Comey-Out Party

Former FBI director James Comey has brought America together across partisan lines in a way that no one has been able to for fifty years.  Democrats and Republicans universally hate him.

Comey is promoting his memoir, which comes out today, in a series of interviews and public appearances, and the comments he's made so far arr bound to enrage everyone and satisfy no one.  He told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that Donald Trump might have put himself in a compromising position that could be exploited by the Russians, and said that he had tried to consult with Trump to see if there were anything that the Russians might have to incriminate him.  Comey, in all fairness, doesn't say that the Russians have any incriminating evidence of malfeasance, personal or public, against Trump - "It's possible," he says - but he does pass judgment on Trump's overall.

"A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they're pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person's not fit to be President of the United States, on moral grounds," Comey said.

As for the FBI's October 2016 re-opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton that likely sank her presidential ambitions?  Comey said that he expected her to win the presidential election, and an investigation into unseen e-mails on the laptop in the possession of her assistant Huma Abedin's estranged husband Anthony Weiner was, he felt, necessary to get out in the open as soon as possible. He thought Hillary was going to win the Presidency, and he wanted to clear her of any charges before rather than after the election so she wouldn't enter office as a compromised President, though it's hard to imagine how anyone named Clinton could enter the White House without being compromised under any circumstances. "I would so much rather Anthony Weiner had never had a laptop," Comey said.

Trump, of course, called Comey a slimeball in public.  (A far cry from Franklin Roosevelt's public line "I welcome their hatred" about his adversaries, and even a far cry from what he said about Thomas E. Dewey in private after Dewey lost the 1944 presidential election to him: "I still say he is a son of a bitch.")  But Democrats have long been ticked off at Comey also, as evidenced from a clip of Democrats questioning Comey's motives in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's e-mails from 2015 and 2016 now playing in a video released by the Republican - the Republican - National Committee.  And Comey's explanation of the Weiner laptop investigation doesn't fly with Democrats.  U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who would have given up his powerful Senate seat for the worthless presiding officer's seat overlooking the Senate floor as Vice President had the Democrats won the 2016 election, said that the FBI had also been investigating Trump but did not divulge the nature of the ongoing investigation before the election and should have done the same for Hillary.  Had Comey divulged the re-opening of the case after the election, and had Hillary won, it still would have cleared her before the inauguration and no harm would have been done.

Comey writes about his entire career in public service, not just his last year as FBI director, and he credits himself for helping to reform an FBI now under political suspicion.  Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation certainly has more credibility than it did back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover or even the tenure of director Louis Freeh, whose tenure was noted for letting the real Atlanta Olympic bomber go while going after the wrong man and could only catch the Unabomber with the help of his brother (sorry, I couldn't resist the dig).  But Comey's involvement with the toxic politics of today has, if not slimed him, made him a bit unclean, as no politically involved American - Democratic, Republican, independent - wants to touch him with a ten-foot-pole.  (Which is funny, considering Comey's massive frame.) Comey will make a lot of money from this book but likely won't return to public life any time soon after.