The Twisted Logic Of James Comey That Sabotaged The Clinton Campaign

James Comey got some good news on Friday. The stories about Jared Kushner’s apparent collusion with the Russians totally overshadowed a CNN story that show just how convoluted Comey’s logic had to get in order to sabotage the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I have already written about the report that Comey had apparently been duped by a Russian operation that delivered a Russian intelligence analysis that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had compromised herself by agreeing to limit the investigation into Hillary’s emails. That report, along with Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Arizona, prompted Comey to unilaterally decide to ignore DOJ protocols, brazenly assume the duties of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, and hold a press conference characterizing Clinton as “extremely careless” while essentially exonerating her.

That report was later shown to be false but Comey had indicated that he took the report seriously on multiple occasions, including testimony before Congress. That seemed bad enough. But the CNN report shows that the truth is actually worse.

Even before that fateful July press conference, Comey knew that the document was false but that made absolutely no difference to him. His rationale was that it would be assumed to be true if it ever became public and that would tarnish the entire investigation and its conclusions. Of course, if it did become public, the obvious position would be to come out and say that the document was known to be false Russian propaganda. But Comey did not want to have to deny the report because he felt that the denial would reveal the FBI’s sources and methods.

So, in order to protect the FBI’s sources and methods, Comey ended up, apparently wittingly, in colluding with the Russians in order to discredit Hillary Clinton and influence the election in Donald Trump’s favor.

Of course, Comey’s actions in July then led directly to his fateful decision to announce there was “new information” regarding Hillary’s emails just 11 days before the election, an unprecedented injection of the FBI into an election and a move that most independent analyses believe threw the election to Donald Trump. And Comey used the same twisted logic in that case. Again, he feared that if the information came out about the existence of the Abedin emails, it would taint his investigation. So he went and announced the existence of those emails before he even had any idea of whether they were relevant or not.

In essence, on multiple occasions James Comey spread Russian or Republican propaganda when he either knew it was false or had no good reason to believe was true simply because he didn’t want to deal with the consequences of the potential abuse he would take if that propaganda became public sometime later. It takes an incredible twist of logic to do what Comey did. But, in both cases, the result was far worse for Hillary Clinton than it was for James Comey.