Harry Litman, WaPo:
Okay, so former FBI director James B. Comey failed to dot his i’s and cross his t’s in creating and retaining memos detailing his private conversations with President Trump during the months between Trump’s inauguration and his sacking of Comey on May 9, 2017.
The report issued on Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that Comey broke no laws and did not release any classified information.
But Horowitz took Comey to task for retaining the memos rather than leaving them with the FBI when he departed. The inspector general concluded that the memos were “public records,” not personal documents, as Comey had argued.
Horowitz also larded his report with civics lessons on the rule of law and the “dangerous example” in Comey’s failure to strictly follow FBI guidelines concerning the handling of government records. There is a strong sensation of outrage in the Horowitz report, which the New York Times characterized as “blistering.”
The problem with the report is that it gives almost no weight to the context in which Comey acted, a failing Horowitz aggravates with his hall-monitor rectitude.
Because the context was extraordinary. When a president summons the FBI director to demand loyalty, and then urges the director during a second conversation to drop a criminal investigation against an ally, we are not in the normal territory of FBI rules and procedures
Jim Comey's legacy is a mixed bag. He's considered something of a Boy Scout, which isn't all bad, until it slops over into the kind of priggishness that the guy carries around with him like some Calvinist circuit preacher.
I think it comes down to the problem of trying to be impartial at the expense of factual reality.
He shits the bed with that round of ridiculous "disclosures" about how Hillary was a dishonest fuckup, and that more emails had been discovered on Anthony Wiener's laptop, and that meant the investigation had to be reopened, which turned out not to be relevant at all, but reinforced the bullshit narrative 45* and House Repubs were peddling - and for what? To make sure Hillary didn't win by the landslide everybody was expecting? To salvage something for the GOP?
But then it seems like he went into the new administration intent on "balancing things out" - or something. Fuck, I don't know.
And I think that little guessing game is the key to the problem. Everybody is so enamored with carving out their own little fiefdom, they don't have enough time or energy to do the job they were hired to do, and we're left to spend our time and energy wondering what the fuck they're really up to.
This kinda shit has to stop.
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