I admit that I was a little dispirited after hearing the investigation of former FBI Directory Comey had concluded with some findings of wrong-doing.
The report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Comey violated FBI policies in how he handled memos that detailed his early interactions with Trump. The report said Comey kept the government documents at his home, engineered the release of some of their contents to the news media and did not tell the bureau which person or people he had given them to. [WaPo]
Of course, Trump’s response is over the top:
The disastrous IG Report on James Comey shows, in the strongest of terms, how unfairly I, and tens of millions of great people who support me, were treated. Our rights and liberties were illegally stripped away by this dishonest fool. We should be given our stolen time back?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2019
While Comey took the opposite view:
DOJ IG "found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media." I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a “sorry we lied about you” would be nice.
— James Comey (@Comey) August 29, 2019
National Review’s Jack Crowe and Jim Geraghty have some surprisingly empty posts on the matter. Meant to be condemnatory, I cannot help but note “… but prosecutors declined to file charges.” If Comey is so terrible, why isn’t he up on charges?
Not being an expert in FBI policy or that sort of thing, I wasn’t sure what to think. Fortunately, I ran across this Lawfare posting by Benjamin Wittes.
The inspector general of the Justice Department has determined that it is misconduct for a law enforcement officer to publicly disclose an effort to shut down his investigation.
Michael Horowitz would probably not describe his findings that way. But that seems to me the inescapable message of the inspector general’s report, released today, on former Director James Comey’s handling of his memos on his interactions with President Trump.
And …
For all that Horowitz spent two years on this investigation, there aren’t a lot of new facts—at least not major ones—in this document. The reason is simple: Comey has never been anything but straightforward concerning why he wrote the seven memos in question, what he did with them, whom he shared them with and what his motives were in doing so. On all significant factual questions, the 62-page report merely fleshes out a story that has been known to the public for the better part of two years.
Which is reassuring. Comey comes across as a thoughtful straight-shooter, at least in my observation and reading. And while it’s one thing to trust your informal, intuitive judgment, it’s quite another to have a seasoned national security lawyer evaluate the findings on a national security professional’s behavior and interpret them for the layman.
That’s a good reason not to pay too much attention to the National Review columns, which sensibly didn’t go into the detail which could have revealed more than they might have wished. They basically took the IG’s report at face value, looked into their prisms, and tried to splutter at Comey. A little digging by Wittes is a lot more convincing, not only because he went digging, but because, while he’s clearly not a Trumpist, he’s also accustomed to assuming a neutral stance on many issues.
That reminds me of what good engineers do, get the ego out of the way and just evaluate.
