FBI director James Comey hasn’t had a very good fall and winter. He turned the presidential campaign upside down two weeks before Election Day when he announced his agency was looking into emails that could potentially be related to Hillary Clinton’s email server. That review turned out to be a big pile of nothing. We now know that the run-up to that announcement was shot through with unethical and outright criminal behavior by the New York FBI. Notably, at least three people close to the Trump campaign knew about those emails before Comey knew about them. Despite this, Comey has yet to take any action, though the Justice Department’s inspector general is conducting an internal review of the matter..
Well, it looks like Comey may have rediscovered his sense of integrity. Senior government officials tell The New York Times that Comey believes there is no basis for Trump’s outrageous claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped on orders from former president Barack Obama. Those same officials say that Comey has asked the Justice Department to publicly concur in this assessment–but the DOJ has yet to respond. Later on Sunday afternoon, other officials close to the situation reached out to NBC News and NPR to corroborate the Old Grey Lady’s reporting.
Comey believes that Trump’s claims are not only bogus, but falsely suggest that the FBI broke the law. Conservative commentator and prominent never-Trumper David Frum realized the significance of what Comey was effectively doing here.
If report is accurate, the director of the FBI is rebuking the president of the United States as a fantasist & liar https://t.co/1bRohI9Ilh
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 5, 2017
But then again, it’s not as if the FBI had a choice. After all, despite publicly and loudly demanding that Congress investigate the supposed wiretapping, the White House is not willing to tell either Congress or the American people what evidence it has to support such a potentially nuclear accusation.
Never mind that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have effectively told Trump, “Show us the money.” In the absence of something we haven’t heard or seen, we can only assume Trump isn’t willing to do so because the only evidence comes from Breitbart–not exactly a credible source. And that’s assuming that there is any evidence at all.
According to The Times, Comey is having a hard time getting anyone in the DOJ to sign off on a statement publicly denouncing Trump’s claims as groundless. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself from any matter related to the ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, there aren’t many political appointees at the DOJ who can sign off on such a statement.
The obvious question–where was Comey’s backbone in October? Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe is one of many people who wants to know the answer to that question.
Comey's ask of DOJ is very significant and helpful to the nation. How he decides when to speak up is hard to figure! https://t.co/Z8akR8zibn
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 5, 2017
Comey would be well within his rights to reject Trump’s claims himself. So why hasn’t he done so? We can only hope that Comey is trying to find someone at the DOJ willing to put their oath of office and his or her personal integrity as a lawyer above any loyalty he or she might have to Trump. That’s the only reason that makes any sense at all. It’s also the only way that Comey will even begin to rehabilitate his reputation after his shameful behavior during the election.
This story went live just after 5 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday. In that time, we have yet to see any angry tweets from Trump–which is rather surprising, given his yearlong feud with the Old Grey Lady. We can only wonder–is it because he himself knows that he has overdrawn his political capital?
(featured image courtesy FBI’s Flickr feed, part of public domain)
