Comey wouldn’t follow Trump’s lead, but was Lynch’s lapdog

Flopping Aces ^ | 06-09-17 | DrJohn

[Starman417]

The Comey hearings today brought nothing with which to hang Donald Trump, but it did raise several questions about Comey and his behavior.  Comey once testified that he would not be an anonymous source:

CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS: I can't remember a time ever where a former FBI director has deliberately leaked the contents of a government document so it would get to a reporter in the hopes that it would prompt a special counsel investigation.

One of the problems for James Comey right now is that in his last public testimony here on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee, right out of the gate in that hearing, he took a series of questions from the Republican Chairman, Chuck Grassley, and Chuck Grassley asked him if he had ever been an anonymous source for reporters about the Hillary Clinton email investigation or the Russia case and James Comey testified no. Then he asked him whether he had ever authorized someone else to be an anonymous source on his behalf, on the Clinton email case and the Russian case, and James Comey said no.

So at the very least, what you can draw here from that testimony is that once he left the office of FBI director, he was not necessarily a person of principle. He made a decision to leak information on an anonymous basis in the hope of really changing the entire focus of the Russia investigation going forward.

So that, based on my reporting here over the last couple of months, specifically on that issue, this sets up at the very least a conflict or the need for a further explanation how he squared these elements here.

Yet that's exactly what he did, with the express intent of initiating an investigation. Comey testified that he believed Trump was asking specifically for Comey to end the Flynn investigation. If Comey felt there was an attempt at obstruction of justice, he was obligated to report it to the DOJ, but somewhere along the line Comey began rewriting the law:

The group decided that it could override standard FBI protocol and possibly legal obligations to report the incident because of its expectations that Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia matter, although that recusal would not come until weeks later. The Comey cabinet also decided that it wasn’t obligated to approach the acting Deputy Attorney General because he would likely be replaced soon.

“We concluded it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations. (He did so two weeks later.) The Deputy Attorney General’s role was then filled in an acting capacity by a United States Attorney, who would also not be long in the role,” Comey said. “After discussing the matter, we decided to keep it very closely held, resolving to figure out what to do with it down the road as our investigation progressed.”

According to three different former federal law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, there is no precedent for the director of the FBI to refuse to inform a Deputy Attorney General of a matter because of his or her “acting” status nor to use the expectation of a recusal as a basis for withholding information.

“This is an extraordinary usurpation of power. Not something you’d expect from the supposedly by-the-books guys at the top of the FBI,” one of those officials told Breitbart News.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein:

“The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016,” Rosenstein wrote. “The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department. There is a well-established process for other officials to step in when a conflict requires the recusal of the Attorney General. On July 5, however, the Director announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders.”

Comey did not tell the President his request was inappropriate and he did not report it to anyone. Instead, Comey made a deposit into his revenge account.

This is hardly the first time Comey has gone rogue. With his splashy Hillary Clinton speech last July, he went way out of bounds in recommending that Clinton not be charged with anything after laying out her abuses. And that's not all.

It is very curious that Comey was taken aback by Trump's suggestion and declined to follow the President's wishes, but was quite compliant when then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. She instructed Comey to refer to the Clinton email investigation as a "matter" and not an "investigation" and he obeyed like a good lapdog.

Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general under Barack Obama, pressured former FBI Director James Comey to downplay the Clinton email server investigation and only refer to it as a “matter,” Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

Comey said that when he asked Lynch if she was going to authorize him to confirm the existence of the Clinton email investigation, her answer was, “Yes, but don’t call it that. Call it a matter.” When Comey asked why, he said, Lynch wouldn’t give him an explanation. “Just call it a matter,” she said.

Comey added later that he was concerned about that direction as it was false. He was further concerned because it aligned with the Clinton campaign’s spin on the investigation.

Lynch’s order, Comey said, “concerned me because that language tracked the way the campaign was talking about the FBI’s work and that’s concerning.”

Comey didn't see fit to leak that to his pals despite agreeing that Lynch had a conflict of interest. It is also very curious that Comey was able to read Trump's mind, but was totally unable to divine the obvious motive for Lynch. No matter how you look at it, Comey came down on the side of democrats in both cases

[1Old Pro]

Comey was politically on the same side as Lynch and he hates Trump. FBI heads are supposed to be apolitical, not Comey, he failed the agency and our country in many ways.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for a good post and this!

[Grampa Dave]

‘It Simply Is Not A Crime For the President to Exercise His Constitutional Authority’ IBankCoin ^ | 6-8-2017 | Dr Fry Posted on 6/8/2017, 5:52:41 AM by blam Constitutional expert and famed Harvard law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, took on Jeffrey Toobin to discuss the ongoing Trump-Comey saga, saying in no uncertain terms that “this is not obstruction of justice.” He explains, “That is his constitutional power. He has the right to say, ‘You will not investigate Flynn.’ The best proof of that is he could have simply said to Comey, ‘Stop the investigation, I’ve just pardoned Flynn.’” To back up his assertions, Dershowitz reminded viewers of when Bush I pardoned Casper Weinberger the night before trial. After doing so, no one cried ‘obstruction’ because it was within the rights of the President of the United States to do so. “That’s what President Bush did,” Dershowitz said, citing the case of Caspar Weinberger. “You cannot have obstruction of justice when the president exercises his constitutional authority to pardon, his constitutional authority to fire the director of the FBI, or his constitutional authority to tell the director of the FBI who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.” He made the point that impeachment and obstruction are two entirely different things, which reduced Jeffrey Toobin to look like an 11th grade history student learning the constitution for the first time. The President can be impeached for all manners of things, but not for firing Comey and/or asking him to stop investigating Flynn — because it is his right to do so. “You can impeach him if you don’t like what he did,” he said. “But you cannot say it’s a crime. It’s simply not a crime for the president to exercise his constitutional authority to pardon or to direct the FBI.” http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3559077/posts

[joshua c]

I remember the Clinton campaign referring to the FBI investigation into her emails as a “review”.

When asked, a former FBI Director said, “A review? I don’t know what that is. The FBI only does investigations.”

[originalbuckeye]

‘Comey came down on the side of democrats in both cases’

Comey came down on the side of Democrats in ALL cases, stretching back to the mid-90’s. As did every other Obama Agency head......the Obama Admin completely politicized EVERY AGENCY in our Government. We are much the worse off for it now. How to get all the Obama loyalists out of the Trump Admin??? That’s the most important question!

[Reddy]

Comey testified that he didn’t trust Trump because he thought Trump was a liar, and that is why he kept memos of their conversations.

Yet, he obviously trusted zero because he kept no recordings of their conversations.. even after knowing zero lied through his teeth about Benghazi, like your doctor/keep your doctor, etc. (also, no memos of conversations with godzillary knowing she lied about Benghazi/emails, etc.)

Comey has no credibility whatsoever remaining.

[Diogenesis]

[right way right]

Like I said in the prediction thread, he is a partisan hack and will prove to have no credibility.

[thinden]

bbb

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

Posted this earlier:

James Comey mentioned in his testimony at one time something about "what my mom taught me" in regard to values. He lied. Any man taught Biblical values properly by one's parents and/or Bible teachers at church and sometimes in an educational setting will stick by those values for the rest of his life.

Comey hasn't done that. His priority in life was his income and retirement. So, he would go with the political winds in order to survive. Many have done this in their lives in order to remain employed and/or earn more money. So many senators praised Comey for his "values" because his values were the same as theirs: politics. However, when he opened his mouth to speak, we saw the two-faced nature of the man. When with the Clintons, go with the Clintons and when with Obama, go with Obama and when with someone like Trump who sticks to what he says, oppose him, tell people you don't want to be left alone with him, hide in the curtains.

This man has no value system except self-preservation. If he were to have real values, he would come out publicly and state what he thinks instead of getting a friend to provide information secretly to an even less value-oriented organization like the New York Times. The hearing also demonstrated the lack of values on the part of the senators, almost all of whom could not muster enough spinal solidarity to ask the man real questions and truly cross-examine him.

The closest anyone came was when one of them asked him why he did not tell Trump that he could not drop the investigation of Flynn when it was suggested and Comey replied, "...maybe I was weak, maybe it was a cowardly response." THAT does not demonstrate a value system. Some of us have stood for what was right no matter what and have lost jobs over it. Others have lost their lives. This man is a charlatan at worst and a Chameleon at best, just like the Clintons and Obama.

Light travels faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright, until they speak.

[jeffc]

Comey practically hung himself at the hearings, but all the “media” can talk about is how damaging his testimony was to Trump. The “media” that surrounded and protected 0bama is now doing the same for Comey.

[chuckee]

Ironic that Trump was trying to get Comey to have the FBI open an investigation into intelligence and investigatory leaks a few months ago and Comey turned him down apparently because he was too busy leaking from the FBI.So Comey and the upper echelon of the FBI are sitting around a conference table trying to determine the best time to leak the memo Comey prepared of his private meeting with Trump while Trump at the same time is asking him to investigate leaks. Does not get more Monty Python than that. Very rarely is one successful in getting the fox to investigate leaks in the henhouse

[Two Kids' Dad]

It seems that the point McCain was ineptly trying to make was made much more clearly in this article.