Republican leaders, who aborted congressional investigations of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, now have trained their sights on Comey, the longtime Republican who had testified at length before Congress and wrote the book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, about his tumultuous experiences as FBI director. Republican congressional leaders demanded that the Justice Department produce the “Comey memos,” which Comey had written to document his meetings with Trump and other members of the White House staff during the first few months of the Trump administration, before he was fired.
As part of the right’s counterattack against the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, on April 18, 11 Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions and other Justice Department officials demanding that the agency start criminal investigations of Comey for claimed leaks of classified information, Hillary Clinton of claims that she concealed campaign payments to an opposition research firm and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch on claims that she threatened an informant with “reprisal” if he came forward with anti-Clinton information in 2016.
The Republicans also accused top FBI officials who signed off on a surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Those officials, they say, include former acting attorney general Sally Yates, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and former acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente, as well as FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
Republican congressmen who signed the letter include Reps. Ron DeSantis (Fla.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Dave Brat (Va.), Jeff Duncan (S.C.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Andy Harris (Md.), Jody Hice (Ga.), Todd Rokita (Ind.), Claudia Tenney (N.Y.) and Ted Yoho (Fla.).
It wasn’t the first attempt by Republicans to criminalize investigators who were threatening Trump. In January, Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Christopher Steele, the former British spy who originally wrote the dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia for Republican opponents of Trump, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier. The decision by Grassley and Graham to single out the former intelligence officer infuriated Democrats and raised the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Trump, his campaign team and Russia.
The day after the Republican congressmen requested the prosecutions of Comey, Clinton, Lynch et al., the Department of Justice released the long-sought Comey memos, which were leaked in less than an hour. Apparently, Trump’s allies hoped to find conflicts between Comey’s contemporaneous notes and his later statements to Congress and in his book and publicity interviews. Instead, the memos confirmed what Comey has been saying all along.
Comey, who was then director of the FBI, made a horrible decision 12 days before the 2016 election when he sent word to members of Congress that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of personal emails after new copies of emails were found. The move violated the policies of the Justice Department, which does not reveal investigations when the disclosure might influence an election. But Comey, who several months earlier had declared the case closed after a yearlong investigation, felt he was obligated to tell Congress of the change. Within a few minutes of the disclosure, Republicans leaked the information, and Clinton’s comfortable lead in the polls disappeared, and she was unable to regain the momentum, even after Comey announced on Nov. 6, two days before the election, that they still hadn’t found anything to justify charges against Clinton.
Comey did not disclose that the FBI was also investigating the campaign of Donald Trump, even though just weeks earlier, he had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. In that case, he played it by the book.
Comey’s bad judgement then is distinguished from the mendacity of Lyin’ Donnie, a sociopath who has been recorded making false or misleading claims more than 2,400 times in the first 14 months as president, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. That works out to six lies per day and is way beyond a reckless disregard for the truth. And this is the grifter Republican congressional leaders are willing to tear down the FBI and the Justice Department to protect.
Trump’s vilification campaign made some headway when his Justice Department referred McCabe to the US Attorney for D.C. for possible criminal charges, based on the FBI inspector general’s report finding that McCabe had shown a “lack of candor” about an unauthorized leak to the Wall Street Journal confirming that the FBI was investigating the Clinton Foundation. The investigation of the Clinton Foundation also came to nothing, but McCabe ended up being fired abruptly, in a highly unorthodox fashion, just a few hours before he planned to retire, and weeks before the report was released in full.
The allegation that McCabe was involved in an unauthorized leak was unusual because Comey told Rachel Maddow on April 19 that there were two people in the FBI who had authorization to provide such information to the media at the time: himself and McCabe.
Trump has been unable to shut up about Comey, but after Trump once again called on him to be sent to prison, Comey told NPR, “The president of the United States just said that a private citizen should be jailed. And I think the reaction of most of us was, ‘Meh, that’s another one of those things.’ This is not normal. This is not OK. There’s a danger that we will become numb to it, and we will stop noticing the threats to our norms.”
The Democratic National Committee prudently filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government and Wikileaks, not only to recover damages from the hacking of its computer system but also to preserve a course of action in civil court if Trump is successful in shutting down the criminal investigation.
The suit, filed in US district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.
DNC Chairman Tom Perez noted there is a precedent, as the DNC in 1972 sued President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee for $1 million for the break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building. Democrats got a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign on the day in 1974 Tricky Dick stepped down as president. There were still responsible Republicans then.
The current lawsuit would give the Democrats a chance to seek internal documents and testimony from the Trump campaign to help them learn more about interactions with Russia during the race.
Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale noted that the Trump campaign, too, would be allowed to probe management decisions at the DNC, as well as the party’s involvement with commissioning the Trump dossier. Democrats apparently think they have nothing to fear from such a search but plenty to gain. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2018
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