James Comey’s original sin

I am guilty of sabotage. Whenever I cruise a bookstore and see one of James Comey’s novels, I flip it backward to hide the cover.

It’s my powerless way of punishing him for his original sin. 

I sympathize with the guy — up to a point. It’s detestable, if not laughable, that the MAGA regime has twice indicted the former FBI director just to sate Trump’s revenge fantasies. Last year’s indictment was thrown out of court with all deliberate speed; last week’s indictment — claiming that he threatened Trump’s life because he posted a photo of seashells that spelled the numbers “86 47” — is further proof that his Justice Department bootlickers are clueless as well as mendacious. Because, according to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects “political hyperbole” and “language in the political arena (that) is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

It sucks that Comey has to weather these nakedly political persecutions. Plus, those weren’t even his seashells! He came upon them while strolling a beach! At most, he’s guilty of thumbing impulsively on Instagram, as millions of us do each day. And since when is “86” an imminent deadly threat? It means toss out, throw out, get rid of… enough already. I’ve wasted too many keystrokes on this paragraph.

No critic of the MAGA regime deserves to be targeted with trumped-up charges, but the violin I play for Comey is exceedingly small. We should never forget what he did in 2016 at the dawn of our dystopia. He’s a big reason why we’re stuck with Trump in the first place. Comey, thanks to his foolish electoral intrusions, helped unleash the junkyard dog who treats the Constitution as a chew toy and who, with the avarice of a leech, is sucking the life’s blood out of our body politic.

I call it Comey’s original sin.

From time to time, here in the United States of Amnesia, I take it upon myself to review recent episodes that are all too quickly forgotten. This is one of those times.

It can surely be argued that Hillary Clinton lost in ‘16 for many reasons — her inability to attract working-class whites, her misfortune to be a woman in a misogynistic culture, and many more. But it surely didn’t help to have the director of the FBI, someone who brands himself as a paragon of “ethical leadership,” put his thumb on the scale with tin-eared ineptitude.

It all started in the summer of ‘16 when the FBI determined that Hillary’s use of a private email server was not criminal. Normally, that kind of finding would be announced in a single terse sentence. But Comey decided to break FBI tradition and make a long public pronouncement about how Hillary’s behavior, while fully within the law, had nevertheless been “extremely careless.” Voters who were skeptical about Hillary got two messages: (1) She’s too careless to be trusted, and (2) Since she wasn’t charged with a crime, she got away with something.

Comey subsequently tried to explain why he’d gone public: He wanted “to show transparency…It was the least worst way to close the investigation.” Wrong. It was his job to investigate and determine the worth of the investigation. As a general matter, when prosecutors and investigators decline to indict someone, they don’t go public to rebuke the person who was targeted. As the respected legal analyst Benjamin Wittes said that summer, “We want them to shut the heck up.”

But having established the precedent of not shutting up, Comey proceeded to double down on “transparency” eleven days before the election. His October 28 letter to Congress — publicly announcing that the Hillary probe was reopened, to examine some new emails found on a random laptop (emails that turned out to be nothing) — darkened the cloud over Hillary and sent out bad vibes to voters who’d not yet made up their minds. Comey later insisted – see if you can follow his reasoning – that he went public because he thought that Hillary would win the election anyway, and he feared that if she won while the reopened probe was being conducted in secret, that she’d be viewed as an illegitimate president.

But, again, it was not Comey’s job as FBI director to parse the polls and play politics. It wasn’t his job to calculate whether Hillary might be viewed as illegitimate; heck, the conservative infauxtainment complex would’ve smeared her as illegitimate anyway. That’s what Trump tried to do with Obama and the birth lie. It’s the standard right-wing playbook. Comey had no business blundering into the political arena, for the second time in four months.

Stomping publicly on Hillary only 11 days before the election was not only a “misuse of prosecutorial power” (according to Larry Thompson, a former deputy attorney general under George W. Bush), and “an abuse of power” (according to ex-Bush legal adviser Richard Painter), he also violated a longstanding Justice Department rule that bars the FBI from publicly discussing probes within 60 days of an election. 

Regardless of Hillary’s own flaws as a candidate, it’s fair to assert that Comey’s behavior dealt her the fatal blow that helped Trump eke out his ‘16 win by 80,000 votes in three key states. Late-deciding voters broke for Trump; a swing of just 0.7 percent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and 0.3 percent in Michigan would’ve put Hillary on top.

Not that Trump was ever grateful for Comey’s timely assists. Comey failed the 1000 percent loyalty test by insisting that his FBI should continue probing the Trump team’s ties to Russia, an investigation that was launched before the election. Trump fired Comey for that reason. Oh the irony. Comey got dumped by the same guy he inadvertently helped to elect. 

But here’s what really ticks me off:

In the fall of ‘16, as Americans prepared to vote, Comey publicly announced his Hillary email nothingburger — but he did not announce his probe of Trump-Russia. It was “transparency” in the first case, but confidentiality in the second case. 

And what a farce it was, shortly before Trump’s first inauguration, when Comey was summoned to a hearing on Capitol Hill. When he was queried about the status of the Trump-Russia investigation, he replied (I kid you not):

“I would never comment on investigations – whether we have one or not — in an open forum…We never confirm or deny a pending investigation.”

Which prompted independent Senator Angus King of Maine to craft this comeback: “The irony of your making that statement here, I cannot avoid.”

I trust that Comey will survive the new show trial concocted by Trump’s corrupt DOJ; punishing critics with ginned-up charges is a speciality of the Putin regime and should not be replicated here. But we should never forget that if he hadn’t blundered so egregiously, the tyrant who torments us today might never have gained power.

Dick Polman, a former national political columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY News who has covered politics since 1988, currently writes weekly at dickpolman.substack.com. His work is syndicated nationally by Cagle.com, and he teaches journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been its “Writer in Residence” since 2006.