Tag Archives: James Comey

Donald Trump and the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight….

It’s hard to believe, but the evidence is overwhelming: no one in Donald Trump’s White House is politically competent.

We knew Trump’s menagerie didn’t know spit about governing or policy. We knew they considered ethics a joke. (Senior Administration officials refused the orientation/training routinely offered by the Office of Government Ethics.) But even acknowledging the cringingly inept performances of Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, no one could have anticipated the level of abject cluelessness revealed by the firing of James Comey.

Perhaps the Washington Post said it best:

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants and amateurs who are either unwilling or unable to tell him no. He lacks a David Gergen-like figure who is wise to the ways of Washington and has the stature to speak up when the president says he wants to fire an FBI director who is overseeing the counterintelligence investigation into whether his associates coordinated with Moscow. Without such a person, Trump just walked headlong into a political buzz saw.

 Senior officials at the White House were caught off guard by the intense and immediate blowback to the president’s stunning decision to fire James Comey. They reportedly expected Republicans to back him up and thought Democrats wouldn’t complain loudly because they have been critical of Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Indeed, that was the dubious excuse given publicly for his ouster.

“Caught off guard”? Really? How utterly devoid of political savvy–not to mention operating brain cells– would you have to be in order to be surprised by the public reaction to so clumsy and obvious an attempt to derail an investigation likely to uncover serious criminal conduct?

Did the geniuses advising our embarrassment of a President really think the American public, the media and the political establishment would believe that Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email was the reason he was terminated?

The word “Nixonian” has been tossed around, but really, Nixon and his co-conspirators were far less naive than the sorry collection of white supremacists, consiglieres, and know-nothings that form Donald Trump’s inner–and only– circle.

Media outlets report that grand jury subpoenas were recently issued to associates of  Michael Flynn, and that Comey had requested additional resources for the investigation of Trump and Company’s ties to Russia. These events, and the damning testimonies of Sally Yates and James Clapper earlier this week, evidently sent the White House into panic mode.

Whatever the calculation (assuming anyone in that den of ineptitude is actually capable of calculating), the President has placed Congressional Republicans firmly between a rock and a hard place. During Watergate, a not inconsiderable number of Republicans put nation above party. American politics is much more polarized now–and we have fewer statesmen and more ideologues in both parties–but I have to believe that the combination of public outrage, Trump’s blatant corruption, and fear of what might happen in the 2018 elections will persuade at least some in the GOP to do the right thing.

Frank Rich wrote an article titled “The Comey Firing May Be the Beginning of the End of the Trump Administration.” It should be read in its entirety, but here’s a taste:

A White House gang this insular, this politically naïve, and this transparent in its maladroit efforts at deflection and deception is a gang that can’t shoot straight. No one in the West Wing apparently even considered that it might look bad to time this debacle on the eve of a day when Trump’s only scheduled official event was an Oval Office meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. No doubt these same brilliant masterminds now think that Washington will go back to business as usual.

If the public outrage that greeted Comey’s firing is any indication, America will not go back to “business as usual” until a special prosecutor issues a comprehensive report.

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The Original Sin

We can all list behaviors we consider sinful.

My list begins with self-righteousness, defined as moral smugness combined with a troubling lack of self-reflection and humility. Enormous harm is done by folks who are absolutely convinced that they are in possession of Truth, and that their actions–no matter how inconsistent with social or constitutional norms–are therefore justified. When self-righteous people are in positions of authority–whether they are Governors or FBI officials–their unshakable belief in their own moral superiority can undermine both liberty and democratic processes.

As Learned Hand famously put it, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”

Which brings me to FBI Director James Comey.

As two former Deputy Attorneys General wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post, the FBI

operates under long-standing and well-established traditions limiting disclosure of ongoing investigations to the public and even to Congress, especially in a way that might be seen as influencing an election. These traditions protect the integrity of the department and the public’s confidence in its mission to take care that the laws are faithfully and impartially executed. They reflect an institutional balancing of interests, delaying disclosure and public knowledge to avoid misuse of prosecutorial power by creating unfair innuendo to which an accused party cannot properly respond.

Decades ago, the department decided that in the 60-day period before an election, the balance should be struck against even returning indictments involving individuals running for office, as well as against the disclosure of any investigative steps. The reasoning was that, however important it might be for Justice to do its job, and however important it might be for the public to know what Justice knows, because such allegations could not be adjudicated, such actions or disclosures risked undermining the political process. A memorandum reflecting this choice has been issued every four years by multiple attorneys general for a very long time, including in 2016.

It is precisely this “balancing of interests” that self-righteous people cannot understand.

The modern world, to the consternation of many people, rarely gives us a bipolar choice between good and evil, black and white.  We live–like it or not–in perpetual shades of gray, a world where “on the one hand” competes with “on the other hand,” and ethical decision-making more often than not requires us to balance competing goods. Unfortunately, ambiguity is intolerable to people who live in a Manichean world where they are on the side of righteousness.

There has been an eruption of anger over Comey’s decision to make public the discovery of emails found on devices used by then-Congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma  Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton. The criticism–much of it from Republicans within the FBI– has been harsh: not only was the disclosure inconsistent with Department of Justice traditions, not only did Comey ignore his boss, the Attorney General, who told him to abide by departmental regulations, but he admitted he didn’t know whether the emails were significant, or mostly copies of messages the Department had previously reviewed. He hadn’t seen them.

Partisans, noting that Comey is a Republican, have accused him of political motivations. Perhaps, but my reading is different. The way in which he announced the FBI’s original conclusion not to recommend charging Clinton (a result entirely unsurprising to most lawyers) provided a clue. During that press conference–itself a violation of normal procedures–he coupled the FBI’s finding that no laws had been broken with a highly offensive, unnecessary and self-serving lecture about “carelessness.”

Comey has defended his decision to inform Congress of the existence of additional emails  with reasoning that reeks of self-righteousness and an unseemly focus on his own reputation–consequences to the integrity of the FBI and the Presidential campaign be damned.

As the former Attorneys General concluded,

Justice allows neither for self-aggrandizing crusaders on high horses nor for passive bureaucrats wielding rubber stamps from the shadows. It demands both humility and responsibility.

Ironically, unless I miss my guess, Comey’s utter lack of such humility has now destroyed the reputation that meant more to him than the consequences of his decision for the nation. His incredible arrogance has also probably ended his career. But in the age-old tradition of the self-righteous, he will undoubtedly consider himself a martyr.

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