{UAH} JAMES COMEY IS TESTIFYING SEPT 30TH HERE IS THE QUESTION YOU NEED TO PONDER ABOUT

Why should anyone believe James Comey?

by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent | 

 

September 26, 2020 10:03 PM

 

Fired FBI Director James Comey is having another moment in the spotlight with the premiere of a new movie, The Comey Rule, on Showtime. The makers fought to have the picture air before the Nov. 3 election, in hopes that it would become "part of the conversation" when the nation votes. By that, they mean they hope it will contribute to President Trump's defeat.

As it turns out, there is a more compelling portrait of Comey out at the same time, one that, perhaps unwittingly, casts serious doubt on the credibility of Comey's carefully planned campaign against Trump in the first half of 2017.

The portrait is in October Surprise, a new book by Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett. The book focuses on the period in late October 2016, when the FBI was deep into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and Comey decided, 11 days before the presidential election, to inform Congress, and thus the world, that the FBI had reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The reopening, which ultimately came to nothing, outraged Democrats and Comey's colleagues in the Obama Justice Department.

The Clinton email decision, as I describe in my own book, Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment's Never-Ending War on Trump, spurred some of President-elect Trump's closest advisers, including Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, and Jeff Sessions, to urge him to fire Comey immediately upon taking office. The advisers were not offended on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Instead, they believed the episode showed that Comey was so erratic, headstrong, and self-righteous that he would surely cause trouble in a Trump administration. Trump did not take their advice, to his regret.

In October Surprise, Barrett describes Attorney General Loretta Lynch's growing unhappiness with Comey. The two came into direct conflict on Oct. 31, 2016, when the attorney general and FBI director had a one-on-one meeting to discuss his very public reopening of the Clinton case. Afterward, Comey's and Lynch's descriptions of what happened in the meeting varied wildly. Both later gave their accounts to the Justice Department inspector general investigating the department's handling of the Clinton email investigation.

"The two versions agree, more or less, on how the conversation started and ended," Barrett writes. "But the gulf between the two accounts is cavernous. Comey describes a meeting lacking substance — a fake tongue-lashing aimed at getting a story favorable to Lynch in the press quickly. Lynch describes something completely different — a long discussion in which she pressures him to take an action to walk back his prior letter, followed by her asking him to think about it."

"The two versions of the Lynch-Comey conversation are so starkly different, so fundamentally contradictory in meaning, specifics, and import," Barrett writes, "that it is hard to read them as descriptions of the same conversation."

Such differences inevitably lead to the question: Which version is true, or at least closer to the truth? On Lynch's side was the fact that she gave a description of the conversation that same day to Justice Department colleagues, one of whom made notes about it. Comey did not have any support beyond his own word. "No one has offered a similar corroboration of Comey's account," Barrett writes. And then the book contains this extraordinary paragraph on Comey's trustworthiness:

"The differing versions of the Comey-Lynch meeting are perhaps the starkest example of a disturbing feature of what was by then a broken relationship between the FBI and the Justice Department — at key moments involving the Clinton or Russia cases, Comey's version of events is starkly at odds with accounts provided by Justice Department officials. 'It's not that there's an outright lie in it, but the meaning gets all mangled,' opined one former senior Justice Department official. By mid-2016, Justice Department officials had come to suspect Comey viewed himself as the most moral, ethical actor in any room he was in. Much later, several of them came to believe his sense of moral superiority was driven in part by viewing even straightforward conversations with his superiors in a sinister light."

Barrett was writing about Comey's conduct in the Clinton email case. But apply the same impressions to Comey's interactions with Trump. Remember that beginning with his first briefing of President-elect Trump on Jan. 6, 2017, Comey secretly wrote memos describing one-on-one conversations with Trump. Among other things, Comey wrote that Trump, when the two were alone, asked for loyalty, asked for Comey to end the Michael Flynn investigation, and pressed Comey to announce that he, Trump, was not under FBI investigation.

In each case, Comey and Trump gave differing accounts of what was said — accounts that were "starkly at odds," as Barrett might say. In each case, it was entirely possible that Comey, while not outright lying about what was said, still got the meaning mangled. And in each case, it is entirely possible that Comey viewed even straightforward conversations with his superior, the president, in a sinister light.

Prior to Barrett's book, many media reports treated Comey's memos as the gospel truth account of his conversations with Trump. For example, the New York Times, in first reporting the existence of the Comey memos, noted that Comey wrote immediately after meeting the president and added: "An FBI agent's contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations."

Would that really be the case for Comey, especially in light of what Barrett reports in October Surprise? Why would Comey's word be untrustworthy concerning his conflict with Lynch but the gold standard concerning his conflict with Trump?

The Barrett book contains other examples of Justice Department officials believing Comey lied to them. For example, it discusses the period after Comey's July 5, 2016 announcement of the end of the Clinton email investigation. "It would be many months before senior Justice Department lawyers found out Comey and his aides had secretly planned in April, May, and June of 2016 to make a solo statement announcing the end of the Clinton case," Barrett writes. "When they [the DOJ lawyers] learned about it, many of them were apoplectic. 'They sat in those meetings, looked in our eyes, and lied to us,' said one former Justice Department official. Said another: 'It's infuriating to realize that people you thought were your colleagues were sitting with you, and by misdirection and omission, were lying to your face.'"

In late November and December 2016, President-elect Trump's advisers did not know what was going on inside the Justice Department or the level of distrust with which some of Comey's colleagues viewed the FBI director. But as I report in Obsession, they knew enough to urge Trump to get rid of Comey.

"I advised him to fire Comey," said Giuliani. "Every time we talked about Comey, I said the guy's gonna turn on you. There's something wrong with him." Chris Christie said of Comey, "If he stays, and he's a loose cannon like that while Obama's in office, why would we think he'd be any different when President Trump was in office?" Christie told Trump that, "You have to either develop a trusting relationship with Comey or you need to get rid of him right at the beginning if you don't trust him. Once you take the oath, if you keep him, he's yours."

Of course, in retrospect, it would not have been possible to develop a trusting relationship with Comey. Who could? Even as Trump took office, Comey was making notes of their conversations for future use. And if those notes mangled the meaning of those conversations, and if Comey viewed even straightforward talks with his superiors in a sinister light, who would know? The conversations were just Comey and Trump, and Comey had all the authority of American law enforcement, plus a decidedly unskeptical media, on his side.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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