“Straying From The Partisan Script”: What James Comey And John Roberts Have In Common
In conservative circles, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts used to be a respected figure, held in high regard. Roberts enjoyed a lengthy record as a center-right jurist, and when then-President George W. Bush nominated him to the high court, Republicans everywhere were delighted.
Roberts did not, however, stay in the right’s good graces. After the chief justice voted to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act – twice – quite a few conservatives, and even some Republican presidential candidates, turned on Roberts, questioning his judgment, intellect, and integrity.
Right about now, I suspect FBI Director James Comey can relate to how Roberts must feel about his former admirers abruptly changing their opinions.
Comey, in case anyone’s forgotten, is a lifelong Republican who served as a top official in the Bush/Cheney Justice Department. He cut his teeth as a public-sector attorney in the 1990s, when Comey signed on “as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee,” where he went after, of all people, Hillary Clinton.
I’m not aware of anyone on the right questioning Comey’s abilities or professionalism ahead of yesterday’s announcement in the email matter. On the contrary, Republicans gave Comey a vote of confidence as recently as June. Politico published this report one month ago today:
Should the FBI not recommend an indictment of Hillary Clinton following its investigation of the setup of her private email server, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Monday said he and his Republican colleagues would “probably” accept the outcome.
“Oh, probably, because we do believe in [FBI Director] James Comey,” the Utah Republican said during an appearance on Fox News’ “Outnumbered.” “I do think that in all of the government, he is a man of integrity and honesty.”
Yesterday, however, Chaffetz said the exact opposite, and accused Comey of failing to carry out his duties. Other GOP members of Congress made related arguments, while some Republican pundits adopted an even harsher posture.
The pattern matters. John Roberts was an excellent justice, Republicans said, right up until he strayed from the partisan script. Trey Gowdy was the perfect person to lead the GOP’s Benghazi Committee, they said, right up until he failed to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton.
And Jim Comey was a fine FBI director, right up until he left his party dejected by exercising independent judgment.
In reality, Roberts, Gowdy, and Comey aren’t guilty of corruption or partisan betrayals – their “failures” exist solely in the minds of lazy ideologues. What their Republican critics don’t seem to appreciate is that their ostensible allies asked them to go too far, ignore their responsibilities, abuse an otherwise legitimate process, and look out for the “team,” whether the facts warranted it or not.
Comey didn’t play along with a partisan game, and his reward is a round of condemnations from the same people who, up until 24 hours ago, sang their praises.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 6, 2016
“Trump Is Mishandling The Clinton Email Controversy”: Insisting Repeatedly That The Investigation Was Rigged
At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser helpfully explains why Hillary Clinton won’t be facing any criminal charges for her use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State. There are a lot of legal issues and precedents to discuss, but it can all be boiled down to one simple thing.
Setting aside the bare language of the law, there’s also a very important practical reason why officials in Clinton’s position are not typically indicted. The security applied to classified email systems is simply absurd. For this reason, a former CIA general counsel told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, “’it’s common’ that people end up using unclassified systems to transmit classified information.” “’It’s inevitable, because the classified systems are often cumbersome and lots of people have access to the classified e-mails or cables.’ People who need quick guidance about a sensitive matter often pick up the phone or send a message on an open system. They shouldn’t, but they do.”
Indicting Clinton would require the Justice Department to apply a legal standard that would endanger countless officials throughout the government, and that would make it impossible for many government offices to function effectively.
That’s the bottom line.
Of course, Clinton was not exonerated. FBI Director James Comey was scathing at times in his criticism, and would not even guarantee that the former Secretary of State’s emails hadn’t been read by foreign and hostile intelligence agencies.
With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.
There’s been a lot of hype about these damn emails, but Clinton deserves some criticism. She did not get a clean bill of health here, and the subject will be a legitimate issue during the campaign. That doesn’t mean that Donald Trump has handled the controversy with any deftness. By insisting repeatedly that the investigation was rigged, he undermined the case he should be making now, which is that the FBI is credible and should be taken seriously. But, instead, he’s still saying that the investigation was rigged.
That’s basically taking a weak, contentious and conspiratorial case in place of one that is backed up by the investigators. It’s particularly stupid because, now that we know that no charges will be filed, this is an entirely political controversy. And the object, for Trump, should be to get the maximum possible political mileage out of it. He could be making the case that Clinton shouldn’t be trusted to handle the nation’s national security because she did a poor job of safeguarding its secrets when she served in the Obama administration, but he’s instead saying that the FBI engaged in a coverup.
Consider that James Comey was confirmed by the Senate on July 29, 2013 as the director of the FBI for a term of ten years. If Donald Trump becomes president and serves for two full terms, his presidency will end on January 20th, 2025. In other words, Comey would be the FBI Director for all but the last 18 months of a Trump presidency. And, yet, Trump’s reaction to Comey’s statement today is to question his integrity and independence and to run down the organization that Comey heads.
It’s not hard to see that this isn’t the beginning of a good working relationship, and at least some voters will notice this and be concerned about it.
Trump will rile up some people who were already convinced that Clinton is a she-devil, but he won’t get much else out of this if he continues to shift the focus off of where it can help him make a case against his opponent.
The truth is, she should not have been indicted and most people will agree that the correct decision was made. So, focusing on the decision is actually doing her a giant favor.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 5, 2016
“Relying On Anecdotes From Police Officials”: No Data Exists To Support Police Claims Of Victimization
Shortly after FBI Director James Comey delivered ill-considered remarks linking increased scrutiny of police to rising crime, a cellphone video of a Columbia, South Carolina, school cop violently manhandling a teenage girl went viral. Comey’s comments were quickly overtaken by that news — which, coincidently, showed how imprudent they were.
On two occasions in late October, the FBI’s top official had the opportunity to reinforce for police officials the sacred trust at the center of their oaths, which require them to protect and serve. That sacred trust was violated — cleaved and quartered, in fact — by Ben Fields, the Spring Valley High “school resource officer” whose actions resulted in his firing and sparked a Justice Department investigation.
Instead, Comey chose to play to police officers’ paranoia and sense of isolation and victimization. In speeches at the University of Chicago Law School and to the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, he suggested that homicides are on the rise in several cities because police officers are too intimidated to do their jobs properly.
Speaking to the police chiefs, Comey asked: “In today’s YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns?”
At the law school, he’d said that “viral videos” may be contributing to a police reluctance to confront criminals.
Let’s be clear: There is absolutely no data — as Comey admitted — that links rising homicides to a new passivity on the part of police. (Violent crime continues to decline, as it has since its peak in 1991, but homicides are now rising in a handful of cities. Criminologists don’t know why, as they still don’t know why crime has declined over the last few decades.)
In fact, there is no data showing that police are less aggressive than they used to be. The FBI director, who ought to know better, is relying on anecdotes from police officials, who are in the habit of complaining when they are under scrutiny.
But that scrutiny is long overdue. The Black Lives Matter movement, a loosely organized network of activists, was sparked by police violence that has resulted in the deaths of unarmed black civilians. You know the names of many of the victims, who include Eric Garner, put in a deadly chokehold by New York City police for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes; 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot dead by police in Cleveland for waving a toy gun in a park; and John Crawford III, shot dead by Beavercreek, Ohio, police after he picked up a BB gun from a Wal-Mart store shelf.
If protests over such official savagery keep police from doing their jobs, they are not committed to keeping the peace, to serving or protecting. If they were, they’d welcome attention that helps to weed out the bullies, the poorly trained and the bigots in their ranks. After all, police officers need the respect and cooperation of the communities they serve in order to catch the real criminals.
Unfortunately, though, many rank-and-file officers and their superiors have assumed the mantle of victims, complaining that the Black Lives Matter movement disrespects, and even endangers, police. It keeps them from doing their jobs. It emboldens criminals, they say.
And that narrative is constantly fed by conservative media outlets, whose pundits insist that President Obama panders to criminals while blaming police for simple errors. That notion was further fueled at the most recent Republican debate by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who insisted that the president doesn’t “support police officers.”
“You know, the FBI director … has said this week that because of a lack of support from politicians like the president of the United States, that police officers are afraid to get out of their cars, that they’re afraid to enforce the law,” Christie claimed.
If you want to see fear, take another look at that disturbing video of Ben Fields flinging a teenage girl across the floor. The other students cower in their desks, some afraid to look up. That lesson is one from which they’ll likely never recover.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, October 31, 2015
“Structural Racism”: ‘Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist’ Doesn’t Excuse Ongoing Police Violence
On Thursday, FBI director James Comey gave a long and searching speech called “Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race” – complete with deep meditations on race, predictable but annoying equivocations, and harmful misdirection about the violence of policing.
It also included – in an unquestionable first for an FBI director giving a public speech – quotes from the oversexed, cursing puppets of the Broadway musical Avenue Q. (Who knows if FBI brass have quoted them in private before; if only J Edgar Hoover could have lived to see this!)
Comey frankly acknowledged his predecessor Hoover’s immoral pursuits of Martin Luther King and that at “many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” He invoked his own ancestry to show how the Irish were once so loathed by the cops that vehicles used to mass transport prisoners are still called “paddy wagons” without forgetting that, although the “Irish had tough times – little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.”
And while it was encouraging to hear Comey say that Americans need some actual goddamned government statistics on how often cops kill people rather than relying upon sites like KilledByPolice.net, it didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that he was so convinced only after he “listened to a thoughtful big city police chief express his frustration with that lack of reliable data” who “didn’t know whether the Ferguson police shot one person a week, one a year, or one a century.”
Does it matter? Isn’t one lost life one too many?
In his prepared remarks, Comey never used the word “racism”. He did use the word “racist” three times – but twice it was to say cops really aren’t racist, and once to quote the song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” from Avenue Q.
Though I was as gleeful as the next homosexual to see a raunchy Broadway musical quoted by the head of the FBI, Comey was actually equivocating on racism’s power to harm by using it: “We all – white and black – carry various biases around with us”, he said. And while that may be true, no level of civilian bias against police, not even cars blaring NWA’s Fuck the Police (as I heard often while in Ferguson myself) justifies the police violence against which protesters are fighting. The structural racism people of color experience isn’t harming police – unless they’re people of color, off duty, and subjected to stop and frisk by their fellow officers.
He did address the cynicism and “mental shortcuts” which exacerbate racial profiling. But then he alleged it doesn’t mean an officer is racist when “mental shortcut becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights”, nor did he even name systematic racism as at work there.
Comey also talked about how “data shows that the percentage of young men not working or not enrolled in school is nearly twice as high for blacks as it is for whites”, adding that he understands “the hard work to develop violence-resistant and drug-resistant kids, especially in communities of color.” But kids in communities of color don’t need to “Just Say No” – they need, and we need, to demand an end to economic segregation and a lack of educational opportunity.
The FBI director hinted at the existence of racism when he talked of changing a legacy “so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops”. He is right that it’s not fair to pin everything on police; but, it’s unhelpful misdirection to point at (unarmed) citizens failing to “really see the men and women of law enforcement” (who are always armed) as the problem with policing.
It’s also unhelpful to act like being a cop is more dangerous than it actually is. Existing data has shown that it’s not a particularly dangerous job; it’s not even among the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Far more people are killed by cops in any given year than cops are killed by civilians – and, cops who do die “in the line of duty” are about as likely to do so in a vehicle related injury than by being shot.
Still, no amount of pandering to the homosexual agenda with Avenue Q quotes can soften the blow of hearing the nation’s top cop ignoring the very basis of our legal system by claiming – right after a year with a record number of legal exonerations – that “criminal suspects routinely lie about their guilt, and the people we charge are overwhelmingly guilty.” Actually, criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law; exonerations indicate that even those decisions aren’t permanent.
This week, there have been a number of positive developments in the fight against police violence; Comey’s speech is among them, to be sure, along with the lawsuit against Ferguson debtors’ prisons and the MacArthur Foundation ponying up $75mn to fight overincarceration. But Comey’s speech isn’t the big sign of progress; the real progress is that, six months after Mike Brown was killed, the movement that his death triggered is still so powerful that the head of the FBI finally feels the need to address the injustice that so many Americans now find apparent.
By: Steven W. Thrasher, The Guardian, February 13, 2014
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