Politics

Hey Liberals: Stop Attacking James Comey Because It Just Makes You Look Stupid

The Democrats need to stop acting like clowns.

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FBI Director James Comey Testifies To House Judiciary On Oversight At The F.B.I.Back in July, Democrats were crowing about how Republicans questioning FBI Director James Comey’s investigative judgment amounted to nothing less than an existential threat to the rule of law. Fast forward and… well, this is awkward.

I get it. Partisan Democrats were caught off guard, and the first instinct is to lash out. But to hurl wild accusations at Comey for doing his job makes the liberals look exactly as foolish as the GOP looked back in July. Show some composure, people.

First things first — the FBI has not “reopened” any investigation into Hillary Clinton. Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders last week is a tempest in a teapot. If anyone took the time to actually read the damn thing before throwing a social-media fit, all Comey says is that he feels duty-bound to amend his previous testimony — that he’d reviewed all relevant emails and found no reason to recommend charges — because the FBI discovered additional emails that fall within the scope of the original investigation through an independent investigation “in an unrelated case” (which news reports identity as that of Carlos Danger Anthony Weiner).

The right answer from Clinton supporters should be “we respect Director Comey’s obligation to review any additional emails that come to light. After his office’s comprehensive review of tens of thousands of emails and his conclusion that nothing warranted prosecution, we’re confident that the FBI will quickly conclude that this small number of unreviewed emails will do nothing to change his professional opinion.”

Of course, that’s pretty much the exact opposite of what’s happened.

Look, These emails almost assuredly reveal nothing new, but it is, in fact, the job of the FBI to review them. Is your argument that the FBI shouldn’t perform thorough investigations? That… seems troubling. Indeed, that seems like an “existential threat to the rule of law,” to borrow a phrase I heard back in July.

The slightly more reasonable argument advanced by agitated Democrats is that there may be nothing wrong with the FBI review, but Comey’s letter to Republican leadership days before the election is irresponsible or worse. Harry Reid’s even alleging a Hatch Act violation.

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This letter may well be irresponsible. On the other hand, the only reason Comey’s writing this letter in the first place is that he already wildly breached standard DOJ operating procedure once this election season: when he did Hillary a solid and announced that he was not recommending further action.

As we’ve discussed before, the DOJ is not keen to ever let the targets of investigations know if they’re off the hook. It’s a cruel practice, but a prosecutor might argue that this case is exactly why they don’t share their thoughts with the people they investigate. In the ordinary course, there would be no “reopening” hoopla because the investigation would have never closed as far as the public was concerned. The review of this clutch of emails would happen entirely under wraps, and when it found nothing, there would be no new announcements at all.

And that’s basically what Director Comey said in his letter to FBI staff:

Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.

Whether Comey wrote the best-phrased letter to Congress or not is up for debate, but his stated reasoning is hard to fault.

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He put his reputation and the reputation of the FBI on the line when he testified about the investigation. The Democrats didn’t want any sword of Damocles investigation out there fueling conspiracy theories, so they pressured the FBI to publicly announce that they found nothing in the investigation worth moving on. The flip-side of that coin is that Comey’s now obligated to amend sworn testimony if anything at all comes up that warrants further review. Pick your poison. Personally, as someone who would rather not live in Trump’s America, I’ll take the way this played out over the alternative.

Plus we’ll probably get some more embarrassing Anthony Weiner misadventures out of this whole thing, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Earlier: The Waiting Is The Hardest Part — Part II

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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