Quick Hits – Comey And Collusion

Two quick thoughts on a couple of items this morning. First, I nearly spit out my coffee when I read James Comey’s op-ed in the NY Times this morning. In it, Comey writes, “I do have one hope that I should confess. I hope that Mr. Trump is not impeached and removed from office before the end of his term. I don’t mean that Congress shouldn’t move ahead with the process of impeachment governed by our Constitution, if Congress thinks the provable facts are there. I just hope it doesn’t. Because if Mr. Trump were removed from office by Congress, a significant portion of this country would see this as a coup”.

This is pretty effing rich coming from a guy who was an important participant, perhaps unwittingly, in an FBI coup concocted and led by the NY FBI office to damage the Clinton campaign and help Trump get elected. Comey has admitted that the NY office was out to get Clinton and felt pressured by threats of leaks from that office to announce the existence of the Abedin emails before he had any clue whether those emails contained any new evidence. And it is pretty effing rich coming from a guy who blatantly violated DOJ rules and procedures to comment and characterize Hillary Clinton’s actions when his investigation led to no charges against her. And it is pretty effing rich that Comey hopes that a president should not be impeached, despite whatever damning evidence there may be of high crimes and misdemeanors, simply because a portion of the country might object. That doesn’t quite seem like to commitment to justice and law blind to the prestige and power of the perpetrators of crimes that we regularly hear from career prosecutors. What’s also incredible about Comey’s position is that it totally ignores the opinions of the other portion of the country who believe the president is not above the law.

Meanwhile, the months-long reporting of the imminent release of the Mueller report is creating some amazing false narratives. Pete Williams basically just said that the imminent release of the Mueller report indicates that he has found no evidence of collusion that would rise to the level of a criminal indictment. This is mind-boggling. Paul Manafort has pled guilty to lying to Mueller about passing confidential internal Trump campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnick. This polling data was eventually passed on to the oligarch associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency which engaged in the targeted social media interference in the 2016 election and whose dozens of employees Mueller has indicted. One of Mueller’s lawyers described this lie about passing the polling data as “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating”. As I have asked before, what clearer evidence of collusion do we need?

Now, it may be that there is no direct evidence that ties Manafort’s actions to Trump. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that Manafort has essentially pled guilty to conspiring with the Russians at this point. It boggles the mind that anyone so-called independent observer could say otherwise. But that seems to be the position the media has taken.