Comeytose In Washington, DC
Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
Educate! Donald Trump, James Comey, RussiaGate
By Jeffrey St. Clair, www.counterpunch.org
May 14th, 2017
Above Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
So our Mountebank-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has finally fired James Comey.
Good riddance. I'll shed no tears for our vain Inspector Javert. But once
again Trump, the Master of the Self-Inflicted Wound, has done the
impossible. In a single stroke, he has transformed the almost universally
loathed Comey into a sympathetic, if not heroic, figure.
Trump, who once fired people for a living on TV, bungled the termination of
the director of the FBI director so badly that he also succeeded in
reigniting a scandal that had started to cool to a slow simmer-and, not
incidentally, may have committed the impeachable offense of "obstruction of
justice," motivated primarily by personal pique. (See Article One for the
Impeachment of Richard Nixon.)
One might be tempted, like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, to assess the fallout
from Trump's slow-motion purge of the prosecutorial state (Sally Yates,
Preet Bharara and Comey) as the best of all possible worlds: Comey is gone,
the Department of Justice is implicated, the FBI is internally splintered
and Trump is wounded, perhaps mortally.
Yes, all very good-except, naturally, for the intervention of the liberals,
who have adopted Comey as a martyr in their Russian witch hunt and have
started praising the FBI-an agency literally engineered to prosecute (if not
invent) the Red Scare-as a "beacon of integrity and independence." A few
minutes after the news broke, even Michael Moore panted: "COMEY FIRED!
Dirty, corrupt things afoot."
Comey is a self-righteous prude, whose preening sense of rectitude is more
than "mildly nauseating." It's not surprising he is despised by many on his
staff, who feel Comey sucked up all the oxygen in the dark chambers of the
J. Edgar Hoover Building. Comey's awful tenure at the FBI, though brief, was
cruelly destructive to basic liberties. Comey's counter-terrorism record
consists largely of having his FBI agents fabricate plots and then entice
mentally disturbed misfits, druggies and loners to join them.
Let us also recall that James Comey was one of the leading propagandists for
the phony War on Cops, a smokescreen to hide the carnage inflicted by the
police's pitiless war on black street kids. This spring Comey ordered the
FBI's terrorism task force to investigate Standing Rock protesters. How can
you repress your revulsion to lavish praise on such a man?
Trump's welcome cashiering of Comey has been called Nixonian, the go-to
metaphor for any executive temper tantrum. Yet this comparison demeans
Nixon, who at least had the sense to fire Archie Cox on a Saturday. (In
Trump's defense, perhaps the president had a weekend tee-time he couldn't
break.)
Trump could have dismissed Comey for almost any reason or no reason at all.
But the president couldn't resist the temptation to create a cover story for
Comey's firing that proved as flimsy as a Kendell Jenner fashion shoot.
By all accounts, Trump became enraged with Comey after he learned that the
FBI man had requested additional resources from the Department of Justice to
expand his investigation into the Trump team's ties with Russia. The FBI is
apparently hot on the redolent trails of lucre left by Michael Flynn and
Paul Manafort, which confirms my suspicion that the real scandal isn't
Russian meddling in the 2016 elections but shady financial dealings by
Trump's dubious ensemble of associates. It always comes down to money,
especially with people, and Team Trump is filled with them, who are
stimulated by any opportunity for self-enrichment. Mannafort and Flynn are
both vulnerable on these counts and thus are likely targets for being
squeezed by the Feds until they squeal on Trump and his inner circle to save
their own asses.
So Trump went on the offensive. He told Jefferson Beauregard Sessions that
he wanted Comey's head on a platter and Sessions, a nasty but dull piece of
work who had already perjured himself before Congress, wasn't smart enough
to simply advise Trump that he had the power to can Comey without cause.
Instead, Sessions instructed newly-minted Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein to prepare a brief against Comey based on the G-Man's buffoonish
mishandling of Hillary's email entanglements. Rosenstein was viewed as the
perfect patsy in this scenario, because he had recently been lauded by many
Democrats (useful idiots in almost any grifter's game) as a "man of
principle and integrity" and had been robustly confirmed by the Senate in a
vote of 94-6.
The key element in this charade was that Rosenstein's bill of indictment
against Comey had to sedulously avoid any mention of RussiaGateC in order to
keep Sessions-who vowed to recuse himself from such matters-in the loop.
Then the President, in true Trumpian style, undermined the whole plot by
writing in his dismissal letter this damning sentence: "While I greatly
appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not
under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the
Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau."
Damning to Trump, Sessions and Rosenstein that is, because Trump couldn't
resist revealing that the real motive was to bury the Russia investigation.
Trump's letter is a kind of forensic IED, detonating legal shrapnel toward
anyone who had a hand in it: Trump, Sessions, Rosenstein, Doug McGahn and
Mike Pence.
When the affair immediately blew up in the face of the White House, Trump's
team reflexively tried to pin the blame on Rosenstein, saying the Deputy
AG's memo was the sole reason for the firing of Comey. After Rosenstein got
wind of these reports, he called White House counsel Doug McGahn and
threatened to quit unless the White House clarified that the impetus to fire
Comey came from Sessions and Trump not him. According to the Wall Street
Journal, Rosenstein told McGahn that "he couldn't work in an environment
where facts weren't accurately reported." Which begs the question, what
administration did he think he was joining two weeks ago? In the end,
Rosenstein's threats were idle ones. He lacked the courage and character of
Elliott Richardson and Bill Ruckelshaus. Threatening to quit and not
following through is more ethically deficient than just quietly serving as a
compliant Trump tool.
The blending of hubris and stupidity on display in the Comey affair is a
recipe for political comedy and legal disaster. By concocting a false story
for Comey's expulsion, the Trump team, including the President and the
Attorney General, have exposed their consciousness of guilt and laid the
groundwork for charges of obstruction of justice against them-if there's
anyone left in the Justice Department or the Congress with the guts to bring
it. Perhaps Ralph Nader will sue, as he did in 1973, when he won a seminal
verdict in federal court that Nixon's firing of special prosecutor Archibald
Cox was illegal. (The torrent of bullshit Ralph has had to endure from
Democratic Party crybabies since 2000 has largely eclipsed public knowledge
about the profound service Nader has done to protect the lives and rights of
American citizens over the last six decades.)
So here we are adrift in uncharted waters. No president has ever fired an
FBI director on a personal whim. The only other termination occurred in
1993, when Bill Clinton gave William Sessions the boot for using FBI funds
to install a new security system on his home and for travel to see his
daughter at college. Even then Clinton treaded cautiously, relying on a
161-page report on Sessions's improprieties compiled by George HW Bush's
Justice Department. Still it took Clinton six months to summon the courage
to send Sessions packing. Clinton said he moved so slowly to evict Sessions
because he feared "politicizing" the FBI. This is laughable. The notion that
the FBI is somehow an "apolitical" enterprise is one of the most
preposterous, if enduring, fantasies of the Beltway.
FBI directors have largely remained immune from executive meddling out of
fear of reprisals from the agency, a practice of bureaucratic blackmail
perfected over the decades by J. Edgar Hoover himself and passed on to his
administrative descendants. As Lyndon Johnson once said of Hoover, "It's
probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the
tent pissing in."
Did Trump somehow miss the news that Deep Throat was revealed to be FBI
agent Mark Felt, who turned into Bob Woodward's snitch because he was irked
at being passed over by Nixon to become FBI director after the death of
Hoover? (Perhaps when Trump hears the phrase "Deep Throat" his mind fixates
on other images.)
Comey still has friends in the agency, many of them whose pumps have now
been primed to leak. Remember most leakers, like Felt, are not acting out of
selfless concern for the integrity of the democratic system. They're out to
settle scores. Blood, piss and semen will flow, Donald, most likely yours.
Surely, vendettas are something Trump understands at a visceral level.
Chaos politics is Trump's calling card. But invariably Trump's distractions
end up creating bigger and more enduring messes than the one's he is trying
to flush down the memory hole. Four months into his administration, I think
we can safely say that Trump's learning curve is flatter than Kansas. He
repeats the same blunders over and over. There's almost no need for FOIA
with Trump. His shadiest maneuvers are completely transparent. And if you
don't pick up on them at first, just wait awhile and Trump will Tweet you a
trail of clues. And if you still don't get the message, he'll drive it home
in a meeting with the Russian ambassador (and alleged spymaster) Sergey
Kislyak and a photo-op with Henry Kissinger-a sure sign that someone will be
bombed in the coming days.
Equally predictable, and perhaps more disgusting, is the risible response of
the Left, which is congealing in defense of the fallen head of the American
Police state. Grandstanding aside, Comey's main objective during his recent
appearances before Congress has been the reauthorization of the wiretapping
provisions of the Patriot Act, the sinister legislation which Comey helped
to shape and enforce during his time in the Bush Administration. Now
liberals are protesting his firing outside the gates of the White House.
Who says the center will not hold?
