz is an exception here.) One relevant polarity is order versus chaos. Another is law versus crime. Another is precision versus slop. Another is the loyalty versus morality opposition that Comey cites. Impersonal v personal; the whole v the ego.

    The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law. Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure and groupthink — repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture.

    Just so. The open shameless bullying is one of the worst aspects. It’s obliging of Trump, in a way, to have underlined the point this morning by publicly calling Comey a “slime ball.”

    Comey, who was abruptly fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, has worked in three administrations, and his book underscores just how outside presidential norms Trump’s behavior has been — how ignorant he is about his basic duties as president, and how willfully he has flouted the checks and balances that safeguard our democracy, including the essential independence of the judiciary and law enforcement.

    Because he thinks of all that kind of thing as “the swamp” and himself as the magical Unswamp.

    Comey is what Saul Bellow called a “first-class noticer.” He notices, for instance, “the soft white pouches under” Trump’s “expressionless blue eyes”; coyly observes that the president’s hands are smaller than his own “but did not seem unusually so”; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh — a sign, Comey suspects, of his “deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.”

    Or, to flip it, of his giant ego that can find only his own “jokes” funny. Maybe it’s insecurity, maybe it’s such hypertrophied security that it blots out everything except The Self.

    During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy-scout polite (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”) and somewhat elliptical in explaining why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking gingerly about “the nature of the person I was interacting with.” Here, however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trump’s demand for loyalty over dinner to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”

    Sheds a whole new light, don’t it. I hadn’t known Comey was a mob prosecutor.

    Put the two men’s records, their reputations, even their respective books, side by side, and it’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered, sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G-man Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s 1987 movie “The Untouchables”; or the vengeful outlaw Frank Miller and Gary Cooper’s stoic, duty-driven marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic “High Noon.”

    One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of the so-called “deep state” who has waged an assault on the institutions that uphold the Constitution.

    Aha, just what I thought. (Yes, I usually start a post before I finish reading whatever it is. I like to annotate as I go.) Trump is chaos.

    The other is a straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law.

    One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog-whistles, divisive appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals, companies, religions, countries, continents.

    And even that doesn’t pin it all down, because as we’ve discussed many times he’s also the bore beside you on the plane, the guy who won’t shut up, the guy who does all the talking, the guy who talks your fucking arm off and won’t let you get a word in.

    One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false or misleading claims a day; a winner-take-all bully with a nihilistic view of the world. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one of his own books. In another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

    The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that “the Christian must enter the political realm in some way” in order to pursue justice, which keeps “the strong from consuming the weak.”

    …

    Long passages in Comey’s thesis are also devoted to explicating the various sorts of pride that Niebuhr argued could afflict human beings — most notably, moral pride and spiritual pride, which can lead to the sin of self-righteousness. And in “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey provides an inventory of his own flaws, writing that he can be “stubborn, prideful, overconfident and driven by ego.”

    Someone should invite Trump to provide an inventory of his flaws.

  • Pee brain wakes up

    Good morning to you too, Don.

    Such equanimity, such restraint, such reasoned argument.

    The Post explains his casus belli:

    Trump’s tirade came in response to news stories Thursday on leaked copies of “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” a 304-page tell-all by Comey that describes Trump’s presidency as a “forest fire” and portrays the president as an ego-driven congenital liar.

    Among the many revelations is that Trump fixated on unconfirmed allegations in a widely circulated intelligence dossier that Russians had filmed him interacting with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013.

    In attempt to blunt the impact of the new book, the Republican National Committee is waging a widespread campaign to undercut Comey’s credibility, including a new website that dubs the former FBI chief as “Lyin’ Comey.”

    So the restraint and thoughtful engagement of Trump spreads to the entire Republican operation.

    The RNC effort was launched in advance of a media blitz by Comey that began Friday morning as ABC News aired segments of a longer interview scheduled for Sunday night. During the segment, Comey said he didn’t know whether to believe Trump’s denial that he had spent time with prostitutes in Moscow before he became president.

    “I honestly thought these words would never come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know,” Comey told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

    …

    The dossier included intelligence suggesting the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist Trump’s campaign for president. Comey said Trump was most fixated on the allegations about the prostitutes and said that Trump later asked him if he could investigate those claims.

    “He said if there’s even a 1 percent chance my wife thinks that’s true, that’s terrible,” Comey recalled. “And I remember thinking, ‘How could your wife think there’s a 1 percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow?’ I’m a flawed human being, but there’s literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true.”

    Picture poor Donald tucked up in bed watching the tv this morning as that conversation aired. Picture him lunging for his phone and with trembling thumbs carefully spelling out “slime ball”…

    Some of the early news coverage of Comey’s memoir has made a mockery of Trump, including the cover of Friday’s Daily News in New York. Its lead headline is “PEE BRAIN!” — a reference to unconfirmed allegations in the dossier that Trump had watched prostitutes urinate on themselves in a Moscow hotel suite.

    Daily News headlines tend to be rather conspicuous.

    [goes to Google images] Ah yes. That’s gotta hurt.

    Image result for pee brain

  • An extensive campaign

    Strange times.

    President Donald Trump’s allies are preparing an extensive campaign to fight back against James Comey’s publicity tour, trying to undermine the credibility of the former FBI director by reviving the blistering Democratic criticism of him before he was fired nearly a year ago.

    The battle plan against Comey, obtained by CNN, calls for branding the nation’s former top law enforcement official as “Lyin’ Comey” through a website, digital advertising and talking points to be sent to Republicans across the country before his memoir is released next week. The White House signed off on the plan, which is being overseen by the Republican National Committee.

    “Lyin’ Comey” ffs – is everybody 6? Are we all reverting to childhood now? Should we just shrug and resign ourselves to living in Twittervania from here on out?

    “Comey is a liar and a leaker and his misconduct led both Republicans and Democrats to call for his firing,” Republican chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement to CNN. “If Comey wants the spotlight back on him, we’ll make sure the American people understand why he has no one but himself to blame for his complete lack of credibility.”

    What has he lied about? I think what he did in October 2016 was terrible and had horrendous consequences,  but that doesn’t make him a liar. What has he lied about? Let’s have the specifics.

    Republicans hope to remind Democrats why they disliked Comey by assailing his credibility, shining a new light on his conduct and pointing out his contradictions — or the three Cs.

    An old quotation from Clinton is prominently displayed on the “Lyin’Comey” website, with Trump’s former Democratic rival saying that Comey “badly overstepped his bounds.”

    Indeed, but that’s not the same thing as lying.

    The White House is bracing for Comey to share his story, with aides fearful of how the President will react and how it could influence the escalating Mueller investigation. The well-orchestrated RNC strategy could, of course, be upended by the President himself through a tweet or off-the-cuff comments about Comey.

    Or it could just fall of its own weight because everyone knows by now what a chronic shameless liar Trump is. It’s easy to give, or to find, specifics of Trump’s lies; Comey not so much.

  • People in the room were stunned

    Well this should be interesting. (I suppose Trump will start shelling Syria at 9:55 Eastern on Sunday night.) Stephanopoulos sits down for a heart to heart with Comey. A source who was there says it’s going to shock King Donald.

    The source said Comey’s comments, in his first interview since being fired by President Trump last May, will generate headlines and “certainly add more meat to the charges swirling around Trump.”

    • In an ABC promo, Stephanopoulos says Comey compared Trump to a mob boss.

    According to the source:

    • The Comey interview left people in the room stunned — he told George things that he’s never said before.
    • Some described the experience as surreal. The question will be how to fit it all into a one-hour show.
    • Comey answered every question.
    • If anyone wonders if Comey will go there, he goes there.

    Should be interesting, if we’re still alive.

  • Character witnesses

    The people at Lawfare have a must-read for us: FBI messages circulated in the wake of Comey’s firing. They’re all the more convincing for the fact that the FBI didn’t send them to Lawfare voluntarily; Benjamin Wittes had to sue to get them to cough up.

    In the Knoxville field office, Special Agent in Charge Renae McDermott wrote to the staff she leads: “Unexpected news such as this is hard to understand but I know you all know our Director stood for what is right and what is true!!! . . . He truly made us better when we needed it the most.”

    The following day, in an email with the subject line “Follow up with your squads,” she followed up: “I need for all of you to make sure our/your folks are doing OK. Check with them today, tomorrow ….you get the idea.”

    McDermott sent that latter email as the White House was launching its public broadside against Comey’s performance. In a , the same day McDermott was asking her staff to make sure one another were “doing OK,” then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had “lost confidence in Director Comey” and that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.” She stated that the president had “had countless conversations with members from within the FBI” in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. , Sanders stated that she personally had “heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision” and that the president believed “Director Comey was not up to the task…that he wasn’t the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI.”

    Many suspected at the time that that was a pack of lies, but there weren’t a lot of FBI people running around confirming that for us. They’re not a burbly bunch.

    Trump himself blasted Comey too, stating  that the former director was “a showboat. He’s a grandstander” and that the FBI “has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil—less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.” A few days later, the New York Times that Trump had told Russian officials visiting him in the Oval Office the day after Comey’s firing that Comey was a “nut job.”

    Over the next few days,  to suggest that Trump and Sanders were playing fast and loose with the truth. But we now have the documents to prove that decisively. Their disclosure was not a leak but an authorized action by the FBI, which released to us under the Freedom of Information Act more than 100 pages of leadership communications to staff dealing with the firing. This material tells a dramatic story about the FBI’s reaction to the Comey firing—but it is neither a story of gratitude to the president nor a story of an organization in turmoil relieved by a much-needed leadership transition.

    There were some people contradicting the Trump-Sanders version – Andrew McCabe, Nora Ellingsen at Lawfare who talked to about twenty former colleagues at the FBI…

    The president of the FBI Agents Association, Thomas O’Connor,  a “gut punch.”

    Resolving the inconsistency between the White House statements and accounts from within the bureau seemed like a good job for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). When the head of an agency is abruptly fired, managers have to inform their teams, and those messages can speak volumes about the mood at the agency.

    So Wittes filed a FOIA request.

    On June 22, 2017, Wittes . One of them sought communications to the workforce from the senior FBI leadership regarding Comey’s firing. Another sought communications on the topic from all the assistant directors and special agents in charge at the FBI’s many components and field offices to their respective teams. When the FBI did not respond in a timely manner, Wittes sued—represented by the folks at —stating that his purpose was “to show conclusively that President Trump and his White House staff are lying about career federal law enforcement officers, their actions, and their attitudes.”

    Maybe the FBI didn’t respond in a timely fashion so that Wittes would sue and the communications would appear that much more reliable. I would have if I were the FBI.

    Over the weekend, we received 103 pages of records responsive to Wittes’s first two requests—messages from FBI leadership around the country and across the bureau regarding the firing of Director Comey. The bureau identified 116 pages of responsive material and withheld only 13 pages, so this material constitutes the overwhelming bulk of communications to staff on the subject of the firing.

    What does it show? Simply put, it shows that Ellingsen nailed it when she described a reaction of “shock” and “profound sadness” at the removal of a beloved figure to whom the workforce was deeply attached. It also shows that no aspect of the White House’s statements about the bureau were accurate—and, indeed, that the White House engendered at least some resentment among the rank and file for whom it purported to speak. As Amy Hess, the special agent in charge in Louisville, put it: “On a personal note, I vehemently disagree with any negative assertions about the credibility of this institution or the people herein.”

    The fact still remains that Comey is one of the reasons we have Trump, because of his bizarre and destructive actions over the Clinton emails. But that doesn’t make Trump’s reasons for firing him valid or Trump’s lies about him true.

    Lawfare includes the whole set of messages, all 107 pages.

  • Don’s whoppers

    Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes write in Foreign Policy that there is now evidence demonstrating that Trump lied when he said the FBI rank and file had lost confidence in Comey.

    The day after Comey’s dismissal, then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said:

    The president, over the last several months, lost confidence in Director Comey. The [Justice Department] lost confidence in Director Comey. Bipartisan members of Congress made it clear that they had lost confidence in Director Comey. And most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.

    At the time, a reporter challenged Sanders’s claim, reading her a quote from a special agent in the FBI who asserted, “The vast majority of the bureau is in favor of Director Comey. This is a total shock. This is not supposed to happen. The real losers here are 20,000 front-line people in the organization because they lost the only guy working here in the past 15 years who actually cared about them.” Sanders replied, “Look, we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things.”

    The next day, Sanders doubled down by claiming that she had personally “heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision.” Underscoring the apparent extent of dislike for Comey at the bureau, Sanders said, “I certainly heard from a large number of individuals — and that’s just myself — and I don’t even know that many people in the FBI.”

    Trump also pushed the line that Comey had lost the confidence of the rank and file, telling NBC’s Lester Holt that the FBI was in a state of turmoil. “You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil — less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that,” he said.

    Typical Trump – what he claims he knows (but doesn’t) is what everybody knows, because he is all there is.

    Even as the White House said these things, evidence to the contrary was pouring out of the bureau. After the firing, some FBI agents reportedly changed their social media profile pictures to images of Comey in a display of support typically shown to colleagues killed in the line of duty. Pictures later emerged from FBI Family Day of employees wearing T-shirts that read “#ComeyIsMyHomey.”

    Less than 48 hours after Comey’s firing, FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe contradicted the White House’s claims in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day,” he said.

    And now the Times has reported on data it acquired via a FOIA request that back all that up. His scores are high.

    Of course, the survey could mask substantial pockets of discontent — those “countless” individuals Sanders claims spoke to her against Comey and in support of Trump’s actions. The rest of the data Ben requested in his FOIA will shed additional light on the matter.

    But these numbers clearly indicate that it is worth asking the newly minted press secretary to revisit her statements from back in May. Can she be more specific on whom she spoke to and when? Might the White House now admit that the president formed a dramatically mistaken impression of the state of morale at the FBI under Comey’s leadership — or that the state of morale actually had nothing to do with his action against the director at all? And is the president prepared to go on the record to correct his attacks on Comey in light of the evidence they were false?

    Or perhaps the answers are too obvious to even bother asking.

    Perhaps.

  • At his core a dishonest and untrustworthy man

    At this point the people who don’t think Trump is a confirmed resolute habitual liar would fit comfortably inside a boutique coffee shop in Sausalito. Dana Milbank won’t be sharing a table with them.

    In the three hours I sat transfixed in Room 216 of the Hart Building, 15 feet behind the fired FBI director, the line that chilled me more than any other was Comey’s account of why he wrote extensive, real-time notes of his conversations with Trump. “The nature of the person,” Comey explained in part. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document.”

    The nature of the person.

    This was the essence of Comey’s testimony: that the president of the United States is at his core a dishonest and untrustworthy man. It was judgment on character, not a legal opinion, and even Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee made no real attempt to dispel it.

    Dishonest and untrustworthy as well as self-interested and greedy as well as malevolent and aggressive as well as too stupid and ignorant to hide any of that.

    (And yet with all that he still got elected. That says something about us, and that something is not a good something.)

    Republicans on the committee defended Trump on some technical points but not on matters of integrity. Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) called Comey’s testimony “as good as it gets” for legal writing and accepted that “we know exactly what happened” between him and Trump. Collins said Trump “never should have cleared the room, and he never should have asked you, as you reported, to let it go — to let the investigation go.”

    Trump is growing lonely in his protestations of his own probity. Friday morning he inexplicably claimed “total and complete vindication.” Trump’s spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders vouched that “the president is not a liar. I think it’s frankly insulting that that question would be asked.”

    She’s one of the customers at that coffee shop. I hope the scones are good.

  • When the subject is spilling beans

    There’s another likely explanation for why Comey didn’t tell Trump he was being inappropriate:

    During the hearing, several senators pressed Comey about why he didn’t ask obvious follow-up questions, as when Trump allegedly said to the director, “We had that thing.” What thing? Comey also might have queried, “Mr. President, what do you mean when you say you ‘hope’?” Or, as various commentators have suggested, why didn’t Comey say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but this is highly inappropriate and I’m going to have to excuse myself”?

    Ask any reporter, whose skills are essentially investigative, and the answer is: You don’t ever interrupt when the subject is spilling beans.

    Ohhhh. Of course. Comey’s the head of the FBI and there’s Trump at least approaching criminal behavior. Explaining the rules to Trump would have been one option, but a competing one would have been to wait to see how far he would go.

    Remember that Flynn was under investigation at the time, as was Trump’s campaign, though apparently not Trump himself. All of this was surely in Comey’s mind when Trump allegedly expressed his hope.

    So he would have been thinking not just “this is all wrong and I shouldn’t be here,” but also “damn he’s incriminating himself right this minute, listen carefully and remember.”

    For Comey, what was the higher moral position? To stop the president of the United States from talking — or keep the conversation going while you gather your wits and see what else might be forthcoming but could aid in an ongoing investigation? Most likely, Comey’s mind was frantically trying to assess the situation and wondering, Lordy, why didn’t I wear a wire?

    I have repeatedly wished he’d had a little recording device in his pocket he could have surreptitiously switched on.

  • The bad man talks back

    The lying sack of shit is fighting back. He threw a news conference this afternoon along with another hapless head of state, and seized the opportunity to say Comey lied under oath.

    President Trump on Friday accused James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of lying under oath to Congress in testimony that the president dismissed as a politically motivated proceeding.

    …

    “Yesterday showed no collusion, no obstruction,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, during a news conference with the visiting Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis.

    “That was an excuse by the Democrats, who lost an election they shouldn’t have lost,” he said. “It was just an excuse, but we were very, very happy, and, frankly, James Comey confirmed a lot of what I said, and some of the things that he said just weren’t true.”

    Yeah who ya gonna believe, a former FBI director and Deputy Attorney General and prosecutor, or a real estate huckster and fraudulent “university” figurehead and tv star? Which one has a long documented history of fraud, wage theft, bankruptcies, sexual assault accusations, racist housing practices and the like? Gee I just can’t tell which one is more likely to be telling the truth.

    Mr. Trump’s comments prompted swift action by congressional investigators participating in the Russia inquiry. Representative K. Michael Conaway, Republican of Texas, and Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, announced that they had written to Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, requesting that any recordings or memos about Mr. Trump’s conversations with Mr. Comey be furnished to the intelligence committee within two weeks. They also made a formal request to Mr. Comey for copies of the memos he testified about on Thursday or notes reflecting the meetings.

    …

    Mr. Trump denied that he had ever asked Mr. Comey to drop the F.B.I. investigation into ties of his former national security adviser and Russia, or asked for a pledge of loyalty, as Mr. Comey asserted Thursday. Those conversations are reflected in memos Mr. Comey wrote, and now are in the possession of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation who was named after Mr. Comey’s firing.

    “I didn’t say that,” Mr. Trump said of the request regarding the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. “And there’d be nothing wrong if I did say it.”

    Ah that’s so Trump. I didn’t do it, plus it wasn’t that bad, plus other people do it too, plus I probably won’t do it again.

    It’s disgusting that he would say there would be nothing wrong if he did say it. Yes, Donald, there is something wrong with obstruction of justice. You’re not a dictator, you’re a head of state who is accountable to the law and the people.

    About the loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump said, “I hardly know the man; I’m not going to ask him to pledge allegiance.”

    Non sequitur, dude.

    Mr. Trump’s team, led by his personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, on Friday was preparing a counterattack on Mr. Comey based in part on his admission that he arranged the leak of his account of the conversation with Mr. Trump in which he says the president suggested the F.B.I. halt its investigation into Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser.

    The president’s lawyers plan to file a complaint with the Justice Department inspector general next week arguing that Mr. Comey should not have shared what they call privileged communications, according to two people involved in the matter.

    Privileged semi-criminal communications that Trump forced on Comey – yeah that should go well for him.