IG Horowitz’s report on Comey: he’s bad, but the DOJ doesn’t care
We had pretty much been told this is what we would get. And yes, this is what we got:
A scathing inspector general report released Thursday said that fired FBI Director James Comey violated bureau policies by drafting, leaking and retaining memos documenting private discussions with President Trump.
The Justice Department’s official watchdog concluded that the memos Comey kept were, in fact, “official FBI records,” and said Comey set a “dangerous example” with his actions…
While the findings of the probe were forwarded to the DOJ, the department has declined prosecution, as Fox News reported earlier this month. But for Comey, who has cultivated the image of a by-the-book and irreproachable leader since his termination in 2017, the review shined a harsh light on his decisionmaking in the final, beleaguered weeks of his tenure at the head of the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
The 83-page document outlined a series of violations, including that he broke FBI policies and the bureau’s employment agreement…
The report repeatedly and pointedly alleged that Comey wrongly violated policies for personal reasons — in this case, in order to spur a special counsel probe.
I wouldn’t call those “personal reasons” at all. I’d call them political reasons—to use the so-called Deep State to spur a soft coup against the president. Doesn’t sound all that personal to me, although personal reasons—revenge—also factored in.
And is the DOJ setting a “dangerous example” by not prosecuting?
Well, it depends what’s in store for Comey next. Rumor has it that there are much better (that is, worse, and more easily provable in the legal sense) things on which he will be prosecuted.
Time will tell, right?
One thing of which I’m pretty sure is that the left will use this IG report to say “no biggee, move along” while the right sees it (correctly, I believe) as a huge indictment of Comey.
But a metaphorical indictment, not a literal one.
Wake me up when we get a legal indictment …
No indictment, no biggie.
What about that (no PR) guy in Utah? Or the other recent prosecutor appointed by Barr?
The Deep State is winning – and it’s far more dangerous than it looks.
If Trump is “waiting” until closer to the elections to have indictments, that might be a later win; but I’d argue he’d be better off with ANY indictment, sooner. McCabe, Comey, Susan Rice (or whoever did the illegal unmasking) – best would be to indict Hillary on the evidence Comey said wasn’t good enough.
Nobody will be indicted from all this.
Just a bunch of strongly worded reports followed by stints on CNN and large book deals.
Hope I’m wrong but haven’t seen anything yet to convince me otherwise.
The double standard of justice will destroy this nation. We will become a banana republic.
They sow the seeds of their own destruction. As more of the Normals see the two tiered Legal System in action…
Its going to get bad. I can even see Barr thinking, of course rationalizing, that this type of action will ultimately save the System. Of course, he’s wrong. But that’s rationalization for you.
I would love to see DOJ play hard ball and bring indictments against Comey and the rest of the cabal, even if they don’t have a prayer of convicting in the DC district. As Mueller so clearly demonstrated, you can punish someone without a conviction; financially through the cost of “lawyering up”, and psychologically with incessant intimidation. If you are really tough (sadistically so?) you can turn the screws to the point of forcing a guilty plea to a lesser charge, without ever setting foot in court.
Great minds think alike. I’m not waiting up nights for any of these creatures to be deservedly punished. They’ll end their careers with pensions intact albeit an asterisk or two on their reputations and that’s about it.
However, the stern words will have some utility during the 2020 campaign when Democrats are going on about corruption in the Trump administration.
Can’t add anything to the above comments. Sadly, all so very true. And the left wonders why WE are so angry. Vote Trump.
You want to destroy the legitimacy of our government in the eyes of a majority of the people?
Want to make people wary of cooperating with the government, to no longer accept anything that someone from government says as being the truth, refuse to believe that the government is really acting in their best interests, or is actually acting selflessly and patriotically in the best interests of the country?
You want the deepest cynicism to govern, and not the Law; everyone out for themselves, and the devil take the hindmost?
This is the way to achieve that kind of anarchic, dog eat dog situation.
Why accept a government, many of whose officers obviously think that you are a clueless boob, a government whose officers–many of them–have such contempt for you that–enabled in their corruption, and shielded from prosecution by other members of the government–they openly flaunt and celebrate their corruption, and then lie to your face, expecting that you will never catch on, a government whose organs of supposed “justice” very publicly enforce the law against some but not others, a government that takes more and more of your money and, then, wastes far too much of it, and uses the rest of it to promote polices that you are opposed to?
Government officials who are, in effect, brazenly daring you to do something about it, when they know that they control the levers of power, and that your are in essence, powerless to stop those who you have entrusted with the power to dispense supposedly fair and equal justice?
Hillary got this treatment–a pass–from Comey, now Comey has gotten the same treatment–a pass– from the DOJ.
To quote gleeful unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayres after the fix was in, in his supposed “prosecution” for terrorist activities in Chicago, “guilty as sin, free as a bird.”
Such a situation, such a “picture of Dorian Grey government,” to quote Lincoln, “can not long endure.”
This is the human thing where everyone demands equality [just like that Capuchin monkey demanding a grapenotacucumberdamnit] and pitches a fit when it isn’t so.
Or again, here’s where Achilles angrily stomps off to his tent, vowing “You’ll be sorry, you will.”
Nothing else is acceptable save equal justice. Or, it’s into the roaring woodchipper feet-first with them.
Trust AG Barr knows this well enough and bide a bit more time, then.
Ha, ha. Sdferr, I wish I understood the point of your first two paragraphs. We did get on the same page in the third; and I do agree that nothing other than equal justice is acceptable.
(I guess I could say that if our justice system is going to be corrupt, let us insure that it is equally corrupt when we have the power. Sad, I know.)
Finally, I desperately want to trust AG Barr. I hope he is playing a long game; but, I am impatient at this point. The game was already in overtime when he entered it.
The points of the first two paragraphs Oldflyer are 1) our demand for equal justice is natural, i.e. built into us in a way which we cannot escape, and 2) we have known of this human nature stuff for a very long time (Homer writing around 800-700ish BC).
And too, don’t be like Achilles: be like Odysseus. Calculate and sneak up on the bastards, then get them all, every one of them.
The double standard of justice will destroy this nation. We will become a banana republic.
I hope this is a misunderstanding. The FISA cases are far more serious. It may have been a mistake to dismiss these weaker cases first, if that is what it was. The loyal “Normals” should not be discouraged lest we take matters into our own hands and start seeking lampposts for the guilty.
sdferr–the reference to the Capuchin monkey is I believe, a reference to a hilarious Youtube video clip of an experiment demonstrating fundamental elements of animal behavior, where two test subjects–monkeys, were in cages, and each was first given a grape and, then, one of them was given another grape, and the second monkey was given a piece of cucumber instead, and this second monkey instantly and violently rejected the piece of cucumber, and threw it back at the researcher.
Monkey number two wanted “equal justice,” to be given the same treat as monkey number one.
Exactly correct Snow on Pine, I posted a link to that in this earlier neo thread (and again, for anyone wishing to see it): https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/08/24/a-sample-of-utopian-leftist-thought-today-part-ii-richard-d-wolff-and-the-ice-cream-cones/#comment-2452963
From the WSJ editorial:
So James Comey, who is then Joe Citizen, lies to FBI agents, and that’s somehow OK??
We know that Comey “released the classified information contained in his memos” to his buddy, with the explicit instruction that it be forwarded to the media. So a crime becomes not-a-crime if the classified info is laundered through a third party??
It all sounds like a jumble of nonsense to me. How is a president supposed to have a confidential closed door meeting going forward from here? Err, I mean, how is a Republican president supposed to do this? Because a Dem president would have had the right-wing analog of Comey in jail for a decade.
Sean Davis writing at The Federalist: “After President Donald Trump fired him on May 9, 2017, Comey proceeded to leak multiple FBI records as part of a plan to get revenge on Trump for firing him.”
Link: https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/29/inspector-general-eviscerates-fired-former-fbi-director-james-comey-in-formal-report/
Davis, I believe, is wrong about this “revenge” crap.
This wasn’t about revenge. This was about getting Pres. Trump (now empowered to reveal all the criminality of the Obama administration and Comey’s own conduct in particular) out of office before all hell could break loose.
But woe unto them, they’re always two steps behind. They’re bloody well screwed, and they knew it from the jump. Hence the desperation we’ve witnessed since the election.
In my second blockquote above, I thought that the characterization of the IG finding was from the IG’s report, but it was from Comey’s tweet.
I’ve heard the opinion that Comey was not prosecuted because the DOJ did not think it had a strong enough case against him (remember, any case would probably have to be tried before a notoriously liberal D.C. jury), and this was because of the 7 memos he created, and took home, he kept 4 that had some classification designations on them at home in his office safe, and the 3 other memos that he leaked had no such classification markings on them, and were only retroactively deemed “classified.”
But, here’s some information that I’ve never heard mentioned before, which puts a whole new light on the status of the documents in question, and the DOJs decision not to prosecute Comey.
According to Professor Victor David Hanson on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight, four people at the FBI were assigned the task of deciding–after the release of some of them to the press—what the correct classification level of these documents were–which of these 7 documents were classified, and which were not, and the documents leaked to the press were only deemed to be”classified” after the fact, making for a weak case against Comey, who could claim that, at the time he leaked them, he did not knowingly leak information he knew to be classified.
And just who were these four people?
Says Hanson, they were Bill Priestap (who reportedly met several times in London with Christopher Steel), James Baker (who was reportedly peddling the Steel Dossier to newspaper reporters), Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page.
So they slyly made sure, by their decisions as to the status of these leaked documents, to make it very hard for the DOJ to successfully prosecute Comey.
Barr knows that any indictments for the coup against Trump must be truly strong. The MSM will treat any of the schemers who might be indicted as political martyrs. The Democrats in Congress will make huge waves and scream that Trump’s AG is a like a head of the Gestapo. And the trials, being in DC, will be subject to a hostile jury pool. So, he doesn’t want to proceed on cases where the likelihood of conviction is in doubt.. At least that’s my hypothesis.
Comey has been publicly outed as a schemer and corrupt cop even though he acts like nothing has happened. That kind of sets the table for charges if the FISA warrants were truly frauds on the FISA Court. At least that’s what I’m hoping will be the case. Yeah, I know, in that stall full of manure, I’m sure there is a pony. Don’t worry, be happy.
Dems and the media will happily support some future FBI czar who does the same if they ever get a bad Prez elected. They’re just THAT moral. /snark
This point made in the Fox story always formed a large part of Comey’s defense of his indefensible actions :
But look at this new story and reconsider that statement:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/29/ig-report-james-comey-passed-private-conversation-with-trump-to-fbi-team-investigating-russia-collusion/
And then there’s this:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/29/report-comey-did-not-use-secure-room-to-pen-sensitive-memos-considered-them-personal/
Well, “me and the rest of the anti-Trump cabal at the FBI” that is.
Maybe he decided to exonerate Hillary of law-breaking because he was doing so many similar things himself.
Sundance has some, um, scathing commentary on the IG’s scathing report.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/29/first-review-of-ig-report-on-james-comey-the-substance-within-the-report-shows-a-two-tiered-justice-system/
The first one has some detail about the same points made in the Breitbart post I linked above, about how Comey lied specifically regarding his “personal” memos — which were planned for and circulated among the Crossfire Hurrican cabal, with this additional information:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/29/hubris-as-a-strategy/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/29/inspector-general-report-on-james-comey-conduct-and-memos
The IG report is embedded via Scribed, but without comment yet.
However, from comments to that post:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/29/inspector-general-report-on-james-comey-conduct-and-memos/comment-page-4/#comment-7318396
100,000 words are not necessary to simply say there is no rule of law. Therefore, I as a sorvereign individual, is an outlaw and beholden to no laws, regulations of the distric of criminals. Free at last, free at last.
Until you realize this truth, the longer you refuse to defend yourself. And keep believing it will not come down to this, they, the left have no qualms , about wanting you to enhàbit concentration/death camps. Cut to the chase, they want you to die. It is that simple. Pretending otherwise i a mntal illness.
Send a polite – but pointed – message to AG Barr here
https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justicem
I certainty hope he understands how late the hour is, and what hangs in the balance. The time is long overdue for a reckoning. The Republic is hanging by a thread.
Comey is strutting around and running his mouth, as if he knows that he will never be prosecuted, and perhaps whatever friends he still has in the FBI are telling him that—whatever show, however much gritting of teeth, shouting, stamping, apparent anger, whirling around, and head shaking, whatever Kabuki routine might be put on—in the end, that is what is going to happen, like Hillary, Comey will never be prosecuted.
This got me thinking, and a horrible thought at that.
Could it be that we have all been way too naive and blind to boot, and that all of this “resistance” by apparently every high level official in the alphabet agencies—from both those officials already in place, or starting immediately after their appointment—is a sign that the the coup we feared was taking place today actually took place some time ago and, moreover, that it was successful?
That despite the maintenance of the outward forms of our Republican government—now an ossified and dead shell—it is actually the members of the Deep State, working underneath that concealing, protective shell, who are de facto calling the shots and running the country, as they have been doing for quite some time now?
The outward forms—Congress, the President, the Departments and Agencies?
They are either partially or fully part of the Deep State, or they are actually de facto powerless, irrelevant to it, and only kept around to keep all of us subjects of the Deep State unaware of the true state of things, and in line.
@ parker – typical of Sovereign Citizen believers to change the subject to that and insert it into every discussion.
As Snow on Pine notes, what Comey has received is very similar to what he himself gave to Hillary: a harshly worded condemnation that could end up going nowhere, to be summarized a year later by the words “But there was no indictment.”
I don’t care about ‘justice’.
All I care about is whether or not this decision helps President Trump’s re-election campaign.
On balance, I think it helps him.
So … good decision by AG Barr.
Un F’n believable.
A conspirator in the attempted coup to overthrow a fairly elected President, gets away with only a F’n report that says he violated established procedures.
No indictment, no arrest, no jail time pending posting bond; not a F’n thing.
So the lesson here is that members of the “correct” ruling class – appointed or otherwise – can really do whatever the F they want and not worry about getting in trouble.
Comey will once again make the rounds of the demokrat party’s propaganda “organs” – the mainstream media – to announce how the AGs report exonerated him.
Just grand, just terrific.
We have witnessed what an attempted coup d’etat – USA style looks like. Unlike those in Latin America where either the failed perps wind up dead or the deposed leader winds up dead, here in the USA, the perps walk and the intended INNOCENT victim does not even receive a “sorry bout that.”
When the citizenry no longer regards the government as legitimate, that’s when the wheels fall off the wagon of govt.
Thank god there are millions of guns in the hands of the citizenry.
JohnTyler:
The fat lady has not yet sung on James Comey. This is not in the nature of the final report. It only concerns his taking and leaking of the memos, and the DOJ declined to prosecute on that issue alone. It doesn’t mean that he will not be prosecuted for something connected with Russiagate.
That said, I basically agree with you that at the moment you have described the takeaway feeling on the right (and perhaps in the middle) about the rule of law and about justice. If anyone deserves jail time, it’s Comey. He tried to orchestrate a coup and almost succeeded. If he is indicted for related things, however, I think there is still reason to believe that at least justice is being served here. The question is: will he be? I tend to doubt it.
I believe this entire incident has damaged respect for many institutions: the law and the FBI, for starters. But if they are damaged institutions (which they appear to be at the moment), we should lose respect for them because they don’t deserve respect. But the loss of such respect—and the loss of integrity by these institutions that has caused that loss of respect—is a profound loss to the nation and leads us down a dark path towards chaos and scrambling for power with no objective rules. That is the deeper meaning and the deeper threat behind all these events.
The DoJ doesn’t take to trial cases that they are not highly confident they will win. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. That’s why so many federal cases are settled with a plea: the defendant and his lawyer both know that there would not be a trial unless the government had overwhelming evidence to convict. Now, if they could figure out a way to get the venue changed to Iowa, that would be a different story.
ROPWA — that link does not seem to work.
Neo–Mixing metaphors here but, a whole series of lawless, reckless actions–lets pick things up with the Obama Administration, shall we–have had the effect of destroying a lot of the public’s confidence in our major Law Enforcement/Justice organizations, their leaders, and in the Law itself–since the Law is nothing but dead letters on a page–if it is not adhered to and, most especially, not enforced.
To follow your analogy and the clip from “A Man For All Seasons,” the structure of the government, some of the key fences making up the metaphorical “enclosure”–the space within the boundaries that our Founders constructed with great thought and care–the structures, procedures, the laws, fences, and boundaries designed to allow us, as citizens, to live relatively safe, orderly, and prosperous lives within that enclosure, and to protect us from the chaos, anarchy, and violence that await outside those boundaries, which are the governing afflictions of most countries throughout history–have been deliberately torn down.
Thus, has the potential for the entrance of increasing violence, chaos, and anarchy been deliberately increased.
As always the question is the abiding, age old question, “cui bono”?
Who gets the most benefit out of this situation?
I would argue that it is our enemies, and the Leftist troops that make up Gramsci’s Long March.
Right now the Democrats/the Left and their allies in the MSM, Academia, the Entertainment Industry, the Commentariat and elsewhere, are running an influence operation/ disinformation campaign, one which is trying to convince as many people as they can that the country is in bad economic, political, and moral/ethical shape, and offering “Socialism” as the remedy for the ills that they themselves have had such a major role in creating or inflaming.
With many of our major institutions and leaders discredited–especially those resposible for law and order–I am afraid that much more violence, much more chaos, much more anarchy is where we are headed for.
Can we patch up the fences, and re-establish that safe enclosure, and a secure life within it?
I see our country as speeding faster and faster on a down hill course, impelled by all sorts of unhealthy events, trends, attitudes, and behaviors–and I am not really sure that we can stop the slide, and return to where and what we once were.
“A Republic, if you can keep it,” indeed.
Snow on Pine:
I swear I had not read your comment at 1:36 PM when I posted my most recent post, which went live at 1:44 PM today (as you can see if you hover your cursor over the date underneath the post’s title). However, take a look.
The comparison of the United States to ancient Rome is often made and is often denied, one reason being that, while the Romans did have a political system and the Roman law—some of whose structures and ideas underlay aspects of our political and legal system today—it is far too little appreciated just how different the Pagan mind-sets and value systems of the ancient Romans of the Republic and the Empire were from the mind-set and set of values than we here in America have today.
There was a reason that Rome conquered and ruled the world for a thousand years, (and that their successor state, Byzantium–the Eastern Roman Empire–survived for another thousand years, until after many hundreds of years of attacks, the Muslim Turks finally conquered it) and a great part of that reason was that those Romans were a far more bloody-minded, ruthless, hard, brutal, amoral, and uncompromising people than we are; unencumbered by any of the softening morality and subsequent values and behavior that Judeo-Christian belief has instilled in us—it simply wasn’t their way.
Nonetheless, I am starting to believe that we here in the U.S. are going to be entering a period in our political life somewhat comparable to that of Rome’s in terms of the violence and viciousness of the scramble for power and control, if our current Republic—either gradually, as has been the case so far, or quickly and catastrophically—disintegrates, and fails
We have, after all, no guarantees as to the longevity of the United States, or to just how long our Republican form of government will be able to function as it was designed to do, be effective, and survive.
Comey worked for the US govt for years, and his claims that the memos were “personal” is complete BS. He knows USG regulations that everything a USG employee creates/works on/writes down belongs to the USG. Anything that has to do with your job belongs to the USG. And the nonsense about “retroactive” classification of some of his memos is also BS. Information does not become classified when someone marks it classified, it is classified based on the inherent nature of the information. ANYONE with a security clearance knows that. Information about a private meeting with POTUS would clearly be classified, whether marked or not. So this justification for why not to prosecute Comey is nonsense.
Richard Saunders on August 30, 2019 at 1:08 pm said:
… Now, if they could figure out a way to get the venue changed to Iowa, that would be a different story.
* * *
Good idea, but I am not even sure I would trust Iowan judges & juries at this point.
“Thank god there are millions of guns in the hands of the citizenry.”
It’s not that we don’t have guns. The question is, who are you going to shoot?
That was the problem in Viet Nam. No front lines. You can’t draw a line and tell everyone to step over to their own side. No, this revolution will not involve guns. It will in all likelihood involve the military somehow taking over the government in D.C. Do I think it will happen? Well, just how polarized can it get? I certainly think it could happen. One thing I’ve wondered about is it possible that even now “just in case” planning is taking place somewhere by someone at this moment?
The DOJ’s prosecutors have no difficulty in using every tool that the law provides, in coming down hard on those it wants to prosecute, twisting the law and procedures to get the result they want, throwing the book at them, entrapping them, threatening their relatives–see the case of General Flynn, in finding a compliant judge and prosecuting them for supposed “crimes” that they overlook in all others, in seeing to it that, for instance, the elderly and non-violent Paul Manafort–(and his deaf wife) are subjected to a pre-dawn raid by swarms of heavily armed agents, and although Manafort is accused of a mere “process” crime, and not likely a flight risk—that Manafort be kept in prison before trial—moreover in solitary confinement for weeks on end—and arguing that for a similar minor or process crime the elderly Roger Stone be slapped with enough serious charges that, if convicted, he could spend the remainder of his life in jail.
And, yet, no one in authority speaks up, and objects to the injustice of it all.
In the case of the major players in this failed soft coup attempt—Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Strzok, McCabe, Page, and others—it’s pretty obvious what the potential crimes are here, and what the charges should be.
Obvious, as well, from the above examples that the “government” has no difficulty in prosecuting someone it wants to prosecute, and it’s also obvious what the consequences should be–indictments and prosecutions.
The longer the delay in producing the supposedly “classified documents,” needed for the prosecution, the more exculpatory excuses made for these major players, the longer the delay in such indictments and prosecutions, the more evidence for my horrific theory that a coup by the Deep State has already happened, and that the Deep State won.
Finally, if there are no actual indictments and trials of these coup plotters then, that seems like it will be pretty conclusive confirmation that the coup already happened and that, despite all outward appearances, it is the Deep State—ignoring whatever laws and standards its members want, and then applying the law as a hammer to destroy their enemies—which is actually in charge here in the U.S.
Ross Tullis on August 30, 2019 at 8:02 pm said:
“Thank god there are millions of guns in the hands of the citizenry.”
* * *
Not if NASCAR has their way.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/51230/nascar-begins-inject-left-wing-politics-racing-ryan-saavedra