Is this the end of the FBI?
I certainly don’t think this is the end of the FBI.
One of the problems with the last ten or so (or more) years is that Americans are somewhat like the frog that’s boiled so slowly it doesn’t notice [see NOTE below], in terms of federal government heavy-handedness, power, and lack of integrity. Things that I believe would have shocked the adults of my youth, or even the adults of my mid-adulthood, invoke shrugs, yawns, and/or excuses today among way too many people.
It doesn’t seem—at last, according to this report—that agency insiders are happy with Comey’s performance so far. Aside from Comey’s off-putting air of self-righteous superiority, he has the distinction of being disliked by a fair number Hillary supporters as well as Trump supporters (probably the only way in which he is non-partisan). The Hillary supporters think he caused her to lose the election, and the Trump supporters’ reasons are quite obvious.
Here’s a sampler:
“Good lord, what a self-serving self-centered jackass,” the official said. “True to form he thinks he’s the smartest guy around.”
A current FBI official said it was bizarre that Comey seemed so pleased with the whole episode. “It’s how happy he looked on TV while cashing in on the biggest mistake in history. His mistake,” they said. “Jim Comey made that mistake. We all just wonder what could have been and what we could’ve done to change it.”
I’m assuming that last remark about “the biggest mistake in history” is from a Hillary supporter, although it’s hard to know for sure. My guess, though, is that Comey is smiling for several reasons. The first is that the spotlight is on him, where he wants it. The second is that his book will probably make a considerable amount of money. The third is that he is smug about being responsible—through his post-firing leak that started it all—for the ongoing Mueller investigation, which he dearly hopes will ultimately trap and destroy his nemesis, Donald Trump.
What’s not to smile about?
An additional source, who works frequently with the FBI, said they had refused to watch the extended cut of the interview altogether. “Didn’t watch it””I don’t care, he’s basically a scumbag. I don’t know how they’re letting him write a book in the middle of an investigation that he’s part of. I wonder if he had his book cleared by the intelligence community? He’s supposed to but I bet he didn’t.”
The former FBI director was fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017. Comey responded by leaking his memos about conversations with Trump to The New York Times, which kick-started the special counsel investigation led by Comey’s predecessor, Robert Mueller…
FBI sources who did not support Comey’s decision to announce the reopening of the Clinton email investigation still stood by him at the time and were outraged at the way in which Trump fired the director. He learned of his dismissal after reading it on a television screen inside the Los Angeles FBI building where he was speaking to agents.
Those same current and former FBI agents and officials””and others””did not respond well to Comey’s interview Sunday night.
Support for Comey has dwindled as those who worked closely with him and initially supported him began to see his book and his public interactions””including Twitter selfies in Iowa””as self-serving and gauche, four sources said.
Their anger has grown in recent months as agents have come to see Comey as the reason for the “current shitshow”¦ that is the Trump presidency,” one former official, who voted for Trump, explained.
Then again, what are all these FBI agents doing talking to the reporters at the Daily Beast? Luckily, it’s not about classified information, but still.
[NOTE: Modern scientific sources report that the alleged phenomenon is not real. In 1995, Professor Douglas Melton, of the Harvard University Biology department, said, “If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot””they don’t sit still for you.” Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, also rejected the suggestion, saying that “If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out.”
In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that “The legend is entirely incorrect!” He described how a critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.]
Americans…. dumber than frogs.
Trials and indictments are, today, almost monolithically against Republicans, carried out by Democrats. To get indicted and tried as a national Democrat today, you practically have to be found in bed with an under-aged girl- literally, and even then the trials are almost always done in jurisdictions where you can’t find a jury that would convict even with slam dunk evidence- at best you can get a hung jury and a retrial if you chose to pursue one, which almost never happens if the defendant is a Democrat
If, instead of an underage girl, the Dem was found in bed with an underage boy, he’d be lionized as a modern hero and elected to a lifetime seat in a California district of his choosing.
” Aside from Comey’s off-putting air of self-righteous superiority, he has the distinction of being disliked by a fair number Hillary supporters as well as Trump supporters (probably the only way in which he is non-partisan).”
Not non-partisan; he’s very biased; but it is a bi-partisanship I can get behind.
“I don’t know how they’re letting him write a book in the middle of an investigation that he’s part of. I wonder if he had his book cleared by the intelligence community? ”
If he waited until the investigation was over, no one would be interested in the book; his sales would be on a par with “What Happened” – they could be remaindered as a two-fer.
BTW, who is in charge of clearing these tell-alls at The Agency? Maybe Comey pardoned himself.
From the Daily Beast:
“Hoover is spinning in his grave,” said a former FBI official. “Making money from total failure.”
Spinning because he’s chagrined at overlooking the possibility of writing his own book, that his own perfidy didn’t rise to the imaginative heights of Comey et al., or that what little was left of the agency’s reputation after the disclosure of his dark doings is now completely shredded?
Or just that Comey failed in his intention to elect Hillary and got caught?
“Comey has been named by Hillary Clinton as a major reason for her loss in 2016. Clinton insiders told The Daily Beast that Comey should “beg for forgiveness,” not use his book to try and explain away his actions.”
Ah, begging for forgiveness would imply that he did, indeed, intend to get her elected by putting his thumb on the scales, and failed.
Hardly adds to the presumption that he is “highly trustworthy and very transparent” — although I might grant the transparent part, now that he is revealing (and being revealed) as a duplicitous lying egotist.
Despite the growing anger and disillusionment, The Daily Beast still repeats what the Right considers to be less-than-completely-honest talking points about the campaign:
“Days before the election, Comey publicly announced that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, but he made no mention of the simultaneous inquires being made into Russian links to members of Trump’s team.”
[because they were pursuing those “leads” unethically, if not illegally, and hoped not to be caught at it before Hillary won; I think Comey’s explanation is bluntly true: he really didn’t think it would hurt her chance.]
“This was seen by many inside the FBI as Comey inserting the agency into the campaign, which was especially unwise coming so close to the election, when the agency tries to abstain from anything that could have political consequences.
[the MSM in general keep leaving out the part where the FBI was already inserted into the campaign in the first place, because of Loretta Lynch and the email pseudo-investigation; the FBI should investigate criminal actions and hang the political consequences — as they seem to have remembered suddenly in November 2016.]
“Comey’s ouster by Trump came as a surprise to him–and everyone else–
…
FBI sources who did not support Comey’s decision to announce the reopening of the Clinton email investigation still stood by him at the time and were outraged at the way in which Trump fired the director. He learned of his dismissal after reading it on a television screen inside the Los Angeles FBI building where he was speaking to agents.”
[I remember the hand-wringing over the “meany Trump” firing Comey publicly instead of handing him a pink slip in private and giving him time to clear out his desk, and all the incriminating evidence he could get his hands on; given what he did afterward, leaking classified memos and all, who knows what he could have rigged if he had been given time to do so?
And they never mention the people fired by Obama, Clinton, etc. who read about it in the newspapers.]
The Trump curse is amazing.
We all know Trump doesn’t mind being an A-1 jerk, so it would seem easy to take the higher ground and make him look bad. Perhaps even get him impeached.
But instead his opponents, out of even worse hubris, keep ending up humiliated or in some cases fired.
I wouldn’t bet against Trump. At some level he seems to know what he is doing, while his enemies lack basic self-reflection.
Comey, Mueller and McCabe may have inadvertently served the country very well. Folks are getting a remedial lesson in how the FBI, the DOJ, and the Intelligence Agencies have descended into the slime of bureaucratic corruption and political activism.
I keep reading here and there that the rank and file FBI agents are upstanding law enforcement professionals. Color me highly skeptical. They are the ones who entrap people in process crimes; they are the ones who carry out raids that stretch the bounds of the constitution–if they don’t trample all over it. Somehow, I missed the news of any of these professionals resigning in protest, or blowing the whistle on abuses.
Don’t know about frogs in boiling water, but, we have ample evidence that when the populace doesn’t pay attention, the bureaucrats and the politicians will abuse them mightily.
Does Comey have Aspergers syndrome? Or whatever else. He does not seem to make any sense to clear thinking people. I come down in Donalds camp, Slippery Comey the nutjob!
RE: “Is this the end of the FBI?”
I agree: NO.
It should be, but it won’t. The FBI is dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent, but they are too entrenched to be removed.
They have now the Praetorian Guard of the Ruling Class.
It just shows that frogs are smarter and better wired for survival than Americans.
The FBI already did the same things to Nixon as they do to Trum. Are people surprised that Trum isn’t immune now that he is a Republican?
It’s always been like this, since even before some people were born in these generations.
Just because people weren’t told to pay attention to COINTELPRO by the mass media, doesn’t mean this is a “new thing” that should surprise them. It should be old news by now.
Btw, the Deep State is playing both the FBI and Trum. This isn’t Red vs Blue entertainment, it’s a higher level of strategy games than people are used to.
Oldflyer Says:
April 17th, 2018 at 5:20 pm
Comey, Mueller and McCabe may have inadvertently served the country very well. Folks are getting a remedial lesson in how the FBI, the DOJ, and the Intelligence Agencies have descended into the slime of bureaucratic corruption and political activism.
I keep reading here and there that the rank and file FBI agents are upstanding law enforcement professionals. Color me highly skeptical.
* * *
I was just thinking that the stories coming out remind me not so much of mud and slime, as they do the Deadly Manure Pits that OSHA warns farmers against.
VDH introduces some names into the saga that I had missed somehow. (the web team need to get a spell-checker, though)
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/colluders-washington-clinton-obama-loaylists/
“Another Washington couple, Shailagh Murray and Neil King Jr., were involved, respectively, in the Obama administration and the Fusion GPS opposition-research firm. Murray was an Obama-administration policy adviser who had once been deputy chief of staff and communications director for Vice President Joe Biden. She is married to Neil King Jr., who, like the wife of Bruce Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS. Why were there so many Obama appointees with some sort of ties to Fusion GPS?
…
“Another member of Mueller’s special counsel team,
Jeannie Rhee, was also a WilmerHale alumna. She was another significant donor to the Clinton-campaign effort. And she was another Mueller attorney who had represented someone deeply involved in a recent Clinton scandal. She had recently represented not only the Clinton Foundation but also Obama deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes during the investigation of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack and Clinton’s role in creating the conditions for that attack and then covering it up after the fact. Was Rhee representing the Clinton Foundation while some of her present associates at the DOJ and FBI were once supposedly investigating it? What were the best criteria to get on the Mueller team? To have worked in his law firm, to have donated to the Clinton campaign, or to have represented a Clinton concern under investigation?”
I must second his rallying cry,
“How much collusion was necessary to coordinate destroying 30,000 emails, smashing hard drives, and finding the proper Washington counsel to ensure that the now-quite-incestuous FBI never charged the perpetrators with a federal crime?”
David French reminds us of the most salient point in Comey’s campaign conduct (as McCarthy did repeatedly at the time):
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/james-comey-confirms-once-again-that-he-failed-america-in-2016/
“But before we get to Comey, let’s pause for a moment and ponder the immense challenge that the Bureau faced. The two major political parties nominated candidates who had long histories of ethically, morally, and legally problematic behavior. Neither possessed a character fit for the presidency. But the Democrats went so far as to nominate a candidate who was known to be under active, credible FBI investigation.
…
Exactly. Investigate the facts, apply the law, and let the chips fall where they may. But did that happen? Let’s read a different portion of the transcript. Here Comey justifies his decision not to recommend prosecution for Hillary Clinton
…
What’s missing here? The words of the relevant statute – a statute that he elsewhere dismisses as “passed 100 years ago.” It doesn’t matter if it was passed at the founding of our republic, it is still governing authority, and that governing authority states that the relevant legal standard imposes criminal penalties when a person, “through gross negligence,” removes “information relating to the national defense” from its “proper place of custody.” It does not add on an additional requirement of “obstruction of justice” or “disloyalty.”
In other words, when placed in the middle of an extraordinary, high-stakes investigation, James Comey applied the wrong legal standard, and he’s still applying the wrong legal standard today.
While applying the actual law to the relevant facts may be politically difficult, that happened to be Comey’s job.
…
We’re living in the world that exists when multiple institutions place political ambition over principle, when negative polarization trumps truth and justice. It’s a world where the guardrails are increasingly fragile, where institutions and individuals who should be repenting of their considerable sins are instead holding themselves up as exemplars of duty and morality.
…
Donald Trump fired Comey for the wrong reasons. Trump’s team is rightly subject to multiple federal investigations, and these investigations should be allowed to run their course without interference from the president. But in watching Comey speak, I can say this with high confidence: If Trump’s conduct is to be scrutinized, James Comey is not the man for the job.“
It’s also the end of any pretense of judicial neutrality.
Two companion pieces.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/michael-cohen-raid-least-of-his-problems/
“It was wrong, however, to reveal Hannity’s name. There were easy ways to give the government the information needed to help identify potentially privileged materials absent publicly disclosing Cohen’s client roster. Judge Wood could have directed that Hannity’s name be given to prosecutors but permitted Hannity an opportunity to argue that his name be kept out of the public record during the grand-jury investigation.
That being the case, it is difficult to see what happened in court as anything other than a gratuitous shot at Hannity, which Trump partisans will naturally take as a sign that the investigation is political. The unnecessary disclosure put Hannity in the position of having to explain himself publicly, to assure people that he is not involved in embarrassing or criminal episodes for which he needed to retain a “fixer.” (In fact, he explains that he and Cohen may have had informal legal discussions but never a formal A-C relationship.)
I am not weighing in here on journalistic ethics. I don’t know whether Hannity’s relationship with Cohen, whatever its nature, obliged him to disclose the relationship to his audience before launching his highly partisan coverage of the raid on Cohen’s premises.* It seems to me that Sean makes no bones about being a Trump advocate rather than an objective journalist, so I don’t know what his duties are – though I doubt anyone would be surprised to learn he has close relationships with people in Trump’s orbit.
Regardless of whether he should have outed himself, it was inappropriate for the court to order him outed as a Cohen client. I think the SDNY and Judge Wood will come to regret that things were done this way (certainly, the SDNY wants to continue arguing for confidentiality when it suits the government’s investigative interests). And I’m confident that the media would be reporting with umbrage rather than glee if a liberal commentator were needlessly outed as the client of a lawyer under criminal investigation.”
*Dershowitz told Hannity he should ethically have done a “full disclosure” thing on his show, but that’s a long way from a judge ordering his public unmasking.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/04/16/judge-michael-cohen-client-outing-presided-soros-wedding-early-clinton-ag-pick/
The headline says it all, but Dyer gives convincing evidence that the judge weren’t noways impartial in this case.
On the Comey interview (citing the Daily Beast story), Mirengoff opines literarily:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/james-comey-a-legend-in-his-own-mind-but-not-at-the-fbi.php
“I don’t buy this act. Comey has shown himself to be a master manipulator and has displayed a self-righteousness inconsistent with genuine introspection.
But assume for the moment that Comey genuinely is the pious, anguished fellow he presents himself as. Why would we want that person lead the nation’s top law enforcement agency?
The FBI is not the place for Hamlet or for a Hamlet impersonator. But neither is it the place for Iago, a role I think Comey more closely fits.“
The FBI, along with the CIA, recruits a significant amount of Latter Day Saints due to background check tendencies.
It’s something people usually don’t know about. The Latter Day Saints are less than 2% of the US population by census numbers, but greatly exceed representation in certain fields similar to how Jews are over represented based on their less than 2% of the population census total.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-mormons-make-great-fbi-recruits
Aesop, ever remember back when I told you that Latter Day Saints and Islamic Jihad would be key components of the war in the US some time ago?
As for a free gut reflex analysis of what this means for the average grunt: what it means is that we have a culture problem where it’s the Leftist alliance + Deep State + Islamic Jihad against a Religious Hierarchy in the USA that is something best known for MItt Romney’s folder of women (probably Relief society related) and his dog on his car superweapon of his.
This is why certain parts of the FBI don’t like “Comey”.
The problem with current day intel analysts in the USA (talking heads in the media and blogs) is not that their resources are superior than mine. I have the same open sources as anyone else, no special clearance or whisper. The same Holy Ghost that uses me as a messenger is readily available to anyone, even enemies that decide to convert.
No, their problem is that they don’t connect the dots. You have to learn how to read between the lines and go looking for stuff everybody else has ignored. That’s how you find “stories”.
P.S. The “Mormonism” culture is larger than 2%, but the Latter Day Saints mainline branch is about 99% of Mormonism. Strangely, the non mainline branches get disproportionate coverage and influence as well for whatever reason. Think of it as Luther/Calvin vs the P of Rome back in the day. The primary divergence points are polygamy, women as priests, and a little bit of feminist/newage/post modern philosophy. The mainline majority is conservative.
https://www.oddee.com/item_98962.aspx
Btw, the rich and elites are spending 1-5 million to rent a missile silot as their underground zombie apoc bunker resort location.
You best bet that they know something we don’t…
The allegory of the frog is apt to describe the situation, that it wouldn’t happen with real frogs is irrelevant and pedantic to say so. 🙂
What Comey and the FBI/DOJ/State/Intelligence anti-Trump crew have accomplished is to give us all an inside look at just how incompetent and corrupt those institutions that we formerly had some level of respect for and trust in truly are.
In similar fashion, the various district court rulings thwarting various Trump polices–and the supposed legal justifications for them–have exposed just how corrupt and biased our judiciary is as well.
Add these institutions to the list of parts of our government that we don’t trust, right along side of Congress, which is obviously very corrupt.
A sad and very precarious situation for our democratic Republic, but a situation that it was absolutely essential that citizens recognize.
Unfortunately this leaves us with just one major institution in this country that–according to polls–people trust, and that is our Military.
Not a good position for a democratic Republic to be in.
Hussein put a lot of black power racists into the US military officer ranks.
You might want to purge your military if you think you can rely on it.
Look up how many people got fired and purged during Hussein’s regime. The USA has so many sleeper agents in it now, that even Iran can take over your navy without a shot being fired.