The New Neo

[NOTE: I’ll probably post Part 2 tomorrow.]

The interview Comey gave to Chris Wallace on Sunday was a study in evasion and deception. I could take it sentence by sentence and spend many hours analyzing each one, but I’m not going to do that. I’m probably giving it more time than it deserves to even write this post, but Comey engenders a kind of repugnance and yet fascination in me, and his interview just cries out for a fisking.

You can follow along. Here’s the transcript, and here’s the video.

First, a word about Chris Wallace. He straddles a fine line here between hard-hitting and letting Comey off the hook. He repeatedly points out the contradictions in what Comey has said versus what Horowitz has said about the FBI investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane, and sometimes Wallace even hammers home the discrepancies. And yet when Comey fails to answer his points or answers them in an evasive way, and Wallace could ask certain rather obvious follow-up questions that would nail him even further, Wallace sometimes doesn’t do so.

Perhaps he’s pressed for time. Perhaps he thinks Comey’s evasions speak for themselves. Or perhaps he’s reluctant to go too hard on Comey.

One general observation I have about Comey and the way he deals with his different stories at different times is to think tactically but remain almost completely in the moment. It’s as though he comes up with a new approach depending on the attack and the amount of information in the public domain, and sees no need for internal consistency on his part.

For example, when the Horowitz Report first came out, Comey said it vindicated him and the FBI, and that “those who smeared the FBI are due for an accounting…The FBI fulfilled its mission — protecting the American people and upholding the U.S. Constitution.” Then, just a few days later – and only because Horowitz explicitly testified to Congress that the report didn’t vindicate anyone connected with the FBI probe – Comey suddenly (and as far as I can tell, for the very first time) admits that mistakes were made. But only by his “sloppy” underlings, and that his only mistake was to trust them too much.

So one of my own questions to Comey (one Wallace doesn’t ask) would be: did you even bother to read the report before you wrote your “vindication” op-ed?

Now let’s take some quotes from the Wallace interview.

“James Comey: Well, maybe it turns upon how we understand the word [“vindicate”].

But “vindicate” is not some term of art, nor is it an arcane legal phrase. It’s a perfectly good English word that most people understand. It means “to show something to have been right or true, or to show someone to be free from guilt or blame.” Comey is not an idiot, but he must think his listeners are. Or perhaps he just can’t think of any other defense.

Comey again: “But [Horowitz] also found things that we were never accused of, which is real sloppiness, and that’s concerning.”

It’s almost risible, isn’t it? But Comey isn’t joking. No one accused the FBI of mere “sloppiness” I did a search of Horowitz’s testimony and the word does not seem to appear. I haven’t searched the report, but I very much doubt it’s in there either. “Sloppiness” is quite the euphemism for errors of the scope, frequency, and magnitude the report details. “Sloppiness” indicates carelessness, like failing to spell a word correctly, or leaving out a small and unimportant fact. Leaving out exculpatory evidence over and over? That’s so basic a violation that the word “sloppiness” becomes an absurdity. Saying Carter Page was not a source for US intelligence when the original document said he was a source? That could be described by a lot of words, but “sloppy” is not one of them.

When Wallace doesn’t buy Comey’s answer, and mentions the 17 violations, that’s when Comey admits “wrongdoing.” His “confession” goes like this:

“I was wrong. I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those. Because he’s right. There was real sloppiness…”

Notice that here Comey persists in labeling it “sloppiness.” And the buck certainly doesn’t stop at Comey’s desk. In fact, apparently no details of the investigation ever even reached his desk, according to Comey. He was some sort of remote figurehead, uninvolved in the running of an operation against the candidate for president of the Republican Party – as though this was a routine process that didn’t need his expertise or supervision. He signed those FISA warrants knowing nothing about what was in them, apparently.

Or so he says.

Yeah, right. Apparently Comey believes that “fool” is a much better thing to claim to be than “knave.” It’s really quite astounding. And although Wallace rightly says “But you make it sound like you’re a bystander, an eyewitness. You were the director of the FBI while a lot of this was going on, sir,” Comey just basically repeats his first answer, and Wallace then goes on to the next point.

What about a follow-up like: “Were you usually in the habit of signing off on request after request that you knew nothing about?” Or “Then why have you been claiming for this whole time, till now, that everything was completely on the up-and-up with the FISA requests? How could you claim that if you knew almost nothing about them? Why didn’t you admit long ago that you were totally disengaged from the process and that you signed off on requests about which you were completely ignorant?”

[To be continued…]