Comey’s CNN Town Hall Was More Proof Trump Should Have Fired Him on Day One
Steve Rogers
Commentary
Disgraced former FBIDirector James Comey’s CNN“360 Town Hall” on May 9confirmed the widely held belief that President Donald Trumpshould have fired this brazen, authoritarian megalomaniac the moment he got into the White House.
Convinced that it will build his brand with CNN’s “resistance” viewership, Comey now openly admits that he oversaw direct spyingon the Trump campaign.
To be clear, he wasn’t calling it “spying”—just “investigating” the opposing party to the one in power based on demonstrablyfalse information, such as the Steele dossier and the musingsof Australian diplomats. Comey absurdly claimed it was just “investigating” when he sent undercover informants—definitely not spies—to infiltrate a political campaign competing with the sitting president’s former secretary of state.
This, Comey assures us, is “reasonable.” Placing spies in your opponent’s political campaign to collect information to predicate an investigation that the Democratic Party would subsequently exploit in order to undermine a duly elected president is a “totally normal step.”
Really? One wonders whether Comey would consider it “normal” and “reasonable” if the FBI under Trump had informants rooting around Joe Biden’s or Bernie Sanders’s campaigns—perhaps “investigating” Biden’s potential involvement with his son’s activitiesin Ukraine or Bernie’s staffers’ linksto international socialist groups.
Actually, we don’t have to wonder. The mainstream media blewits top about “smears” and “terrifying” improprieties when administration officials merely hinted at the possibility of investigating Biden’s questionable dealings.
Comey knew that the consequences might be dire if it were ever revealed that an incumbent administration had tried to place spies in an opposing party’s campaign, but he just assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election and he’d never be held accountable for his abuse of power. He made that clear again during his CNN town hall when he gave a renewed defense of Clinton’s clearly illegal private email server.
As certain as Comey is that Clinton committed no crime, he’s equally adamant that Trump did—by firing Comey. The disgraced former FBI director toldAnderson Cooper he has “no doubt” Trump would have been charged with obstruction of justice if he wasn’t the president.
Comey’s explanation for why Attorney General William Barr and the Justice Department’s senior lawyers concluded that there was no collusion and no obstruction of justice is the same as his explanation for why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein supported Comey’s removal from the FBI: Trump “eats your soul in small bites,” as Comey wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.
In Comey’s view, he wasn’t fired for the gross mishandling of politically sensitive investigations, but rather because Trump is a soul-devouring demon.
The sun is setting on Comey’s public life, and his flailing accusations, self-exonerating fantasies, and narcissistic denials during the CNN town hall confirm that the worst suspicions about him are entirely true. We may not have seen the last of Comey quite yet, but if his performance at this town hall event is any indication, he lost his last shred of credibility long ago.
Thank goodness a man like this is no longer in control of the FBI, and no longer has the authority to authorize spying on—er, undercover infiltration and electronic surveillance of—rival political campaigns.
Trump didn’t make a mistake by firing Comey. Based on what we’ve learned since 2017, Comey deserved to be shown the door on Day One. He proves it himself, over and over again.
Steven Rogers is a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer and a former member of the FBI National Joint Terrorism Task Force. He is a member of the Donald J. Trump for President 2020 Campaign Advisory Board.