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Hidden in the IG Report: The Case for the Collusion to Elect Trump is Confirmed
Former FBI Director Comey’s concern that collusion contributed to Donald Trump’s election has been established. What was not confirmed until yesterday was the lengths to which he and his FBI assured the election of the man he clearly opposed. He and his cohort colluded overtly, informationally, or by deception to elect Hillary Rodham Clinton and by so doing, elected President Donald J. Trump. Say what you will, but Comey’s July, 2016 dance back and forth on Hillary’s criminal actions and his rewriting the law to extract her from prosecution convinced more than few Americans in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin that enough was enough.
Comey’s effort to embellish his reputation with the late revelation of the Weiner investigation may have served his own campaign to rehab his reputation. It came at a point in the election when Comey thought Clinton would win, thus allowing him a last minute confirmation that his July pardon was just and fair. In fact, it actually hurt her reputation far more than he imagined – so tone deaf is Comey, and his colluders at the FBI.
But in all candor, what was Comey the Colluder to do? He was trapped by the reality that sooner or later the Weiner horde of confidential emails would be disclosed. So he let it sit for weeks, polished the apple, revealed it as he was obligated to do (Scout’s Honor), and then promptly closed it.
The FBI is a national police force. The Constitution relegated police powers to the states. Its creation came around the time that Progressivism and law and order were mingling to devise a rationalization for a small, but coordinating ‘investigative’ agency of the Federal government.
The FBI has on at least two occasions (and many more), proven it is a dangerously and politically motivated body. From its inception as J. Edgar Hoover’s pulpit of power, the FBI was a structural threat to our republic. The excuse that this is a just a “few bad apples” is just that. This is a concentration of power, operating in secret, and working to preserve itself, and its interests on a virtually unlimited budget. Think Star Chamber, but apparently devoid of stars. It is not that it is just a few bad apples. It is that it only takes a few bad apples to commandeer an election when you control the national police.
Kings and dictators rely upon national police forces. We do not have a king, nor a dictator. Which makes the FBI even more dangerous. It is now so powerful, it can serve as a tipping point in the political process. Ted Steven’s was removed from office just in time to assure a Democratic Senate sixty seat majority and launch America down the path of the Obamacare roller coaster. Ted Stevens may have been guilty of something, but the Attorney General’s Office armed with its police force, the FBI, did not play fair. Would this have been possible without the FBI?
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, using FBI resources, investigated Scooter Libby for a crime Libby did not commit. In the end, ‘Fitz’ alleged he committed a different crime of perjury (though Libby could not recall events, he was charged with perjury or not being fully honest, something not hard to prove in a DC courtroom when a Republican, a Cheney Chief of Staff, was the defendant). At the time, Fitzgerald compared Libby’s actions to “throwing sand in the umpire’s face.”
How ironic that James Comey, Patrick Fitzgerald’s close friend, has been exposed for doing just that. Comey not only presided over a lax investigation, prejudged, made up law, rewrote law, usurped power and participated in “de facto” collusion (if not in fact naked collusion) in the Clinton case, he convinced many that the government under the Obama administration, with its failure to fulfill promises, sloppy seizure of healthcare, and open deceit was not only untrustworthy, but likewise dangerous. Thus, we got Trump.
Trump was an outsider. He was not mealy-mouthed. He was not coated with years of unctuous political relationships. He might be rude and careless, ruthless even, but the Obama perfidy backed by bureaucratic complicity and casuistry (IRS, EPA, HHS, ATF, DoJ) demanded redirection, not a readjustment. Comey, and his fellow travelers, cinched the deal.
Published in General
The effect of Comey’s dance late 2016 may have been to elect Trump, but if you understand the broader picture and the imminent indictment of many Democrats including Hillary in October 2016 by the NYPD that was avoided by that strange dance by Comey and Loretta Lynch you will look at the situation differently. Comey was trying to cover for some pretty hard to cover up criminal acts by Hillary, et al. He did get her off the hook at least till now, but perhaps the stench was just too great not to swallow her disastrous campaign.
I agree. He was caught in a jam, had to disclose, delayed a bit, and then tried to polish it and himself as best one could. He complied with Congress, that information leaked, stated he could not comment on an on-going investigation, and then boldly pronounced, ‘nothing new.’
I was going to email Director Wray today and tell him he is living in a bubble amongst other things. It’s incredible that FBI headquarters does not publish a email address. Check it out on their website if you don’t believe me. Imagine that! A citizen can not contact them. Twice before the 2016 election I did contact the FBI Tip Line regarding the crimes being committed by HRC. I heard crickets.
I have said before and I will say it 1,000 times after this: The leader of the FBI needs to be a cop, a field agent that comes from the ranks. As long as the politicians continue to appoint federal judges and federal prosecutors to the post this stuff is going to happen over and over again.
Please change Trump to Clinton in the title.
Or EJ,
Is there a way to break it up? Restructure? It’s its own branch of government.
Thank you. It is ironic. But also confusing. The world is seeking collusion to elect Trump. There was. By the national police at the top of the FBI.
Yes, as Mark Steyn has written, the Russian collusion story was concocted to hide the conspiracy against Trump.
Is there a role for a national law enforcement agency to coordinate investigations that cross and re-cross state lines? That was my understanding of what the FBI was meant to be.
And is there a role for a law enforcement agency with the power to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by or within political entities —e.g. the corrupt use of the IRS under Obama?
Genuine questions.
But I’m with EJH: the director should come up through the ranks.
There have to be some perp walks for the country ever to be able to recover from this. And I don’t just mean the FBI agents who were outed in the text messages. Hillary and Obama both belong in prison for starters, and so do Loretta Lynch and others. The more that comes out, the more the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I realize how close we came to the FBI turning into Hillary’s Pretorian Guard, and none of it would ever have come to light.
I do recall reading somewhere (Charles Murray, perhaps?) that the US congress used to be fairly immune from corruption not because those elected to it were saints, but because prior to the eruption and metastasis of the regulatory state, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to sell.
I wonder if something similar has happened to investigations. I have a vague image of so many laws, regulations and rules that it is simply too easy and too profitable (one way and another) to launch investigations in the sure and certain knowledge that something will be found to justify the effort?
With the addition of Mueller the FBI is becoming the Stasi or KBG. They must be reined in and become more responsive to Congress and therefore the people. I am also sick and tired of hearing that it’s not the rank and file. That’s just so much PC. Just taking orders is an excuse that was destroyed at Nuremberg Germany . People need to man up and speak out. Men and women give up there lives everyday for their country a career or paycheck or pension is nothing.
Limit the size of HQ FBI by federal law, like the military. Make all the staff jobs rotating slots with a time limit of three years preceded and followed by field assignments or retirement. I think it is reasonable to require any Director to have field experience as a law enforcement officer, but I wouldn’t restrict it to FBI experience.
We wouldn’t need a large FBI if there were much fewer federal crimes.
JM,
I like what you made clear in your post. What we should realize is that when Comey did his dance to exonerate Hillary in the first press conference there was still time for her to withdraw and the Democrats to pick up a candidate that might have actually been more effective.
Comey’s play was classic insider garbage. He was paying off the political inside gang and hoping for profits from it down the road. He wasn’t acting from principle, he wasn’t protecting the FBI, he was playing the big game and screwing the American People business as usual.
Regards,
Jim
BTW: I do love the idea that the Clintons colluded with an allied media to ensure that Trump would run, starting with a little golf-buddy-chit-chat (between bouts of p***y-grabby-braggy) out there on the gleaming green.
On the theory that the Donald would introduce fatal distraction into the GOP side.
Too clever by half, those progressive elites! Here in Maine, the progressives pushed ranked choice voting, arguably because they expected Republicans to split the votes and get bogged down in re-counts. As it happened, Republican Shawn Moody swamped his competitors and won decisively while Democrats Adam Cote and Janet Mills got 28% and 33% of first-place votes respectively. So there has to be a recount and then:
” …the last place candidate’s votes will be redistributed to his or her voters’ next choices until someone breaks 50 percent. The Associated Press will only call winners for the first round of tabulation. If additional rounds are required to determine a winner, final results will not be available for a few days.” (New York Times.)
Both Mills and Cote are lawyers, so that “few days” could go for weeks and weeks while this new process is contested through the courts.
Meanwhile, Shawn Moody is going to be…running for Governor.
It’s that casuistry that pisses me off the most.
Here’s what I don’t get about the Comey pre-election performance …
It seems crystal clear that everybody involved thought HRC was going to win the election. Everybody. Including Comey. And most everybody involved wanted her to win. There were never going to be charges levied. No way. The fix was in at the FBI and certainly at the DoJ.
So, if you are Comey, why would you put the spotlight on yourself like that? Just go by-the-book. Pass it off to DoJ and let them do the whitewash. DoJ’s announcement would, no doubt, say “After a thorough and extensive FBI investigation, there is no evidence…”. Blah blah blah. Comey would still get credit among the cognoscenti. Wink wink nod nod “thorough and extensive” yeah right.
And if you are doing it to curry favor with the new President-to-be why call her careless? I mean, if you are going to give her a pass on National TV just do it. Why waffle? I don’t get it.
It can’t be because he was trying to do the right thing … because opening his yap and saying anything at all was the wrong thing. It’s not his job. I can’t figure it out? What the heck was he trying to prove? Is the ego that huge that he couldn’t let the moment go by without him being at the center?
Two other observations:
A deeper irony is what I have read a number of times (I think in Holman Jenkins’ columns), that Comey’s July 2016 press conference was in part motivated by his knowledge of an intercepted Russian communication which said, perhaps falsely, that Lynch was hiding evidence damaging to HRC. He was afraid this would go public, and do huge damage to HRC and the public’s trust in the DOJ. So he held the press conference as a way to get out ahead of that possibility. If this is true then he was having his strings pulled by Russian misinformation.
I am not at all sure what criminal acts you are referring to, while discussing Hillary, but for a while during 2016, I was watching some very interesting youtubes relating to NY state FBI agents who had uncovered some glaringly incorrect reporting relating to the Clinton Foundation.
For whatever reason, Bill and Hillary had chartered their “charitable foundation” with the state of New York. New York has some very picky regulations. (As someone who hates about 90% of the charities out there, I say, “Good for New York.”) But anyway the duo chose a state with stringent reporting requirements.
And these agents were finding major discrepancies, even hundreds of thousands of dollars that had not been reported but that were on the Foudnation’s books.
So Comey says to the agents: “You guys really don’t have the resources there in NY to do a good job. Send the records you have here to Washington DC bureau. And we will get it done.” The agents then complied with that request.
And apparently, that was the last that anyone heard of the matter.
A decent comment by someone over at The conservativetreehouse.com:
Mickturn says:
June 15, 2018 at 1:11 pm
I found an interesting tidbit from the OIG report, Page 276 (as numbered in report, Adobe gives different page numbers). This is in relation to how Comey and the FBI ignored the Weiner Laptop evidence…here it is:
“The AUSAs provided written guidance to the case agent about how to handle
review of the laptop. In a September 28 email to the case agent and the SSA,
AUSA 1 advised that the case agent should review “only evidence of crimes related
to the sexual exploitation of children, enticement, and obscenity” and instructed the
case agent “that all emails and other communications between Anthony Weiner and
Huma Abedin (even if there are other parties to the communication) should be
sequestered and not reviewed at this time.”
In other words the FBI agents were DIRECTED TO NOT LOOK AT the key evidence about Hitlery’s emails or any other thing the investigation was SUPPOSED to be about. (PERIOD).
That tells me that the FBI KNEW there were very explosive items on Weiners Laptop (Stored in an “Insurance File”) but chose NOT to look at them. So much for the ‘complete evaluation’ that Crooked Comey talked about!
####
Carol Joy: “I am not at all sure what criminal acts you are referring to”.
The NYPD had gained access to the second batch of Weiner emails in September 2016,which according to leaks contained evidence of serious and salacious crimes by Hillary and other Democrats. Then AG Loretta Lynch essentially blackmailed the NYPD by threatening to re-open a closed case against NYPD officers with a new hardened approach unless they stopped their investigation of the crimes gleaned from the emails.
Right Angle: “There have to be some perp walks for the country ever to be able to recover from this. ”
I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately almost the entire media excepting Fox and a few blogs, the entire Democratic Party and the Republican Establishment want any investigation of the unconscionable crimes committed by the DOJ, FBI and the CIA to just go away completely without any prosecution and with little or no publicity.
These people defending these Deep State crimes don’t understand the white hot anger these crimes have aroused in millions of Americans, and the retribution that will be coming their way if all there is only an inconsequential, whitewashed Inspector General report with no actions taken as a result of government’s criminal behavior. If we do not prosecute fully these awful, Republic threatening crimes, we will be ceding power to a power mad, criminal Police State where there will be no bounds in their abuses, and where this kind of criminal behavior by our government will then become the norm. They are really playing with fire here.
I think Comey knew the Russian intercept was of dubious credibility. But Holman Jenkins is usually pretty tight on facts.
Something that might have been nagging Comey in the back of his mind is that after Clinton became president and he still wanted to be in the job was not wanting to become Ron Brown #2.
Warning — unsubstantiated conspiracy allusion. Probably not appropriate under Code of Conduct and could get me suspended for who knows how long. Suggestion that Comey might be engaging in paranoid behavior or possibly engaging in a power play to try to out-muscle the Clintons. A more rationale person would understand the futility of that tack.
He may have known, but then it’s still true that his presser might not have happened but for Russian meddling.
This is the $million question.
My take is Comey needed to self-actualize, to affirm himself to himself and all comers. HRC would be elected the first woman, but he could be the strength of his character become a modern Roman Pro Consul – appointed to rule Rome with the other Pro Consul, the tainted HRC as President. His power could equal hers. His prestige could be greater.
To understand this, you must accept that Comey sees himself as supremely moral and above mere mortals. His ego and God-like persona meant he was the last one capable to shield the Republic’s integrity while insuring the real estate clown did not get elected (Loretta was tainted on the tarmac, DoJ was percieved as doubtful, and Comey’s FBI gang was ready and willing to cooperate). So, he magnanimously looked at HRC’s guilt, decided it could be sold as an infraction without malicious intent, and pronounced her free to go. HRC could never question him without stirring the home brew server hive up again. She embraced the reprieve.
Once he was called out over his own Icarus moment, and the NYPD accidentally discovered the Weiner problem, Comey no doubt thought, I can delay this (4 weeks) until we can determine what new is on Weiner’s computer, then disclose it if I have to, and if I can rationalize an excuse, clean it all up for HRC before the election without damaging her. After all, we were told despite all the negative news about the server, she was leading in the polls. When the FBI claimed no new emails were discovered, Comey felt safe. There was time to squeeze out of a tight spot, pronounce her free of any wrong doing, and hold on to his claim as co-Pro Consul.
Hail Comey. All Hail Comey.
However – I would love to hear other explanations, thoughts, etc., etc.
I like this summary. I don’t see the FBI executive team as particularly ideological beyond being supportive of the Establishment of either party. They were certain Clinton wold be elected and covered for that very well and they would be in the clear now if that had happened. The key players within the FBI had a plan to undo any election that went awry. What is yet unknown is what was the role of the CIA and the State Department. Comey is in a category by himself just based on his ego. McCabe looks like he acted when there was a payoff.
Wait. Did I just read in the news that Comey …the director of the FBI … claimed he didn’t know that Anthony Weiner was married to Huma Abedin who was HRC’s …. um …. ah …. aide/secretary/assistant/gal Friday?
Bums on the subway sleeping in wrinkled, day old copies of the Daily News and NY Post knew that. Really?
I would not go that far, although I understand the point. The vetting is the important consideration. Quite frankly, promoting from within has its disadvantages as well. The key is to understand the person, whether agent or prosecutor or judge. It’s doable.