It’s not enough. They won’t stop until they’re the stupidest in the world.
Prediction, they will play Brexiter’s in the final. :)
Another way of saying he deliberately sabotaged the Clinton campaign. Sadly he put the Republican party before his duty to his country, and that’s why you are where you are now.
That he had post-election regrets after talking with trump directly is not a big surprise… what is surprising is why he could not see what a cancer trump is during the campaign itself. Too bad. But really… he should be a freaking hero to you alt righters… Trump would not have made it without him, period.
Also worth noting, firing Comey was Trump’s biggest mistake. If he had kept him on, very little of this would have come out.
Collusion or just good business?
Edit - I’m thinking at the least that if Broidy wasn’t registered as a foreign agent/lobbyist, he’ll end up on Mueller’s radar again…
That’s actually not at all what it means.
What it means it’s that after Clinton got elected, if it later came out that he has known an investigation had been restarted, and didn’t tell anyone, that they would have said that the FBI rigged the election for her.
Which i actually said way back when it actually happened.
Still deliberate sabotage, even if he didn’t think it would be effective.
That’s exactly what Comey said on Fresh Air as well. He claims that he was faced with 2 bad options: 1) Do what he did (which was terrible) and possibly influence the election or 2) “Cover up” the investigation, which might delegitimize the election.
That said, it’s hard to hear him say that, then say “We couldn’t say anything about how we’d been investigating Trump since the summer. It was too early in that investigation to say how serious that investigation would be.”
Some of us might have decided to go the other way. Besides, Clinton was so far up in the polls, it’s not like she could lose, right?
She didn’t lose. We just got sucked into a roving vortex of anti-time.
The problem is that option 1 also results in delegitimizing the election as well.
I believe he had additional, better options to play if he was willing to take a personal PR hit but he was too self-righteous to even realize it.
It’s a false dichotomy because there was a 3rd choice which was the one in the country’s best interests:
Go public with everything, both the Clinton and Trump/Russian Investigations.
He made the wrong choice, and it bordered on both treason and throwing the election.
He chose the most personally expedient one.
Having just finished Comey’s book and read his memo, let me say there is a significant amount spin and outright bullshit in this post, which is at complete odds with how the actual rules of the FBI work. I think it is important to understand that most folks commenting on TV about Comey were low-medium level FBI agents and more commonly prosecutors. In all the hours I’ve watched of talking heads, I never once heard one of them say. This what the FBI manual says about conduct during an election. “during an election do blah blah”, and there was a good reason. Because there aren’t written rules for almost all this stuff. There is world of difference between norms and rules, and norms in a big organization especially one that you’ve haven’t worked out for many years, like is true of most of the talking heads, change and are interpreted differently.
But fundamentally, it is stupid to treat this election as normal. I think we can all agree that nothing about Trump is normal. AFAIK, no Republican or Democrat nominee has been the subject FBI investigation during a campaign. Somehow the American people, with big assistance from the DNC, managed to nominate two candidates eminently worthy of FBI investigation. To say well, the FBI and Justice Department should treat Clinton/Trump investigation the same way the would a 2-term Congressman accepting bribes or deputy cabinet member during an election year is foolish. They aren’t close to the same thing and they can’t be. One of the structural flaws in our government is the Justice Department is part of the Executive branch, which created an inherent conflict of interest. We’ve spent the last 200+ year trying to patch this with not a great deal of success.
It wasn’t James Comey desire to hold a press conference in July talking about Hillary email. First and foremost the reason that email investigation we still going on in the middle of 2016, has everything to do with Hillary decision to stonewall, dodge, and lie about them for more than a year. If she had simply cooperating they would have been done by the end of 2015. Second, it was structural Loretta Lynch or any Attny General is going to be perceived as biased. Finally, it was Lynch action obviously her meeting alone with Bill Clinton was stupid. But also what she could and arguable should have done is recused her self and then appointed a Deputy AG with no ties to Hillary or better yet a Republican. Instead she passed the buck to Comey, and he saluted and said yes boss.
Second, if a case concludes without charges, file your report and move on
Not true. According to Comey it is quite common for high profile cases when the prosecutor doesn’t press charges to have a lengthy press conference. In fact, we’ve all heard a bunch of examples the last few years, everytime the cops shoot somebody and there is a video tape, the DA stands up and explains why they aren’t charging the cops. By delegating the prosecution decision to Comey, she moved him from his role as just the head of the investigation to that of prosecution.
he made a promise in advance to violate first rule by saying he’d report back on any new information
The duty to correct is part of the FBI policies, so you want Comey to obey unwritten policies but ignore written ones?
It is not Comey’s fault, that Hillary’s top aid, has such horrible taste in my men that she married a pervert like Weiner, stuck with him too long, and was so careless with classified material that somehow allowed 100,000 email to be on the former Congressman laptop. He spends about a dozen page agonizing what to do in the book. It is obvious that he is screwed either way. if she is elected and they email turn out to be important, it will be investigations 24x7 and the FBI’s reputation will have taken a big hit. In hindsight, he made the wrong choice.
I think Comey had an impossible task and so would any other person doing his job. He certainly could have done things differently, and odds are good that different choices would have resulted in Hillary being President, which while not good is certainly a huge improvement over Trump.
But it is entirely unfair to accuse Comey of being a tool of the Republican. Temperamentally, Comey is an old-school Republican, more akin to Colin Powell in the duty, honor, country creed. He fought the Cheney wing hard with respect surveillance and torture at a great political cost to himself. It was that independence, which is why Obama picked him for FBI. (In retrospect, Comey is a prosecutor, not an investigator so he probably wasn’t a good choice.) In the book, Bush 43, comes off as being organized and effective, but a bit mean. President Obama is characterized as being smart, compassionate, wise, funny, and a model leader. Obama is right behind the grocery store manager that Comey, idealizes as the perfect leader. It is pretty clear that even though Comey didn’t vote for Obama, he thinks very highly of him. Nor is it any secret that he despises Trump.
What Strollen just wrote. I’ve said for months he was trying to protect the bureau from an increasingly radicalized GOP in Congress, who he knew would shred the bureau’s reputation if Hillary won and that laptop had had something damaging on it.
It’s ironic that because of Trump’s refusal to respect any norm that they’re now dragged into doing the very thing that Comey feared.
I heard Comey is the biggest traitor/hero this country ever had for losing/winning the election for Clinton/Trump.
The winning political play here was to attack the FBI. An army of people on TV going after them relentlessly. In order to defend their reputation you may get them to over correct: McCabe did this to ‘prove’ he wasn’t soft on Hillary Clinton, and Comey had a similar reaction. Meanwhile the only time the FBI talked about the Trump investigation was to tell the press it didn’t exist.
That said,
I support that. I get not wanting to politicize the election, but you can’t sit here and say what happened didn’t.
I must say, Mr. Carrey does a lovely sea urchin.
This line was great:
We’ll call it: OPERATION DESERT STORMY DANIELS.