Jim Comey: A Man of Many Faces, None Of Which Are Speech Martyrs

Forty-two judges take a stand in the dumbest group letter ever

The prosecution of James Comey is the latest End of Democracy panic, so press mania is expected. A group letter signed by 42 retired judges, however, takes a grotesque step, turning Comey into a speech martyr:

For the first time in American history, the bedrock First Amendment right of American citizens to disagree with their president and their government and to express their views and opinions on any matter they wish — including their president — is under unprecedented attack by the President of the United States.

The Trump era being a time of soaring virtue-signaling and boundless partisanship, there’s been no shortage of open letters. Our own Greg Collard put together a painstaking compilation earlier this year. A few already earned places in history books for sheer dishonesty (the “51 Spies” letter comes to mind), but this new effort shatters the Guinness shamelessness record.

Judges stayed quiet as colleagues handed down sentences after the government charged people like John Kiriakou, Daniel Hale, Terry Albury, and Chelsea Manning with the Espionage Act for talking about torture, war crimes, our “targeted killing” drone assassination program, and other minor state peccadilloes. Apparently Justices also had to keep mum when thousands were removed from the Internet for disagreeing with the previous administration on issues like Covid. But trespassing on the “speech” of James Comey was a bridge too far.

What these justices are calling “First Amendment” activity is concocting pretexts for investigation, leaking classified information, perjury, and false accusation. They’re arguing officials should be able to smear with impunity. Recapping Comey’s “speech”:

Long before Trump had time to view Comey as a “perceived” political enemy (as judges describe him), the former FBI head in late 2016 was signing applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court asking for monitoring of former Trump aide Carter Page. These applications relied on the dossier of paid Clinton campaign researcher Christopher Steele, which Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz later called “central and essential” to the granting of those warrants.

Comey signed three separate applications, including after the FBI terminated Steele “for cause” for talking to the media, and after the Bureau learned his primary claims were false or unfounded. Comey still told Senators under oath in 2020 that “in the main,” the investigation was conducted “by the book,” and he was “proud of the work.”

Comey’s “speech” therefore included taking part in an ongoing deception of judges, clearly an important principle for the 42 retirees. Later that same year, in December of 2016, Comey worked with CIA Director John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper to assemble an “Intelligence Community Assessment” that would conclude Russia and Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 election after developing a “clear preference” for Trump. Despite an absence of evidence serious enough that NSA Chief Michael Rogers threatened to pull out, Comey signed off on that document, too, which was published on January 6, 2017.

Comey wrote memos about his interactions with President-elect Donald Trump that included scenes of him telling his soon-to-be-boss on January 6th, 2017 that “we were not investigating him”:

“VERY CLOSE-HOLD”: Comey told Trump he wasn’t being investigated and promised to keep the pee tape material “close-hold.” It hit the papers three days later

In Comey’s lofty A Higher Loyalty, he described how the idea of telling Trump he wasn’t under investigation went over with FBI General Counsel Jim Baker. After all, the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe that Comey would announce to great fanfare was still open:

After extensive discussion with my team, I decided I could assure the president-elect that the FBI was not currently investigating him. This was literally true. We did not have a counterintelligence case file open on him. We really didn’t care if he had cavorted with hookers in Moscow, so long as the Russians weren’t trying to coerce him in some way.

The FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker, argued powerfully that such an assurance, although true, could be misleadingly narrow: the president-elect’s other conduct was, or surely would be, within the scope of an investigation looking at whether his campaign had coordinated with Russia. There was also the concern that the FBI might then be obligated to tell President Trump if we did open an investigation of him. I saw the logic of this position, but I also saw the bigger danger of the new president, who was known to be impulsive, going to war against the FBI.

Comey told Trump “we’re not investigating” him, then told himself this was “literally true” because the conversation was about prostitutes and Comey didn’t care about that, “so long as the Russians weren’t trying to coerce him.” Yet he was memorializing Trump’s answers and sending them not just to his Chief of Staff Jim Rybicki, but other FBI personnel like Andrew McCabe who were part of the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe (McCabe even signed the fourth Page warrant application after Comey was fired). In other words, Comey’s meeting with Trump was part of the ongoing investigation of Trump. Some of the first words he spoke to his future boss were lies, like that theirs was a private conversation, not written down within five minutes of the meeting’s end and e-shared for investigatory purposes:

A “PRIVATE CONVERSATION.” Except for the comprehensive memo I’m about to send FBI personnel investigating you

When Comey said “we’re not investigating you,” he was lying about past and present. In an August 17th, 2016 national security briefing Trump received as a major-party candidate, an FBI agent was detailed to watch Trump and National Security aide Michael Flynn as part of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. In other words, even though “Crossfire Hurricane” had been launched on the thinnest of pretexts and Trump himself had never done anything that remotely justified making him the subject of undercover FBI surveillance, Comey’s FBI was already spying on him, in the summer of 2016:

The FBI dolts who decided to use a national security briefing for “investigative purposes” before a presidential election were asked if it ever occurred to them that such activity might have a “chilling effect” on future briefings, if the episode ever became public. Former General Counsel Jim Baker told Horowitz’s office that “he did not recall that issue being discussed.” This was one of many issues Horowitz took issue with in his report, in addition to the 17 “significant” inaccuracies and errors with the FISAs Comey was “proud” (in the main) to have signed. Regarding the fake briefing:

The FBI’s use of such briefings for investigative purposes potentially interferes with this expectation and could frustrate the purpose of future counterintelligence briefings.

Recapping:

The FBI under Jim Comey repeatedly submitted phony research created by Hillary Clinton researcher Christopher Steele to FISA judges in order to obtain electronic surveillance of a presidential candidate. The Bureau fired Steele as a source for talking to the media after the October 31, 2016 publication of a Mother Jones story hinting that Trump had been “cultivated” by Russians for five years and subject to “blackmail,” but waited a year to punish the other FBI source for that story, Baker. Comey then signed off on placing the same bogus information in a highly classified annex to the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which afforded him the opportunity to brief President-Elect Trump about its existence.

Days later, news organizations that had the Steele reports but until then had sat on them as unconfirmable bullshit reported the “blockbuster” news that the same material had been presented to Trump by four of the nation’s top intelligence chiefs, including Comey. Now the material was printable, no longer bullshit but “allegations” that “Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” Shortly after that, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Comey announced that he had been “authorized” to disclose what he had not in his first meeting with Trump: that the FBI was “investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.” He didn’t tell Congress or anyone else that the material that was sending the world into chaos — that Trump was in the thrall of blackmailing Russians — had by then been determined by FBI agents interviewing the original source of those stories to be “rumor and speculation” and “just talk.”

Not content to smear only one side, Comey also attempted to deflect criticism from Democrats that he’d dealt too harshly with Hillary Clinton.

In a 2017 Senate hearing, Comey testified that he asked “a friend of mine to share [information] with a reporter.” Also, FBI memos from its “Arctic Haze” leak investigation show the Bureau knew “Comey also hired Richman so Comey could discuss sensitive matters, including classified information… Comey also used Richman as a liaison to the media.”

One of the stories the FBI investigated was in the New York Times and published just before Trump fired him. Called “Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election,” one passage quoted Richman as saying “Jim sees his role as apolitical and independent,” while another disclosed the hottest of hot stuff:

The Times found that this go-it-alone strategy was shaped by his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other F.B.I. officials felt had provided Mrs. Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta E. Lynch, the attorney general, who Mr. Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.

His misgivings were only fueled by the discovery last year of a document written by a Democratic operative that seemed — at least in the eyes of Mr. Comey and his aides — to raise questions about her independence. In a bizarre example of how tangled the F.B.I. investigations had become, the document had been stolen by Russian hackers.

This passage referred to documents covered in Racket earlier this summer that were somehow obtained by Russians that was supposedly written by then-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. One passage read, “the political director of the Hillary Clinton staff, Amanda Renteria, regularly receives information from Loretta Lynch of the Department of Justice, on the plans and intentions of the FBI.”

Comey was deeply concerned this document might leak out, telling interviewers from the Inspector General’s office:

I could picture emails rocketing around the Internet of… someone at the Atlantic Council saying, “I just had lunch with Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She told me Loretta Lynch is controlling Jim Comey.”

Comey told the IG his decision to make such an early statement about the “Midyear Exam” investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server was fear that this document might come out. He was so concerned, in fact, that according to two FBI witnesses — Comey’s Chief of Staff Rybicki and Principal Deputy General Counsel of National Security and Cyberlaw Trisha Anderson — that Comey drafted his soon-to-be infamous “exoneration” statement of Clinton “in the spring” or in “May” of 2016, before his team interviewed her.

There is every reason to believe, in other words, that classified information was leaked to let Democrats know Comey hadn’t just said a few unkind things about Hillary’s email practices in the summer of 2016, but in fact been a good boy and sat on much more damaging material about Loretta Lynch.

Meanwhile, according to Comey’s own testimony, he had his “friend” speak to the media about Trump’s alleged comments saying “I hope you can let this go” with regard to the Flynn investigation, in the hopes it would “prompt the appointment of a special counsel” in the Trump case. Mueller was indeed appointed, assigned to continue the Comey investigation into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” — an investigation that to date produced zero evidence of collusion, and lasted as long as it had only thanks to fraudulent FISA applications, whose contents were also leaked to the public.

Comey was a key player in the production and dissemination of phony evidence that created a false national security crisis in which the world was led to believe a sitting president was a stooge of Vladimir Putin. There is no “free speech absolutist” alive who’d count perjury and classified leaks as protected First Amendment activity. In Comey’s case there’s the additional novelty of classifying false information that was then leaked, to produce a desired political effect. This was comprehensive abuse of federal investigative machinery, and Trump was not the only victim. If there was such a thing as defamation of the entire United States, Comey would be liable.

I testified earlier this week that Americans have become numb to surveillance, but we’ve also gotten used to the spectacle of security officials lying their faces off to Congress and parachuting into cushy sinecures with networks or think-tanks after they finish their public deceptions. That’s insulting enough, but listening to judges wrap such behavior in the First Amendment is beyond obscene. They just keep finding new floors, don’t they?