Comey wouldn’t follow Trump’s lead, but was Lynch’s lapdog

The Comey hearings yesterday brought nothing with which to hang Donald Trump, but it did raise several questions about Comey and his behavior.  Comey once testified that he would not be an anonymous source:

CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS: I can’t remember a time ever where a former FBI director has deliberately leaked the contents of a government document so it would get to a reporter in the hopes that it would prompt a special counsel investigation.

One of the problems for James Comey right now is that in his last public testimony here on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee, right out of the gate in that hearing, he took a series of questions from the Republican Chairman, Chuck Grassley, and Chuck Grassley asked him if he had ever been an anonymous source for reporters about the Hillary Clinton email investigation or the Russia case and James Comey testified no. Then he asked him whether he had ever authorized someone else to be an anonymous source on his behalf, on the Clinton email case and the Russian case, and James Comey said no.

So at the very least, what you can draw here from that testimony is that once he left the office of FBI director, he was not necessarily a person of principle. He made a decision to leak information on an anonymous basis in the hope of really changing the entire focus of the Russia investigation going forward.

So that, based on my reporting here over the last couple of months, specifically on that issue, this sets up at the very least a conflict or the need for a further explanation how he squared these elements here.

Yet that’s exactly what he did, with the express intent of initiating an investigation. Comey testified that he believed Trump was asking specifically for Comey to end the Flynn investigation. If Comey felt there was an attempt at obstruction of justice, he was obligated to report it to the DOJ, but somewhere along the line Comey began rewriting the law:

The group decided that it could override standard FBI protocol and possibly legal obligations to report the incident because of its expectations that Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia matter, although that recusal would not come until weeks later. The Comey cabinet also decided that it wasn’t obligated to approach the acting Deputy Attorney General because he would likely be replaced soon.

“We concluded it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations. (He did so two weeks later.) The Deputy Attorney General’s role was then filled in an acting capacity by a United States Attorney, who would also not be long in the role,” Comey said. “After discussing the matter, we decided to keep it very closely held, resolving to figure out what to do with it down the road as our investigation progressed.”

According to three different former federal law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, there is no precedent for the director of the FBI to refuse to inform a Deputy Attorney General of a matter because of his or her “acting” status nor to use the expectation of a recusal as a basis for withholding information.

“This is an extraordinary usurpation of power. Not something you’d expect from the supposedly by-the-books guys at the top of the FBI,” one of those officials told Breitbart News.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein:

“The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016,” Rosenstein wrote. “The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department. There is a well-established process for other officials to step in when a conflict requires the recusal of the Attorney General. On July 5, however, the Director announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders.”

Comey did not tell the President his request was inappropriate and he did not report it to anyone. Instead, Comey made a deposit into his revenge account.

This is hardly the first time Comey has gone rogue. With his splashy Hillary Clinton speech last July, he went way out of bounds in recommending that Clinton not be charged with anything after laying out her abuses. And that’s not all.

It is very curious that Comey was taken aback by Trump’s suggestion and declined to follow the President’s wishes, but was quite compliant when then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. She instructed Comey to refer to the Clinton email investigation as a “matter” and not an “investigation” and he obeyed like a good lapdog.

Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general under Barack Obama, pressured former FBI Director James Comey to downplay the Clinton email server investigation and only refer to it as a “matter,” Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

Comey said that when he asked Lynch if she was going to authorize him to confirm the existence of the Clinton email investigation, her answer was, “Yes, but don’t call it that. Call it a matter.” When Comey asked why, he said, Lynch wouldn’t give him an explanation. “Just call it a matter,” she said.

Comey added later that he was concerned about that direction as it was false. He was further concerned because it aligned with the Clinton campaign’s spin on the investigation.

Lynch’s order, Comey said, “concerned me because that language tracked the way the campaign was talking about the FBI’s work and that’s concerning.”

Comey didn’t see fit to leak that to his pals despite agreeing that Lynch had a conflict of interest. It is also very curious that Comey was able to read Trump’s mind, but was totally unable to divine the obvious motive for Lynch. No matter how you look at it, Comey came down on the side of democrats in both cases.

And speaking of conflicts….did Comey go stupid because of something more ominous? There apparently is a recording of the conversation held by Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton during that “coincidental” meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix. You know, just before Comey announced that he would recommend against prosecuting Hillary Clinton. Almost as though he was given his orders.

Lynch asserted that her conversation with Bill Clinton consisted of “grandchildren” and “travels.” Since when are grandchildren and casual travel a matter of national security?

Judicial Watch filed an FOIA for the recording and/or transcript of the conversation between Clinton and Lynch, but the NSA has refused:

“To respond to your request, NSA would have to confirm or deny the existence of intelligence records on Loretta Lynch,” the NSA wrote in their response on November 14, 2016. “Were we to do so in your case, we would have to do so for every other requester. This would enable, for example, a terrorist or other adversary to file a FOIA request with us in order to determine whether he or she was under surveillance or had evaded it. This is turn would allow that individual to better assess whether they could successfully act to damage the national security of the United States. For such reasons, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of the records you requested.”

It’s pretty obvious what went down here. It was reported that there exists a document written by a democrat operative in which Lynch promises that the Clinton “matter” would not “get too far.”

Comey declined to respond. No memo, no leak to provoke a separate investigation.

Another Comey score for the democrats. Every move Comey made was either for democrats or his own pride. As much as you wants everyone to think so, he’s not as pure as the driven snow. Comey may also have his own legal pickle to deal with- the unauthorized disclosure of classified information:

“The problem is that Comey’s description of his use of an FBI computer to create memoranda to file suggests that these are arguably government documents. Comey admitted that he thought he raised the issue with his staff and recognized that they might be needed by the Department or Congress.  They read like a type of field 302 form, which are core investigatory documents,” he says.

Leaking the documents places Comey into a legal box, Turley explains, as the FBI restricts using material to harm a “former represented person or individual or firm related to prior representation,” and the FBI website specifically says:

Dissemination of FBI information is made strictly in accordance with provisions of the Privacy Act; Title 5, United States Code, Section 552a; FBI policy and procedures regarding discretionary release of information in accordance with the Privacy Act; and other applicable federal orders and directives.

DrJohn

DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.

DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.

Except for liberals being foolish.